Disclaimer to make it clear that the site isn't offering professional advice

Question

Proposals: Medicine, Software Law, Intellectual Property Law, Laws & Legal Questions

All of these proposals are for sites in fields in which only accredited professionals should be offering authoritative advice. However, people will naturally come to a Q&A site expecting such advice. There are a couple of existing SE sites that have a similar issue, so I've proposed on MSO that there ought to be a mechanism for moderators of such sites to put up a disclaimer.

Answer 1

Wikipedians dealt with these issues in the following way: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Legal_disclaimer and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Medical_disclaimer. That's a good CC-BY-SA-licensed starting point, I guess.

Answer 2

This is a very good point and a very difficult issue. On the one hand not allowing professionals to comment on such sites encourages the sort of 'racket' which keeps the ability to take legal matters into your own hands quite difficult (and therefore forcing you to use an expensive lawyer). On the other hand such a law potentially protects people from attempting to do things which is out of their range of capabilities.

That said, I am still in favor of trying to get this site going. Even if you can't depend on the information here as being a %100 accurate or reliable, it is still significantly better then nothing. In fact despite these laws a lot of people can contribute (albeit with the normal caveats). I'm thinking law students, people with similar past experiences, etc. Lastly, a lot of the advice of these sites does not really constitue information of itself, but more on how to look for the information needed.

Answer 3

Reading this discussion, I also feel like it might be wise not to allow people to ask for legal advice on such a website, both because of the legal issues (disclaimers are a good idea, but not all countries have the same laws), and also because it usually tends to result in noise and rather low-quality topics – which are not really what SE sites are intended for.

But a reasonable solution might be to require a minimum amount of knowledge and research from the people asking questions, much like what is done on most programming sites through "minimal working examples". Say, moderators would (after due warning) close subjective and non-researched questions amounting to "How do I sue my next door neighbour", but allow questions in the form of:

This statute / decision says [this and that]. Are there other legal texts that go in that direction regarding [this specific matter] in [this jurisdiction]? Are there specific counter-arguments one should look for? What are the precedent on this issue?

Or perhaps interpretative questions like:

This law was just passed / This court ruled that… . What are the possible consequences for [this field]? How wide-ranging could be this change in the law? Can it be interpreted as saying [this]?

This way, people who are not legal professionals can still ask general questions, insofar as they are willing to do a bit of research beforehand, and the format of the questions would be such that the answers can't really be considered "legal advice". If someone wants to know about their case, they would need to ask several general questions regarding each separate issue, and no one would be accountable for the total answer since the sum is usually more than the parts.

Then there would also be questions about learning, legal research, legal citation and legal theory, that an SE website could definitely promote, seeing as it is so difficult to find good places for discussing those issues.

So, what I am really saying is: I think it can only work (i.e. attract professionals and scholars) if we strictly require a certain level of knowledge in the questions and answers. There is no point in having a Q&A site if it cannot attract a few "key" people (or at least some knowledgeable people) to run it day to day.

Answer 4

I think this kind of site should be mostly for people in the field, that is MD or students, and used to improve and share their knowledge. It should be not used by people for asking medical advice!

Stating this clearly at the beginning should drive away anyone that is not in the field.

So good question would be something like: "has anyone info about this new guideline" or "can anyone suggest me a good book for the psychiatry exam"?

And bad one: "i have headache, cannot move my neck, and high fever since a couple of day" cannot be accepted (also because this guy should probably go to the hospital if he doesn't want to die from meningitis)

Answer 5

Perhaps we can find a way to give exponetially higher cred to actual lawyers.

E.g:
Law student => 1k cred
JD => 5k cred
passed the bar => 10k cred

Then give these users the ability to close bad questions. Just a thought.

Of course we would need a way to vet actual lawers/distinguish them from pretenders...