Ganfyd

» see ganfyd.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Ganfyd is an acronym for "Get a note from your doctor", the sentence an employer or an insurer produces when it wants a physician to absorb the liability. British doctors say it with contempt. In November 2005 a group of them took it as the name of a wiki, which tells you most of what the project thought of itself: a medical textbook written by practitioners, free for anyone to read, and closed to everyone else's edits.

The lock was the design. Only registered medical practitioners, people working under their direction and a small number of invited non-medical specialists could change an article, and the license said so in writing while allowing anyone at all to copy and redistribute the text. Registration ran through a General Medical Council certificate or an equivalent. Every page carried a public audit trail, so a reader could see which doctor had written which sentence and when.

It worked for over a decade. By October 2010 Ganfyd was serving more than 2,000 page hits a day across 7,000 topic pages, with 449 editors in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Ireland and the United States. By 2016 the page count was past 10,000. The medical search portal TRIP had been indexing it since December 2006, which may be the first case of an independent medical search engine indexing a wiki at all.

On 27 March 2019 the server failed in a way that could not be recovered. Backups existed. What did not exist was the volunteer time to rebuild a site that size back to a standard doctors would cite, so the editors suspended operations and returned the donations that had been paying the running costs.

~ the record ~

~ the maintenance page ~

The address kept answering for a while. On 5 May 2019 ganfyd.org served 103 bytes of plain text: "Maintenance: site being moved and rebuilt. This will be a long process. Sorry." The rebuild never came. By June 2020 the domain pointed at a personal photography page under the heading "Maintenance and redirection page", and a note added to Wikipedia in 2022 says the content had begun resurfacing as a historical archive, which it has not.

Today the domain answers with a small card reading "This domain is for sale", tagged noindex so nobody stumbles into it from a search. The wiki survives in the Internet Archive, including a capture of the main page taken on 22 March 2019, five days before the server went.

~ the pandemic footnote ~

A former editor, asked later about the timing, called it quite impossible for one person to keep effective editorial oversight of Ganfyd through an evolving crisis while also pushing accurate information out through official NHS channels. Ganfyd's pages on SARS and MERS had been written years before and were unreachable by then. The server failed eleven months before the first British lockdown.

~ the reader who could not edit ~

A wiki only doctors may write in is a strange object for an engineer to use. I could open any page, follow the audit trail, see exactly which practitioner had written which paragraph about which drug, and had no standing whatsoever to correct a word of it. That restriction was the entire value of the thing, and it is also why nobody could save it: the pool of people allowed to do the rebuilding was exactly the pool of people who already had patients booked.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »