Welcome to Opasnet
What is Heande?
Health, the Environment, and - Everything (Heande) is a wiki-based website for helping decisions about human health, and environmental factors affecting it. The website collects, synthesises, and distributes people's values and scientific information. We believe that all wise decision-making is based on expressing our values about what the really important things are, and understanding how the decision actually affects those things. This is why we need both values and science.
Heande is hosted by KTL (National Public Health Institute, Finland). The Department of Environmental Health has a motto:
- Man must be able to breathe, drink, eat and live in the environment trusting on its safety. This is both individual's civil right and a prerequisite for a functioning society and economy.
This is a major challenge. We must ensure that the environment is safe in general. We must teach people to avoid things in the environment that are not healthy. We must be alert for emerging hazards and be prepared when needed. And we must convince people that when all this has been done, they don't need to worry.
By this website, we hope to provide understanding on and guidance for environmental health issues and decision-making. The issues are usually very complex and cross administrative, geographical, and scientific boundaries. Therefore we need information and contributions from many disciplines and areas. This website is built in a way that hopefully makes it easy for you to add information and values. It is also built in a way that mimics the real world. The pages describe things that are usually real, measurable quantities. And if something affects something else, these two things should be linked also in this website. It is a major challenge to describe even the most crucial things affecting human health, but that is what we are aiming to do. We have started from practical case studies to make this effort somewhat manageable.
What is the difference between Heande and Wikipedia?
To our knowledge, Heande is a unique website in its aims and methods. However, in some respects it is also very similar to Wikipedia, which is a familiar concept to most of you. It might therefore be useful to compare Heande and Wikipedia.
- Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Heande contains also encyclopedia-like pages, but the major content is a structured collection of real-world measurable quantities. We call them variables. A synthesis of these variables forms an analysis of a particular decision situation and gives guidance and information for the decision.
- Wikipedia collects existing information. Heande creates also new information by combining existing information into novel syntheses.
- Wikipedia rejects information that is not established. Heande collects also controversial information but with a certain structure that reveals the controversies. There are also rules that try to solve or at least diminish these controversies.
- Wikipedia describes everything from neutral point of view. Heande does the same for scientific issues, but it also collects values where neutrality is not required. However, respect to other people's values and relevance to the topic are always required.
- Wikipedia has links to other pages whenever associations exist. Heande has the same, but in addition, there are special kinds of links that describe causal connections between two things. There are special rules about how to describe these connectioins.
- Wikipedia has Talk pages for discussions about the content. Heande has them also, but they are used especially for formal argumentation about defined topics
- Anyone can edit Wikipedia. Heande also has an open policy for contributions, but we require that editors use their real names. In addition, many pages are protected in such a way that only a draft page can be edited, and the contents are regularly moved to the actual page by the administrators. This is because the pages have more complicated technical requirements than in Wikipedia, and unskilled authors could disrupt the structure.
