Welcome to Opasnet

What is Opasnet?

Opasnet 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.

Opasnet is hosted by THL (National Institute for Health and Welfare, 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 Opasnet and Wikipedia?

To our knowledge, Opasnet is a unique website in its aims and methods. However, in many ways it is also very similar to Wikipedia, which is a well-known concept. It might therefore be useful to compare Opasnet and Wikipedia.

1. The purpose of Wikipedia is to provide information in general. The purpose of Opasnet is to give guidance to decision-making related to environment and health.
2. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Opasnet is more like a decision support system (although the structure is quite different than in typical decision support systems). However, Opasnet also has some encyclopedia-like contents.
3. Both Wikipedia and Opasnet are running on Mediawiki software.
4. Wikipedia rejects information that is not established. Opasnet 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.
5. Wikipedia describes everything from neutral point of view. Opasnet does the same for the scientific content, 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.
6. In Wikipedia, the content is structured as articles. In Opasnet, there are 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.
7. Wikipedia collects existing information. Opasnet creates also new information by combining existing information into novel syntheses.
8. A Wikipedia page has links to other pages whenever associations exist. A Opasnet page has the same, but in addition, there are special kinds of links that describe causal connections between things. There are special rules about how to describe these connectioins.
9. Wikipedia has Talk pages for discussions about the content. Opasnet has them also, but the discussions have more specific rules. Discussions are used especially for formal argumentation about defined topics.
10. Anyone can edit Wikipedia. Opasnet 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 (in a similar way as in Citizendium). This is because the pages have more complicated technical requirements than in Wikipedia, and unskilled authors could disrupt the structure.

How can you participate?

• Contribute to a discussion