What an excellent direction to steer this thread in Traveler!
One thing that is a safety issue, and Erowid does address this to some degree, is knowing what you are taking and how with some plants, extractions and RCs this can be difficult or complicated by various issues.
This is part of why up to date data on plants is a must.
People often oversimplify things, like saying an alkaloid mixture obtained via an extraction is X chemical because that chemical tends to predominate said mixture.
Wiki style approaches seem good for allowing people to add information, provided it has some evidence or verification.
It would be nice to see Erowid collaborate, but I have heard them insult forums directly and say that information on forums is not worth reporting, because it is on forums and not published in a journal. Basically they say, though not explicitly, that if you do private GCMS work or TLC and publish on a forum that it does not count as real research because it is not accredited. This is part of why they reject so much information, it amounts to a bias. I have heard them say that since forums tend to be open and anonymous that you can't trust any information on them. I disagree, but only provided there is some evidence behind claims published on a forum, and I do note that forum posts count legally as publication and the forum activity in regards to said posts does count as a form of peer review that in my opinion is often superior to those found in peer reviewed journals, which are notorious for publishing false information. On a forum however there tends to be more scrutiny than there is for peer reviewed journals because forums are open and anonymous, if someone posts made up work here they will get called on it, the standard of information that becomes accepted here is incredibly high, better than I have seen from academic institutions and journals.
In a journal or institution research is reviewed by a small select group and this does not eliminate bias, however on a forum the open aspect of it allows anyone to review and this means that people with serious expertise in the topic area can review the posts and information, this ends up being superior to peer review by specific select people. I recall trying to have a paper peer reviewed in college and the people reviewing it had zero comprehension of the topic, I could have gotten away with anything as long as it was well written and I used terms that those in review did not know. I could never do that here, I didn't do that there either but do recall that I could not get decent feedback because of the problem with this. Falsified and innaccurate or poor esearch is much easier to get away with in an institution or journal than it is on a forum like this.
So now what is happening here is that Erowid is failing review from it's peers, it simply does not meet a high enough standard to be acceptable at this point. This might create conflict, but it does not have to, the process can be incredibly productive and constructive.
