Pharmacopedia:Refusals
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This page lists the things Pharmacopedia will never do. They are durable commitments. The Pharmacopedia Collective (Pharmacopedia.wiki's nonprofit operator) treats these as bedrock: changing any one of them would change what Pharmacopedia is. They are written down here so readers, contributors, and reviewers can hold us to them.
Most of these refusals exist because we have watched health-information sites compromise on each of them and become less trustworthy as a result. The pattern is consistent enough that we treat each one as load-bearing.
Money, access, and independence
Pharmacopedia will never paywall medical information. Every page, every claim, every layer of every page is freely readable, now and in any future. There is no premium tier, no "professional" tier, no API rate-limit that turns into a paid plan.
Pharmacopedia will never push subscriptions. We do not ask readers for recurring payments, "memberships," or "supporter status" gated behind a payment. If we accept donations in the future (only if costs outgrow what Mark Elliott, MD can self-fund), donations stay one-time, voluntary, and never gated.
Pharmacopedia will never sell health data. We do not sell, license, lease, or trade any information about who reads what, what medicines a person looks up, or any data derived from reader behavior. We do not produce aggregate reports for sale. We do not enter data-sharing agreements with commercial entities.
Pharmacopedia will never run ads. No banner ads, no inline ads, no sponsored content, no native advertising, no affiliate links, no referral kickbacks. The reading surface is for the medicine, not for somebody buying attention next to it.
Pharmacopedia will never accept any commercial relationship that influences content placement. Pharmaceutical companies, supplement vendors, telehealth platforms, insurance companies, and any commercial actor with a stake in what readers learn cannot pay to surface, suppress, prioritize, or shape any Pharmacopedia content. There is no enterprise sales motion; there is no business-development pipeline.
Editorial integrity
Pharmacopedia will never let pharmaceutical companies (or any party with a commercial stake in a medicine) edit medicine pages directly. Industry-employed contributors are welcome to submit corrections and citations through the public propose-review-approve workflow like any other contributor, with their affiliation disclosed. Direct editing access is not granted to any commercial entity.
Pharmacopedia will never give "medical advice" wrapped in liability disclaimers. We do not tell individual readers what to do with their bodies in the form of personalized recommendations. We describe what is known about a medicine, at clinical depth, across multiple editorial perspectives (Clinician, Patient, Traditional, Researcher). The reader, in conversation with their own clinician, decides what to do with that information.
Pharmacopedia will never hide controversy under a neutral mask. Where authoritative sources disagree about a medicine (efficacy, safety, mechanism, indications, withdrawal, traditional use), we surface the disagreement explicitly and cite all sides. We do not pretend a contested question is settled. We do not silently pick a side and present it as consensus.
Pharmacopedia will never let AI generate medical content without human review. Claude (the AI assistant family that helps build Pharmacopedia) can draft, structure, search, organize, and check sources. Every word of medical content that appears on a published page passes a human review gate, with the reviewer named in the editorial history. AI-generated text that is published without human review is not an editorial workflow we operate.
Pharmacopedia will never optimize for engagement over informativeness. We do not measure success in time-on-page, daily-active-users, push-notification open-rates, or session length. We do not run experiments designed to keep readers on the site longer. The product target is: the reader leaves with the answer they came for, in the depth they needed, and trusts what they read.
Pharmacopedia will never gamify health. No streaks, no badges, no leaderboards, no progress bars on personal health behavior, no "you have not checked in for 3 days" notifications, no points for reading more articles. Health information is not a game and we will not turn it into one.
Technical and regulatory posture
Pharmacopedia will never use third-party JavaScript on user-facing pages. No analytics scripts, no advertising scripts, no embedded social-media trackers, no tag managers, no third-party fonts that phone home, no CDN-hosted libraries that report referrers to a vendor. The browser of a reader on Pharmacopedia.wiki talks only to Pharmacopedia infrastructure. This is how we make "we do not sell health data" technically enforceable rather than only policy-stated.
Pharmacopedia will never operate as a Class III medical device without going through the proper regulatory review. Pharmacopedia is reference and education, not a regulated medical device. We do not build features (interaction checkers, dose calculators, contraindication flags) and ship them as if they were unregulated decision-support tools when in the relevant jurisdiction they would require Class III review. If we build decision-support tooling that crosses that threshold, it ships only after the appropriate regulatory pathway (FDA in the US, CE Mark in the EU, equivalent elsewhere) has been completed.
If we ever violate any of these
If a reader, contributor, or reviewer believes Pharmacopedia has violated one of these commitments, the standing process is:
- Report it on the Newsroom talk page, or by email to mark@pharmacopedia.wiki.
- We acknowledge the report publicly on Newsroom within 7 days of receipt.
- We post a remediation notice with what happened, why, and what we are doing about it.
- We do not delete the report.
These refusals are not aspirations. They are operational constraints on every decision the project makes. They were locked on 2026-05-28 by Mark Elliott, MD as part of the broader institutional identity commitments that define Pharmacopedia.wiki.