I have a vague idea to create a wiki for politics-related data. Basically, I’m annoyed with how low-effort, entirely un-researched content dominates modern politics. I think a big part of the problem is that modern political figures use social media platforms that are hostile to context and citing sources.
So my idea for a solution is to create a wiki where original research is not just allowed but encouraged. For example, you could have an article that’s a breakdown of the relative costs to society of private vs public transportation, with calculations and sources and tables and whatnot. It wouldn’t exactly be an argument, but all the data you’d need to make one. And like wikipedia, anyone can edit it, allowing otherwise massive research tasks to be broken up.
The problem is - who creates a wiki nowadays? It feels like getting such a site and community up and running would be hopeless in a landscape dominated by social media. Will this be a pointless waste of time? Is there a more modern way to do this? All thoughts welcome.
The concern is that if anyone can edit, anyone’s bias can become prevalent. I can easily write a 500 word post, cite multiple peer revied sources and no one will check if what I am saying actually reflects the research.
There is a community (improvethenews i think) that tackles this by providing the narrative of what has happened, then providing for and against arguements (and some nerd facts after). Not this is better or that is worse - this is the decision, this is what supporters think, this is what opponents think, there is x% chance of something related happening.
Your first point is already a huge problem on wikipedia. There was controversy a while ago when a prolific editor simply went through pages about various Nazis, checked the sources, found out they were all nonsense, oftentimes purposely misquoted to glorify said Nazi, removed them and then had the page deleted for not having valid sources/enough content. And honestly good for her.
I’m not understanding why you need to reinvent the wheel here, you can just leverage Wikipedia to accomplish your goal (to a degree). Take the entry for public transport: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_transport
There are sections on the impacts and challenges of public transit. If you feel it’s lacking in factual peer reviewed information regarding the financial benefits, just go ahead and add it. The only challenge will be if you don’t want to conform to Wikipedia’s moderation rules, in which case you’re probably better off just making your own website/blog, but you’ll lose the community aspect.
As for more true political topics, balletopedia already exists, and quite frankly, it’s an excellent resource. If I were you I’d spend my time contributing to resources that are already popular than trying to reinvent the wheel.
Unless you get really lucky, good quality Wikipedia edits will have a much larger impact than a website run out of your basement.
Wikipedia doesn’t allow original research as a source. It has to be reported by a second party before it is accepted. This makes most political topics hard to properly cite.
You sure about that? It feels like a dubious claim, especially considering, for example, the Public Transport article I linked has at least 6 DOI references to journal articles.
Additionally, even if true, most journal articles of any value get picked up at least once, pretty easy to get a secondary source to back a claim.
I think you misunderstand, he means you can’t publish the results of your own research to Wikipedia. It has to be published somewhere else and then you need to reference to that on Wikipedia.
Oh, well I guess that’s true, but I find it hard to fathom that OP was going to do their own research (in the sense you described) on something like transportation infrastructure costs. Unless OP runs their own infrastructure network where they can pull real cost and usage data, I assumed the research they were referring to was more in the realm of a lit review.
Unless OP is a secret billionaire, odds are this rule will not impact their efforts.
I totally see your point. It still feels like wikipedia is missing something - like if I were trying to debate my uncle on whether its fair to tax people for public transportation, I’m not sure if this article would really get me the quick statistics I’d be looking for. But in order to find out why not and clarify the idea a bit I think I’ll try to make a wikipedia article like the one I’m thinking of and see how it goes.
Maybe what is missing is not the content but the way it is structured and presented. Perhaps the article/page paradigm does not fit very well to what a political discussion is.
Perhaps some sort of visual graph of each topic, with supporting and contra-indicating evidence represented as boxes with arrows? Each piece of evidence could have sources and sub-evidence, etc. Check this out: https://debategraph.org/poster.aspx?aID=65
I have a vague idea to create a wiki for politics-related data. Basically, I’m annoyed with how low-effort, entirely un-researched content dominates modern politics.
So my idea for a solution is to create a wiki where original research is not just allowed but encouraged.
these two statements are entirely contradictory. The purpose of the NOR ban on wikipedia itself is precisely because OR is almost always not researched at all, and is only presented as “research” to spackle a veneer of credibility over the top of what are really sock-puppet arguments.
What it seems to me that you’re suggesting is essentially crowd sourcing a mix of investigative journalism and data analysis, which is not a skill I think that just anybody can pick up and do properly. To be fair I’ve never tried my hand at investigative journalism, but I have done a few units of data analysis and trust me there’s a hundred different ways to do it wrong. Even among the experts, there’s a lot of disagreements to what the best approaches are. I had a teacher even say that if you give a set of data to 10 data analysts, you’ll get back 12 different ways of interpreting it.
That is all to say that I’m not sure how much you’d be solving by providing another forum for people to post their takes on public policy issues, but then again if you manage to attract the right crowd of critical thinkers, who also happen to be open minded enough not to insert their own agendas into matters, perhaps people might hold each other accountable?
BTW have you checked that something similar doesn’t already exist? Insert obligatory xkcd comic:
I think Wikis themselves are more useful than ever but I don’t know how well a political Wiki would go over. I could see it being very easy to get accused of being biased in one direction.
You may want to do some digging and see if something similar exists though I doubt a lot of websites would be open to outside submissions.
If you do decide to create one I would be interested to see a historical background section. For example if a page is dedicated to improving failing infrastructure in the United States including when and why it was developed, prior large pushes for maintenance, and the history of funding.
I feel like knowing how things go the way that they are should be a bigger part of people’s political views. That is unrelated to your question though; just an idea.
Moderating is a bitch. Moderating anything is bad. Just the other day a non-nsfw pic of a gaping vagina and a half-excreted shit got onto the 2nd page of hot. And this is just lemmy.
Political wiki is asking for the worst dregs – online policy wonks – to notice you.
I’m not saying don’t do it. Just be ready to wade into the worst sewage humanity has to offer.
Political wiki is asking for the worst dregs – online policy wonks – to notice you.
“Policy wonk” is a Clinton-era term for people with actual expertise in policy.
I think you mean something like “factional trolls”.
Hence “online” policy wonks.
Wikis are very common, idk what you’re talking about
The problem isn’t creating the wiki itself but how you’re going to manage a sensitive topic like politics. You’re frustrated with all the low quality political content but if your wiki is community driven, what’s the guarantee that it stays high quality and doesn’t devolve into a flamewar full of misinformation and dubious sources like everything else? It’s hard to imagine people will contribute to something like this without an agenda, so unless you’re prepared to face that storm I’d vote to not do it.
politics-related data
Yes.
I’m annoyed with how low-effort, entirely un-researched content
And you think a wiki will solve that? Lol… yeah this is a bad idea.
No one should trust a wiki for anything other than information on a tv show or a boss, and even then trust but verify. And this is something that you would need to trust.
You’re better off creating a blog, or find already established blogs who do this, because stuff like Five Three Eight exists. ’
“Original research”
There’s a reason peer reviewed research is practically required, and even then there’s HUGE problems with that model, but having people go out for original research is basically saying “Let people make up bullshit.”… not a good idea.
having people go out for original research is basically saying “Let people make up bullshit.”… not a good idea.
Yeah, I’ve seen what this does to fan wikis. There is a certain type of personality that thrives on having their version of reality be what is reflected in wiki articles, and they will revert any and all attempts to excise their personal theories. If admins step in to break up the edit war, it’s clearly “favoritism” and “admins should only exist in service to the users and have no say in content”. Some of these wiki addicts go out of their way to become the wiki equivalent of Reddit’s supermods in order to ensure that they have the upper hand in these content disputes.
“No original research” is one of the core pillars of your ability to push back against delusional nonsense. If you’re determined to live without it, you need to have very strong content standards in its place to decide the difference between objective fact and someone’s conspiracy vomit. Good content policies save you from having to waste a bunch of time on bad faith arguments about why the content of your wiki pages have to abandon fact for massaging someone’s ego.
(Somewhat of a tangent, but if you’re bored you can look into a brief history of AlexShepherd’s crusade against circumcision in the Silent Hill fandom. He’s not the only person I’ve seen thrive on wikis who don’t adopt an original research policy, but definitely the most entertaining read.)
Wikis are great and still very useful but I am wondering if you are using the right tool for the right job.
As people have pointed out any wiki is going to be subject to the biases of those who are editing it and, especially in politics, that’s always going to be an issue.
What I’d suggest is a database of reliable information, probably keeping a copy of the original web page like The Internet Archive or WebCite. People could then request information in specific subjects. It seems an idea to have an AI in the mix as it would be able to understand context and give better quality returns (I was talking about this kind of thing in the pub at the weekend, a lot of the legal legwork by junior lawyers is looking up old legal cases for precedents and AI can do this quicker and better - it wouldn’t tell the senior solicitor what to say in court but it would be able to provide him with the information he needs to decide how to proceed). You could even have a feature where people ask for a summary. It wouldn’t necessarily be 100% correct but it’d be less biased than a human and help people decide which information to look at from the pile of returns.
I use Wikipedia on the regular, just saying.
My go to with all projects like this is if it worth it if ends up it’s just you doing it for yourself. 99% of these projects attract no one but their creators.
So if you want to make a wiki for your own reference or to be able to link to in relevant conversation or for whatever reason you want to for yourself, and accept that no one else may not contribute or even care, go for it. If you just want this to exist but not put in the effort, you are probably better off seeing if someone else is doing something similar.
There is https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Main_Page for deep politics
Similar to what others said my main thought is how to have unbiased moderation of the content. Since anyone can edit anyone can try to spin their own story instead of reflecting the true idea of the website. If there is moderation to prevent any bias on either side and only allow for the data that viewers can draw their own viewpoint on, would be great but sounds like it would rely on a lot of people to help moderate the bias.
I do not know a lot about how wikiapedia operates as far as their moderation. It seems it’s gotten so big that any topic with more than 1 person interested in it will have people editing out bad content.
With the more niche wikis out there most the people who have interest in them are interested in keeping it honest.
With politics your bringing in a wide demographic with a lot more room for people trying to spin their own narrative.
I just had a thought: what would happen if the “articles” on a wiki were all AI generated, using comments and edits on the initial data as the prompts?
So you could write up a good set of content, but then the AI would filter it to generate the main page, with links back to all the supporting content. Any edits would be submitted as more supporting content and no direct editing would be allowed.
Sure, it could be gamed, but it would ease the moderation load significantly. New generated main page content would still need to be reviewed before a new generation would be accepted.
I think choice of software (wiki or otherwise) is the least of your worries. The problem is not so much with fake data, it’s with the interpretation of the data. That’s where the bias (and sometimes manipulation) comes in. Even if you managed to moderate it well enough so that all the data was “objective”, you couldn’t stop subjectivity being a part of the interpretation.
As an example, in most countries, certain minority groups are over-represented in prison populations. e.g. in the US, black people disproportionally end up in prison. That is an objective fact (so far as it goes).
But based on that fact, you could interpret it as either:
- Black people are just inherently more likely to commit crimes
- There are systemic biases that mean black people are imprisoned more often
How do you decide which is right when both are based on the data? (One is clearly racist, but still based partially on facts)
