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.

  • SamC@lemmy.nz
    1·
    1 year ago

    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)