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.