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.
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: