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"Wiki the Vote" Project Open-Sources Candidate Info
Gabriela writes "Wiki the Vote was just launched on Congresspedia.org for citizens, professional researchers, and even candidates to collaborate on profiles for each and every candidate for Congress in 2008. The project is non-partisan and, in true open source fashion, is free for anyone to participate — even the candidates themselves. Unlike Wikipedia, people connected to the subjects of articles are free to add to them as long as their contributions are rhetoric-free and comprised of fully documented, verifiable facts. The citizen editors are assisted and fact-checked by professional editors. The project is starting with nearly 300 basic profiles of candidates that 2008RaceTracker has identified as definitely running, and will eventually expand to cover every candidate on the ballot in the primary and general elections next year. When the OpenSecrets.org 2008 congressional campaign contributions database goes online in a few weeks, the candidate profiles will also display live feeds tracking the money race and who is funding them."
Not quite. Votesmart.org is more on the technical side - what bills were voted for, biography, history of employment, etc. I'm hoping that this will be the why and how to votesmart.org's what.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
eh, my province(Ontario) and my country (Canada) has had a first past the post electoral system. Surprisingly enough, there are four different "major" parties in parliment(Liberal/Conservative/NDP/Bloc) and numerous minor parties(Green, etc...) that get a chunk of the vote too.
The Bloc would need a truly bizarre balance of seats among the other parties in order to become the government, but have served as our Opposition party before. It's unlikely for the NDP to become a governing party in the foreseeable future, but they get significant numbers of seats.
Last night Ontario had a referendum on switching from first past the post to mixed member proportional voting, don't think the results are in from that yet. FPP has some pretty serious issues, but that in and of itself doesn't preclude 3rd parties and alternative viewpoints. There's something ELSE going on that has contributed to that culture of "there's only two, mutually contradictory viewpoints on any issue, and these conveniently arrange themselves such that you'll find all of your policies in one of the parties, and none in the other, such that a compromise party(A from Demos, B from Republicans, C from Demos) is ridiculous" view that the US seems to have.
I don't disagree that FPP tends to foster that sort of thinking/voting, but it's not sufficient. What are the other factors that led to a 2 party system in the states, while multiple parties can exist elsewhere?
Conor Kenny here, I work on the Wiki the Vote project (it's great work if you can get it!)
This is one of the big problems in political discourse, no doubt. People have found that if you create a political debate about the facts, the media will back off and treat it as an open question. "Verifiable facts," for us, means that there's an outside, verifiable source that is credible. We're a little squishy on what makes a credible source, and leave that up to a case-by-case debate. We have a few advantages, though:
We don't have a "neutral point of view" policy - if your point of view is stupid and intellectually dishonest, we don't have to include it.
Because we're part of the larger SourceWatch wiki, we also have a lot of profiles of those fake front groups (remember those ads talking about how carbon dioxide was natural, so why were people concerned about it?), which means that even if someone quotes one of those groups, we can just wikify the link and let people click through to see that the group is a wholly financed arm of ExxonMobil (as was the case in that instance).
Verifiable means verifiable. It actually creates quite a hurdle to have to go cite something if you're just making stuff up.
But, yeah, it's a difficult business. But it's worth doing, so that's why we're here.
Instead of hating, why not come over and try it out? I'm happy to help out if you want to email me.
best,
Conor Kenny,
Managing Editor,
Congresspedia.org
ckenny (at) congresspedia.org
Conor Kenny
Managing Editor, Congresspedia.org
"This page in a nutshell: Avoid writing or editing an article about yourself, other than to correct unambiguous errors of fact."
Conor Kenny
Managing Editor, Congresspedia.org
ckenny (at) congresspedia.org
Conor Kenny
Managing Editor, Congresspedia.org