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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."
I envision each candidate's article eventually looking almost entirely like this...
==Controversies==
Some people say that [candidate X] is misrepresenting [issue A] in order to gain the approval of [group M]. However other people say that this is simply a misrepresentation of the actual issue at hand, [issue B]. However other people say both of these groups are simply resorting to partisan bickering in order to gain approval for [candidate Y], with support from [group N].
These people are all idiots LOL!!11 POOOP
Nancy Patricia D'Alesandro Pelosi ON WHEELS!!! is the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives for the 110,234,548th Congress. A Demoncrat, she is the first cyborg to hold the post of Speaker, or even lead a major political party in either house of Congress. She has represented the 8th District of Kaleefornia in the United States House of Representatives since 1887.
I mean, seriously; if the Guardian / Independent Washington Post/Times and New York Times / Wall Street Journal editorial (and I daresay even political news) slants have taught us anything, it is that professional editors can be just as slanted as the amateurs, and even more subtly so.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
So, now we can confirm that our choices are in fact still just a Douche or a Turd Sandwich?
Ho hum. Another wiki. Useful, sure, I guess. One can never have too many places for bored people to use up their energy documenting the past and present, I suppose, but geez, when it comes to politics, could we not think about the future a bit? How many people even like how things are going right now?
Forget documenting what politicians do and have done. When is someone going to make a forum for discussing what should be? There's a real challenge for the wiki... creating tools for collaborating on a common view of the future rather than the past.
Or how about, as a middle ground if the future is too hard to discuss, even a wiki for each candidate so that we could discuss what made a coherent position/platform for that candidate right now, based on various issues before the candidate made a fool of him/herself by saying what he/she thought we wanted/thought/etc. Rather than let the candidate define him/herself, let the people define what they see in the candidate. Might be better in some ways. Candidates seem to be maleable about what they have to say to get elected anyway, why not duke it out online and see what ends up being stable?
Normal discussion forums have to be read from beginning to end to make sense. A wiki statically records the present state of a conversation in summary form so that anyone can pick up from there if they don't have time to read all of what's been said before, which is kind of like what a politician's platform does. It seems like it should be possible to figure out how to make that work... or a fun experiment to try.
I hope this isn't off-topic. I got all excited when I saw a political wiki and thought "maybe this is it". But it wasn't, and I figured I'd at least record the fact that I had hoped it might be.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
I clicked around a bit and found myself on the SourceWatch:Ground rules page. Good ideas, but an awful lot of red links. Several important topics haven't yet been defined, such as:
* "become a sysop"
* "language and rhetoric"
* "using discussion pages"
* even "wikifying"
Of course, since it's a collaborative project, I guess the users get to define those topics. Would it be overly cynical to start the "become a sysop" topic with a redirect to "Please select a giving amount or enter your own desired amount"?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Yes, I know. It will be full of propaganda and one-sided views. Even the most OCD-addled citizen editors will have a hard time competing with the attention of someone who gets paid to do the "right" edits.
However, this will mean that every candidate will finally be in one place. If I want to know Ron Paul's position on abortion and compare it with Hillary Clinton's, I can go to one site (and edit the pages - nyuck nyuck nyuck). Combined with the integration with opensecrets.org, I can do actual, honest to god research on ALL candidates trying to represent me, and vote accordingly.
I welcome our new congress-critter overlords - me, you and everyone else.
A bit rosy? For sure. But it this is a significant development for citizens trying to cast an informed vote. We might be going from totally and utterly craptastic to slightly less craptastic, but it's progress - the first true progress I've seen in ages. Now if we could just get redistricting fixed....
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Wiki my vote? I though Diebold had a patent on that?
:)
No, their patent is for Search and Replace
The citizen editors are assisted and fact-checked by professional editors.
Wasn't the whole point of Wiki that professional editors and writers were not needed? Did they just reverse their position 180 degrees?
technical writing / development
If a baby duck is a "duckling," why would anyone want to eat "dumplings?"
So good to hear it's not being run by somebody with an agenda to push.
Chris Mattern
I'd really like to see an easy-to-use system that lets me see who voted for what and when. I know that congress already has a system that stores that data but it's difficult for laymen to understand the data (I'm guessing that that's intentional).
I would really like to see a requirement that forces elected officials to explain why they voted for each bill - maybe in 5-30 words. This would give us a great deal of accountability on things like the PATRIOT act. It would be a lot harder for them to justify shady and pork-laden votes if they have to explain themselves.
It's good for business, though. Imagine, the candidates all have to hire someone to monitor their articles now.
I should start an Interweb Public Relations Firm.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
Forget documenting what politicians do and have done.
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.When is someone going to make a forum for discussing what should be?
You can't take the sky from me...
Trying to eliminate bias is a fools game. I would much rather read news sources which don't hide their bias and proclaim them out in the open, rather than "fair and balanced" news sources. When I know the bias of the news I am reading I can have a good idea of the types of things they will leave out or spin. When a source claims to be bias free I have a hard time with exactly where I should look for the bias and which "facts" I should check. This is one of the reasons I prefer "advocacy" journalism. I know where they stand and I can act accordingly.
BTW I am myself biased:
I am suspicious of elected officials motives
I am very skeptical of government intervention into the economy beyond the role of a referee
I prefer a smaller, less intrusive, government than the one we currently have
I tend to think that the cons of foreign intervention outweigh the pros almost all of the time
There you go. There are my biases. Now you can weigh those against my earlier comment. I wish news reporters would do the same instead of trying to appear "non-human".
Creative Demolition
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
Until the professional gig pans out, why not come and edit Ron Paul's page on Congresspedia?
Conor Kenny
Managing Editor, Congresspedia.org