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.
Similar to what others said my main thought is how to have unbiased moderation of the content. Since anyone can edit anyone can try to spin their own story instead of reflecting the true idea of the website. If there is moderation to prevent any bias on either side and only allow for the data that viewers can draw their own viewpoint on, would be great but sounds like it would rely on a lot of people to help moderate the bias.
I do not know a lot about how wikiapedia operates as far as their moderation. It seems it’s gotten so big that any topic with more than 1 person interested in it will have people editing out bad content.
With the more niche wikis out there most the people who have interest in them are interested in keeping it honest.
With politics your bringing in a wide demographic with a lot more room for people trying to spin their own narrative.
I just had a thought: what would happen if the “articles” on a wiki were all AI generated, using comments and edits on the initial data as the prompts?
So you could write up a good set of content, but then the AI would filter it to generate the main page, with links back to all the supporting content. Any edits would be submitted as more supporting content and no direct editing would be allowed.
Sure, it could be gamed, but it would ease the moderation load significantly. New generated main page content would still need to be reviewed before a new generation would be accepted.