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.
I’m not understanding why you need to reinvent the wheel here, you can just leverage Wikipedia to accomplish your goal (to a degree). Take the entry for public transport: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_transport
There are sections on the impacts and challenges of public transit. If you feel it’s lacking in factual peer reviewed information regarding the financial benefits, just go ahead and add it. The only challenge will be if you don’t want to conform to Wikipedia’s moderation rules, in which case you’re probably better off just making your own website/blog, but you’ll lose the community aspect.
As for more true political topics, balletopedia already exists, and quite frankly, it’s an excellent resource. If I were you I’d spend my time contributing to resources that are already popular than trying to reinvent the wheel.
Unless you get really lucky, good quality Wikipedia edits will have a much larger impact than a website run out of your basement.
Wikipedia doesn’t allow original research as a source. It has to be reported by a second party before it is accepted. This makes most political topics hard to properly cite.
You sure about that? It feels like a dubious claim, especially considering, for example, the Public Transport article I linked has at least 6 DOI references to journal articles.
Additionally, even if true, most journal articles of any value get picked up at least once, pretty easy to get a secondary source to back a claim.
I think you misunderstand, he means you can’t publish the results of your own research to Wikipedia. It has to be published somewhere else and then you need to reference to that on Wikipedia.
Oh, well I guess that’s true, but I find it hard to fathom that OP was going to do their own research (in the sense you described) on something like transportation infrastructure costs. Unless OP runs their own infrastructure network where they can pull real cost and usage data, I assumed the research they were referring to was more in the realm of a lit review.
Unless OP is a secret billionaire, odds are this rule will not impact their efforts.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research
I totally see your point. It still feels like wikipedia is missing something - like if I were trying to debate my uncle on whether its fair to tax people for public transportation, I’m not sure if this article would really get me the quick statistics I’d be looking for. But in order to find out why not and clarify the idea a bit I think I’ll try to make a wikipedia article like the one I’m thinking of and see how it goes.
Maybe what is missing is not the content but the way it is structured and presented. Perhaps the article/page paradigm does not fit very well to what a political discussion is.
Perhaps some sort of visual graph of each topic, with supporting and contra-indicating evidence represented as boxes with arrows? Each piece of evidence could have sources and sub-evidence, etc. Check this out: https://debategraph.org/poster.aspx?aID=65