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.
Wikis are great and still very useful but I am wondering if you are using the right tool for the right job.
As people have pointed out any wiki is going to be subject to the biases of those who are editing it and, especially in politics, that’s always going to be an issue.
What I’d suggest is a database of reliable information, probably keeping a copy of the original web page like The Internet Archive or WebCite. People could then request information in specific subjects. It seems an idea to have an AI in the mix as it would be able to understand context and give better quality returns (I was talking about this kind of thing in the pub at the weekend, a lot of the legal legwork by junior lawyers is looking up old legal cases for precedents and AI can do this quicker and better - it wouldn’t tell the senior solicitor what to say in court but it would be able to provide him with the information he needs to decide how to proceed). You could even have a feature where people ask for a summary. It wouldn’t necessarily be 100% correct but it’d be less biased than a human and help people decide which information to look at from the pile of returns.