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.

  • @ryathal
    4•11 months ago

    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.

    • @RvTV95XBeo
      2•11 months ago

      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.

      • Lysol
        8•11 months ago

        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.

        • @RvTV95XBeo
          3•11 months ago

          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.