"Wiki the Vote" Project Open-Sources Candidate Info 89
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."
Huh (Score:2)
Re:Huh (Score:5, Funny)
No, their patent is for Search and Replace
Wikipedia edit wars redux (Score:3, Insightful)
==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
Re:Wikipedia edit wars redux (Score:5, Interesting)
Each side then believes what they wish and objective truth, science or even video evidence are then discounted, the various media channels then publicise the spin of their chosen side and no one even gets to hear the facts.
I'm afraid democracy may not survive, this is not a problem exclusive to the united States but exists throughout modern western democracies.
The demos needs open honest moderated debate, instead we get two groups of PR agencies promulgating their opinions without ever interacting with each other.
I genuinely fear for the health of our democracies</rant>
Or maybe I've become an old fart when I wasn't paying attention and the world is suddenly going to hell in a handcart
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From my admittedly jaded viewpoint, there are some inherent problems with Democracy that really prevent me from appreciating it as much as most Americans. You might be interested in this book from Hans Hermann Hoppe: Democracy: The God That Failed [wikipedia.org]. I haven't read the whole thing, but I have caught parts of it posted as articles on certain blogs and such. I know about
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I know you're talking about the advantages of Instant Runoff Voting [fairvote.org], but I read your post as:
A feature of all first post electoral systems.
I've been on Slashdot too long.
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As far as I can tell pairwise voting schemes scale really badly with the number of candidates. Okay, so three guys runnining for president, you need to vote three times (AB BC AC). Four guys running, it's six times (AB BC AC AD BD CD). A dozen candidates it's, what, 78 times?
And the w
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The Bloc would need a truly bizarre balance of seats among the other parties in order to become the government, but have served as our Opposition party before. It's unlikely for the NDP to become a governing party in the foreseeable
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Here's the meat of it:
At noon Thursday, with more than 99 per cent of polls counted, the proposal had the support of 36.8 per cent of the vote. Meanwhile, 63.2 per cent of voters cast their ballots in favour of the existing first-past-the-post (FPTP) system.
Only five ridings, all of them in Toronto, showed a majority supporting MMP.
The MMP proposal required 60 per cent support to become the new electoral system. As well, it had to win a majority in 64 ridings.
A citizens assembly was appointed by the previous Liberal government to study the issue. It recommended MMP to replace FPTP, which has been in place in Ontario for 215 years.
As a supporter of MMP, let me say "Yay for democracy =\"
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eh, my province(Ontario) and my country (Canada) has had a first past the post electoral system. Surprisingly enough, there are four different "major" parties in parliment(Liberal/Conservative/NDP/Bloc) and numerous minor parties(Green, etc...) that get a chunk of the vote too.
From Wikipedia:
"Although four parties are currently represented in Parliament, Canada has two dominant political parties, the Conservatives and Liberals, that have governed the country since its formation in 1867."
That is. The other parties might as well not exist.
You were saying?
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Hint: check out what the current parliament is, and what the previous one was like, and another in my lifetime(1979).
Even during majority goverments, the voting of the minority parties can matter a great deal. Not every vote gets 100% support by every member of the governing party. So the governing party needs the help of the others(eg: the NDP/Liberal coalition of sorts during the p
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Don't know what country you're from, but in the US we travel in a handbasket, and on very well paved roads, I might add.
As for democracy, there's no saying that majority rule is such a good thing. It should be clear by now that the majority can be wrong. It's more akin to fascism by committee than anything. Merely less efficient, not less fascist. And there's very little hope when 99 percent of the people are only looking after their personal interests, wi
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Conor Kenny here, creator of the Wiki the Vote project. I agree this is a huge (but perhaps not new) problem in political discourse. One way we avoid having to give respect to all viewpoints, even if they're idiotic, is that we don't have a neutral point of view like wikipedia. If the citizen editors or the staff editors feel that something is obfuscating the facts rather than clarifying them, we'll delete it.
We're not a straight encyclopedia. Wikipedia is great, but is a straight encyclopedia that tries
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While this is an interesting idea.. (Score:1)
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but what I see as useful are things like:
- what was politician Bob's vote on bill bla
- what did politician Fred say publicly on issue bla
This way there would be a verifiable public record of the entire career of any given politician, verifiable by other public documents (newspaper archives etc)
so we get no more weasling in or out of campaign promises.
I agree tho, the spin doctors will reduce the overall value significantly..
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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, th
Nancy Pelosi ON WHEELS!!! (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Nancy Pelosi ON WHEELS!!! (Score:5, Funny)
So, err... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Unfortunately, so do many of the political news articles outside of the op-ed section of these respective papers...
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Professional journalism cannot be unbiased, but when it works best, the bias is in favor of facts first, and after that individual human beings before authority figures. But unless th
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But wikipedia has discovered neutrality!
Well, there you've got me.
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Oh yeah. Great idea. (Score:2)
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It may seem like a hopeless idea, but desperate times do call for desparate measures. "No shot too long, no straw too short!"
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"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 [congresspedia.org]
ckenny (at) congresspedia.org
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I should start an Interweb Public Relations Firm.
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I gave in and donated to Ron Paul.
I don't make a practice of replying to signatures, but since it's somewhat related to this story, I figured I might as well.
I'm very liberal on social issues and an economic moderate, and have never supported a Republican in my life... Until Ron Paul. He's still not my favorite - but he's a much better choice than almost everyone else.
It's sad, but knowing that the winner is going to be either Democrat or Republican (oh, how I wish this wasn't the case...), I gave equal funding to the two best option
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You have a point, but in their defense at least they require contributors to register. On the downside though, all you need to register is a working email address -- that will screen out casual vandals, but not hired-guns, which are arguably the real problem in the political arena.
I've come to the conclusion that "anonymity" isn't really suitable for anything but a toy site [1].
So... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:So... (Score:4)
Future collaboration using Wiki (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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Rome wasn't built in a day. And neither will a tool that changes our political process.
You gotta learn to crawl before you run... and this is the crawl. Whether we get to the run stage is open for discussion, but this is a crucial step in getting there. Don't dis
Stop dooming us all! (Score:3, Insightful)
Forget documenting what politicians do and have done.
When is someone going to make a forum for discussing what should be?
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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.
So, several of us are considering working on that right now, at this moment. We're just off the phone with David Korten. While it seems we won't be able to work with him directly, we're thinking about making a wiki seeded with the works of David Korten, [thegreatturning.net] Anodea Judith, [wakingtheglobalheart.com] Paul Hawken, [blessedunrest.com] Michael Dowd, [thegreatstory.org] and, .
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Yeah, daddy-o. Kind of a beatnik [greatmodernpictures.com] wiki [wikipedia.org]
Just starting out, for better or worse (Score:3, Funny)
* "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 [democracyinaction.org]"?
One word: Awesome. (Score:5, Insightful)
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....
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Re:One word: Awesome. (Score:4, Informative)
Huh? (Score:2)
Why? Content posted by joe random user will AT BEST be nothing more than speculation and random opinion, the sort of stuff you can read your fill of at any of a dozen existing sites.... for any political bent you like. Why would the candidates post anything themselves other than a link to their OWN website, one where they can say what they want to say and know it won't be edited into oblivion within an hour.
A Wiki is simply the wron
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At best, content posted by joe random will be well-sourced, informative and enlightening. At worst, it will be Ann Coulter posting. Personally, I enjoy the mess that is public discourse. There's plenty of nuggets there, if you know how to filter properly. Though filtering at -1 can be interesting as well.
As for what will happen.... well, your exact concerns where the concerns voiced about Wikipedia in the
Sheldon Rampton is awesome (Score:2)
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So good to hear it's not being run by somebody with an agenda to push.
Chris Mattern
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being run by somebody with an agenda
People without agendas don't get much done.
The word "agenda" has been reduced in popular lingo to a limited use in the negative connotations of the hidden agendas, but you keep using that word, and I do not think it means what you think it means. Having an agenda is not a bad thing. Mother theresa had an agenda, it involved taking care of people who needed help and had nowhere to turn to, it wasn't a bad agenda.
Hidden agendas are a different matter, they imply secrets, hypocrisy, things of which we should
Reversing position 180 degrees (Score:4, Insightful)
Wasn't the whole point of Wiki that professional editors and writers were not needed? Did they just reverse their position 180 degrees?
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As far as the actual Wiki software developers go... Since there's the ability to lock down articles, I think they foresaw the need for administrators and experts.
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We're just trying to do something a little different.
Won't hold a lot of weight (Score:1)
One giant black hole of internet suck.. (Score:1)
Blame MSM all you want but at least when someone reports something stupid their is a name that can be held accountable.
The anonymous internet... not so much. No matter how good the intention, any internet social site without moderation, will end up as fetid sewage.
Not Wanted (Score:1)
Not True (Score:2)
Instead of complaining about it, how about setting up a wiki to document ways for citizens to become involved?
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Whooaa There!!! (Score:1)
I used to express the same pessimism, but I decided one day that I'm not changing the situation for the better by expressing it.
Every opportunity I get, I throw out the idea that one can and should participate in their government with the hopes that it improves citizen participation in some small way. It won't cause any harm that's for sure.
Nice. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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Holy crap (Score:2)
Then I read thru the entire "new additions" section and it read like a laundry list of scandals, corruption, and Iraq-related bickering. Oh yeah, and Bush vetoed the SCHIP bill to.
I'm so depressed about my sucky country now that I can't do any research. Thanks Congresspedia.org.
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Some of us look at a veto of this bill -- federalizing healthcare payments to every resident of the United States of America up to the age of 25 including families who make up to $80,000 income -- as a good thing. The bill is (1) not addressing low income families, (2) not addressing children, and (3) not controlling the costs of healthcare. It's socialism with a literal "think of the children" label.
-- Scott
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overspecialization (Score:1)
A wiki just for the 2008 US Congressional elections? Maybe this is a silly question, but what was wrong with the Campaigns Wiki [wikia.com]?
...And who built that thingy the Wiki runs on? (Score:1)
You can't think too small...
Very Similar Idea (Score:1)
Fools Game (Score:3, Interesting)
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".
A few clarifications (Score:1)
(1) Congresspedia is not a part of Wikipedia and is not formally affiliated with Wikipedia in any way (although we use the same Mediawiki software and appreciate a lot of things that Wikipedia does).
(2) Congresspedia and "Wiki the Vote" are not devoted simply to the 2008 U.S. congressional elections. One of comments here suggested that a wiki d
Ron Paul supporters: (Score:1)