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.
Comment on Is it dumb to create a wiki in this day and age?
RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
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: 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.
rsuri@lemmy.world 11 months ago
kglitch@kglitch.social 11 months ago
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
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 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@sh.itjust.works 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@lemmy.world 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@sh.itjust.works 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.
ryathal@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
…wikipedia.org/…/Wikipedia:No_original_research