Wikipedia for politics? A new site gives it a try
As is usually the case, Declan McCullagh offers an excellent introduction of PoliticalBase.com.

The idea behind PoliticalBase.com is to provide a neutral, one-stop source of information about politics (and politicians) to which anyone can contribute. Changes must be approved by a staff editor before they take effect.

The only thing missing in this article is mention of the “related” Congresspedia and other sites and tools from the Congresspedia team. We first mentioned Congresspedia over a year ago and then featured it as a Resource of the Week in November, 2006 . Congresspedia is a part of SourceWatch. Another SourceWatch project is TobaccoWiki.

Like PoliticalBase.com all of these sites allow users to input content and editors including Congresspedia chief editor, Conor Kenny, review submissions.

Selected Features:
+ U.S. presidential election, 2008

+ Last Week in Congress and Coming this Week in Congress

+ The 2008 U.S. Congressional Elections Portal

Of course, it’s important for all and very important to teach young people not only critical info skills but also media awareness skills. SourceWatch, Congresspedia, and the Center for Media and Democracy offer info about their various services and beliefs in what they publish. It’s important reading and excellent for classroom use. Understanding where the info is coming from can make what you read more or less useful. That’s why having this knowledge is so important. It’s also worth reading about the Sunlight Foundation.

See Also: In June, We Posted About the Beta of LOUIS (Library Of Unified Information Sources) Database

See Also: Don’t Forget about Citizendium. This general knowledge user-built encyclopedia comes from Larry Sanger who was one of the co-founders of Wikipedia. We’ve said many times that some of its primary differences might make this a project the library community should support. Some of the differences (between Wikipedia and Citizendium) are enumerated here. More background in numerous articles on Larry Sanger’s personal site.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 9th, 2007 at 12:19 am and is filed under Government Documents and Political Information, Source File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.