Let's Wiki Wrongdoing!

People For the American Way has created a new site, WikiThePresidency.org to provide a well-organized, well-substantiated, easily accessible public clearinghouse for factual information about wrongdoing commited by the Bush Administration.

Based on the same technology as Wikipedia, this site encourages citizens to collaborate in adding and editing both topics and content documenting wrongdoing in the Executive Branch. The space is defined by just two simple rules:

1. WikiThePresidency.org is intended to be a factual resource and not an op-ed page, and so contributors should post only factual claims there and refrain from posting commentary or ill-substantiated speculation.

2. All factual claims should be supported with links to sources widely regarded as credible (produced by a recognized authority or published by a reputable news source).

Needless to say, the distinctions between descriptive and prescriptive claims, or between factual and speculative discourse are difficult to maintain, especially when the deployment of the distinctions themselves can be fraught with precisely the political significance that would draw citizens to participate in the creation and support of such a site in the first place. The insistence on sourcing is helpful, but of course the criteria that define "reputable" and "credible" sources are themselves neither innocent nor sure.

I suspect that the discussion pages available one click away from each wiki-entry will become fora where many interesting battles of value and of fact will be fought. I hope these discussion pages will be treated as valuable supplements to the documentary entries themselves, available to those who seek out broader contexts and a clearer sense of the contested stakes out of which provisional consensus documentary descriptions arise. I think these public but backgrounded contentious discussions and these public and foregrounded consensus factual accounts ideally will complement one another, so long as they do not hopelessly contaminate one another. Definitely I will observe this experiment in peer-to-peer democracy and critical collaborative citizenship with great interest.