[Air-L] WikiCandidate 08

[Dmitry Epstein]

Dear list members,

 

My colleagues and I just launched a website (http://wikicandidate08.com
<http://wikicandidate08.com/> ) intended to research the way in which people
engage in political discussion online. It's called WikiCandidate. The site
is the campaign website of a fictional presidential candidate running in the
2008 US election. It's intended to look and feel exactly like a real
campaign website (our developers are getting there gradually, but things
look similar already), with one exception: all the content on it is tied to
a wiki engine and editable by users. Visitors to the site can write up and
change this candidate's bio, issue stances, news from the campaign trail,
etc.

First and foremost, the WikiCandidate Project is supposed to be a fun
website and an online community. In a presidential election, it's common for
people to be disappointed in the choice of candidates. Each person running
has some character flaw, holds a position on an issue you don't share, says
something you wish they hadn't. So, we wondered, free of practical
constraints like life history, party politics, and voting record, who is
(and can there be) a perfect presidential candidate?

It wasn't long before we realized there were some really interesting
academic research questions that could be asked about this. And so we put
together this website. We're not studying people our users like bugs or
anything. We mostly want to see whether an effort like this can be
successful, and how people discuss politics in this non-traditional forum.
We'd love you to stop by, and if you like what you see, invite your readers
to do the same.

 

Thank you!

Dima