The two-column approach to resolving life’s biggest questions

As Andrew noted last year, Wikipedia’s neutral-point-of-view doesn’t always cut it, especially when the topic at hand is particularly controversial. Should Guantanamo be closed? Is outsourcing a good thing? Should convicted pedophiles be electronically tagged? No easy answers to those questions, and rather than clicking through tit-for-tat editing at Wikipedia, why not move the conversation over to Debatepedia? This site, a project of the International Debate Education Association and a group of Georgetown University students and alums, offers a structured place for back-and-forth arguments. The result is so calm and rational it begs the question: Could Debatepedia set up a personal advice section, where we submit heavy personal questions — Should I break up with with my boyfriend? Should I withdraw from the presidential race? (hey, Mike Huckabee, we traced your IP address) — and allow fellow netizens to debate the pros and cons for us? Debatepedia founder and editor Brooks Lindsay will be with us in Miami to answer these and other questions. Today he tells us why Debatepedia is the ultimate online tool:

Debatepedia is my favorite digital-deliberations tool, combining philosophy with personal conclusion-making. It’s a wiki that enables users to frame public debates, and the pro/con “logic-tree” structure allows for effective deliberation. By enabling the creation of argument pages (ordinary wiki pages with an argument “claim” as the title), we can gather quotes and evidence from a wide array of sources, see them laid out next to each other, and observe how people take the same evidence and deploy it differently. Then, we can see counter-arguments, with supporting evidence and quotes also gathered conveniently. These tools make public logic transparent and help us come to our own conclusions.

Our mission is to create an encyclopedia of debates and evidence. Obviously, this is an impossibly burdensome task — voila, the open-source solution. We want to do for debate and argumentation what Wikipedia has already done for the traditional encyclopedia. 

Indeed, Wikipedia has created an amazing, high-standard environment. The very structures and rules required for its organization inherently limit the type of debates we hope to foster at Debatepedia.  First, neutrality and consensus on Wikipedia are a problem when it comes to opposing points of view: The full expression of minority viewpoints is threatened by the “consensus” of the majority. On Debatepedia, the split-screen pro/con structure iprovides an equal place for the presentation of opposing cases with non-neutral language.

Secondly, Debatepedia’s pro/con logic-tree structure is specifically designed for weighing opposing sides and deliberating between them — a task all citizens and leaders must engage in, but for which Wikipedia does not offer a structural solution.

Thirdly, Debatepedia offers argument pages, where all the supporting evidence for a particular argument can be quoted and displayed en mass, instead of brushed over in a single sentence or single reference on Wikipedia.

In these ways, Debatepedia helps advance the wiki model beyond the limitations of Wikipedia to an arena vital to societal progress — public debate and deliberation.