(Bumped – promoted by DavidNYC)
I think you guys are gonna like this. Based on this suggestion from Terry312, I went ahead and created a brand new wiki at WetPaint.com called 2008 Race Tracker. The name is pretty self-explanatory: This wiki is designed to be a database for information on all 2008 House, Sen and Gov races. The main focus now is inputting candidate information, both incumbents and possible challengers.
The WetPaint system is incredibly easy to use – everything is WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get). If you’ve ever waded into Wikipedia and quailed at the thought of editing its quirky code, fear no more. Absolutely no code of any kind is necessary to create pages on WetPaint. The only thing you’ll need to do is create a user account, which takes 30 seconds. (I set this requirement to ward against vandalism.)
I’ve created easy-to-use templates for each type of race which I strongly encourage you to use. (Here’s an example of what a page ideally looks like.) The idea is to create a page for each race, so we have a lot of info to fill in. I figure our first objective should be to fill in all the incumbent data. Anyhow, check out the main wiki page for some more info and just jump right in! This should be fun.
Hey guys this is like Barry Welsh’s Fifty State page. Fantastic!
A few suggestions if I may.
You need a page that shows how many races are filled, unconfirmed etc.
Each house race should allow for a link to a district map, 2004 pres vote numbers, PVI, district blogs, polls, and voter reg figures. Yeh in other words just like the 50 state page. It is a lot of info but not impossible for a community to maintain. (I managed it with the 50 state page single handedly) for the last few months. For some reason I can’t log in there now BTW which is a pity because there has been a plague of spam comments I owuld love to delete. Anyway just a few thoughts.
Thanks David, James, et al.
Been an avid user of Wiki for a while now.
Nice color! Nice work!
I see that it’s easier for some people to use, but I really wish it had an option to have some sort of normal wiki-like interface for users who want it. Trying to put together lists and tables and keeping things formatted consistently would be a lot easier if it were possible to do things as text and paste them in rather than screwing around with all this mouse work.
Thanks David for putting this into action. I hope it’ll become both a solid reference and a good way to make sure we have options for the future. Let’s hope we can get a critical mass of contributors!
This is a nice thing to have. I added pages for all of the MN House races with their incumbents, not going to add potential opponents yet because that’s a little hard to tell.
This is “bogun”, by the way. I changed my name because I was tired of using a nonsense name for my account 🙂
But I think we should focus on adding candidate info first. The district info is very helpful but can probably come later.
Also, in terms of a page which keeps track of everything – unfortunately, WetPaint (at least with its current feature set) doesn’t offer anything automated like that. So it would have to be a massive manual effort. That’s probably not worth it, certainly not right now.
I know there’s a “2008” in the name, but if we’re analyzing gubernatorial elections it seems odd to be skipping over the ones next year: Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi.
Looks like it just lost the last 4 or 5 hours of people’s editing. That doesn’t inspire confidence. Hope it’s somehow restored later.