What is the most important website a U.S. citizen should bookmark in order to be responsible?
Asked by
iamthemob (
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February 24th, 2011
Define responsible any way you want, but please include why you think it’s important, and a link to the website.
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15 Answers
Wikipedia and BBC News
Knowledge and news.
Interesting – why does wikipedia work for a U.S. citizen for knowledge, and why does BBC news work for a U.S. citizen for news?
Wikipedia is the most easily accessible and most up to date encyclopedia in existence. Plus it is free, and because it is maintained by an international community, less prone to american historical revisionism and filtering.
BBC news gives a outside perspective on global and american events and gives an alternative to biased us stations.
Even though a lot of good things come from Wikipedia, it’s easily written/re-written by an individual or group. And, other countries’ new services have their bias…just like ours.
@ragingloli As does the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Network).
http://www.democracynow.org/ is currently the most important web site for US citizens. important for the same reasons as wikipedia and the BBC.
@MissA
Errors and biased Wiki entries can and usually are swiftly corrected by the community.
Errors and biased entries in a physical encyclopedia will stay there for a long time.
I also trust it a bit more than an encyclopedia that is written by just a few people and do not get corrected until the next revision.
@ragingloli right, and if people haven’t donated they should.
Sites such as congress.org and senate.gov are pretty important, to see how our politicians vote. They say a lot!
I agree with @ragingloli about wikipedia. I have found that the criticisms leveled against it were valid in the early days of the site when not many people edited it regularly, but there is currently a huge cabal of regular, educated editors who literally spend all day monitoring the recent changes page in order to snipe any trolling or misinformation before it stays up too long. Sure, Wikipedia will almost always have some kind of bias in it, as long as it is written by human beings, but the information is invaluable, and everyone knows an informed citizenry is a happy citizenry.
Oh, and @forestGeek stole my answer, but I’d like to add http://www.opencongress.org/ to the list. It’s a website where you can read all the bills that are floating around out there, from the most mundane, to the most influential, and even the most terrifying.
Opencongress.org
hehe, fiddle beat me to it. At any rate, it is the first thing I go to when doing my duty as a citizen.
@squirbel, I think it’s an important and useful enough website to be re-emphasized on here… in case anyone missed the link the first time.
I second Democracy Now! In general it’s pretty good reporting of stuff major news outlets don’t want to cover.
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