Bridging FOSS ideals and direct democracy • The Register

Remark A number of different tasks additionally use the huge linked knowledge retailer that underpins ubiquitous web encyclopaedia Wikipedia, and a few of them are serving to the combat for democracy.

Wikipedia is large, besides, it is larger than it seems to be. For a begin, the encyclopedia itself is bigger than it seems: there are energetic Wikipedias in 342 different languages. Greater than 65 million articles and over 273 million pages, and they’re all linked to one another inside every language in addition to between languages. The result’s an unlimited linked knowledge graph, and it is free, open supply, and multilingual.

Wikidata is the a part of the group which manages this database. It underpins a number of different websites and tasks than simply the very seen encyclopedia. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project makes use of it to energy Aleph which helps about 25,000 investigative journalists monitor folks and firms. WikiFlix, launched final month, is a free, no-registration-needed streaming service for non-copyrighted movies. Cividata is an worldwide index of charities and non-profits. The GLAM mapping project indexes and maps Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums.

The Register talked to 2 of those Wikidata-backed tasks.

GovDirectory

Jan Ainali of Open by Default instructed us that he had the thought for GovDirectory “again in about 2016, when Twitter was nonetheless good.” It is simple to explain, however laborious to realize: it aspires to be a listing of all authorities organizations on the earth, the place they’re, and how one can contact them. A core drawback is that as a result of nothing like this exists, they do not know for certain what number of such departments exist. They estimate that there might be as many as 800,000 businesses.

Up to now, GovDirectory has about 13,000 businesses throughout nearly 40 countries. It lists web sites and official presences or accounts on social media.

Different points the crew has encountered is perhaps stunning should you’ve by no means needed to attempt to do that your self, though they most likely will not shock any weary technologist. Venture member Albin Larsson instructed us of some amusing hiccups they encountered getting began in his native Sweden. One company had an official Flickr account, however no person within the company knew who had the password. Two authorities businesses labored on monitoring different Swedish authorities businesses and sustaining lists, for example, embassies – however their lists didn’t match. Earlier than he emigrated over a decade in the past, the Reg FOSS desk was British, and as such is aware of of some free equivalents to GovDirectory for Brits. TheyWorkForYou is a searchable index of UK parliamentary representatives. It launched in 2004 at NotCon04, as an offshoot of the wonderful and much-missed satirical e mail publication NeedToKnow. It is now part of MySociety, as is its associate web site WriteToThem which makes it very simple to contact every Member of Parliament instantly.

Previously, this vulture has additionally discovered SayNoTo0870 very useful – particularly as an emigré Brit making an attempt to contact organizations and firms within the UK from exterior the nation. That additionally contains from close by international locations. Talking personally, we misplaced monitor of what number of calls we positioned to the UK Visas and Immigration Division, whose contact page is notably devoid of any contact info.

For non-Brits, 0870 numbers are the UK’s unique non-geographic cellphone dialling codes. Firms can use them to direct calls to switchboards and call-centres, and that additionally led to the rise of premium fee contact numbers – which usually cannot be dialled from exterior the nation. (The identical usually applies to US 1-800 numbers.)

A free, world, verified, multilingual service that lined this kind of performance sounds very helpful certainly to us — even should you by no means go away your homeland in your life.

For US readers, a extra topical instance of the worth of this kind of service is the ICE Listing, which the inimitable Jamie Zawinski blogged about some days in the past. On the time of writing, we won’t get to it, however this Internet Archive snapshot offers you the flavour: “Crowdsourced database of people concerned in deportations, ICE operations, and related abuses.”

AletheiaFact

We additionally spoke with Mateus Santos and Tamiris Tinti Volcean from the Aletheia Reality Motion. Its AletheiaFact web site is a really totally different kind of effort. Santos gave a talk at FOSDEM 2024 concerning the platform, and the intro there has potted introduction.

(The title comes from Aletheia, which is the time period for reality or disclosure in historical Greek philosophy. It’s possible you’ll not understand it – we did not – however we acknowledged its antonym: Lethe, the river of forgetfulness.)

AletheiaFact is a fact-checking service, impressed partly by a Czech web site, Demagog.cz [🇨🇿 Čeština]. For now, it primarily focuses on Brazilian Portuguese, however it might be helpful all over the world. Volcean instructed us that it is supported by the Comitê Nacional de Democratização da Checagem de Fatos – the Nationwide Committee for the Democratization of Reality-Checking – and it was a finalist within the World Summit Data Society’s WSIS Prizes 2025.

The previous authorities of Brazil and its chief Jair Bolsonaro had, to say the least, a troubled historical past of coping with the reality. This included persecuting journalists, and in its time, there have been mysterious cyberattacks on the legal system. Happily, present chief Luiz Inacio da Silva is extra open–minded – for example, he was up to now a supporter of open source.

Volcean instructed us “At present, in Brazil, it is not possible to debate with out disinformation. They distribute it with social media. We have to educate folks how one can devour it: how one can discover sources, and how one can discover belief — how one can do the method of fact-checking.”

Santos instructed us that though AletheiaFact.org is not a direct Wikidata mission, its backing has been very useful. Drawing on Wikidata means the location will be crawled by search engines like google, and the information base implies that they’ll plug into different schemas. An instance was that it permits some primary automated fact-checking – i.e the form of the Earth. (To which we will solely say, O tempora! O mores!.)

“Wikidata allowed us to create a product very quick, and the wiki motion’s selections assist – for instance, the notability standards for including folks.”

That could be very a lot not only a Brazilian drawback. To choose one unhappy instance, ever since reporting on the Xlibre project, this vulture has seen extra dinsinformation from anti-vaxxers than within the 12 months thus far. As a dad or mum, this explicit evil fiction is one we particularly detest. In our guide, something that helps expose conspiracy theorists is an excellent factor. ®