Contributing to SourceWatch and Congresspedia are important ways that you can further the work of the Center for Media and Democracy and the Sunlight Foundation - from the comfort of your own home!

SourceWatch is an online encyclopedia of people, issues and groups shaping the public agenda. Its Congresspedia component is the "citizen's encyclopedia on Congress." It runs on "wiki" software, which means that anyone - including you - can contribute. There are a series of introductory pages, including a "welcome" for newcomers [1], editing instructions [2] and frequently asked questions [3], to help you get started on SourceWatch in general. If you'd prefer to start out contributing specifically to Congresspedia, the Congresspedia about [4] and help [5] pages are the best places to start.

 

The philosophy behind SourceWatch is that an online community can research, track and report on influential people like George Soros [6], issues like climate change [7], groups like the Heritage Foundation [8] and the actions of members of Congress [9] more accurately, thoroughly and rapidly than any individual person or organization could. Community members also strengthen SourceWatch by fact-checking, editing and updating others' contributions. Center staff - including SourceWatch editor Bob Burton and Congresspedia editor Conor Kenny - are part of the SourceWatch online community.

If you enjoy doing research, reading the news and writing, we encourage you to add information and articles on areas of interest to you. The SourceWatch home page [10] highlights articles in the news and lists research priority areas, to help direct your work.

And there are other vital roles that we need volunteers to take on. These include fact-checkers (verifying and adding references to articles), editors (improving the structure, flow and wording of articles, including condensing large sections of text cut and pasted from other sources), and categorizers (ordering articles by topic).

Take some time to get acquainted with SourceWatch and think about how you can help us. If you have questions you can't find the answer to, leave a message on Bob [11] or Conor's [12] SourceWatch user talk pages or email them at bob(AT)sourcewatch.org conor(AT)sourcewatch.org (replace (AT) with @).