Are you interested in Republican Sex Scandals? Really, who isn't? If there's anything guaranteed to raise one's feeling of Schadenfreude it has to be Minnesota toilet toe-tapping followed by fierce denunciations. How about the Co-chair on the Committee for Missing and Exploited Children sending lewd and suggestive text messages to male pages. Ah, the good old days. What do you think is the best resource for such info? What's the top response from google for "Republican Sex Scandals"? Go ahead and try it, I'll wait... That's right, our very own dKosopedia's article on Republican Sex Scandals.
But with that notoriety comes great responsibility. The information in the dKosopedia must be correct. I started this out with Republican Sex Scandals primarily to get your attention, but the dKosopedia can be a great resource on a great many topics. It can be, and it should be.
That's where you come in...
What do you know? What are your particular interests? You don't need to be an expert, just be willing to help out on an article here or there. For example, does it raise your ire when the fundies start pushing Intelligent Design in schools? At some point the dKosopedia's article on Intelligent Design will be used by one or both sides as a potential resource. So it needs to be accurate. You can help make it that way.
Intelligent Design not your cup of tea? Then how about Election Fraud, or Karl Rove, or the Fighting Dems, or Gun Control, or Elizabeth Edwards? There are lots of articles on the dKosopedia that need to be worked on. They need editing and sourcing and proofreading. All you have to do is register (if you don't already have an account) and go to it. Fix typos. Update an article by adding a reference to a more recent news event or story or finding. The dKosopedia is a wiki, so the more people who work on it, the better.
Did you know that dKosopedia, this community's political encyclopedia, has no entry for Michelle Obama? That's insane, if not borderline criminal. One of you needs to do something about that.
We also need monitoring. The problem with allowing anyone to modify pages is that anyone can modify pages. A while ago the picture on Barack Obama's page was changed to something, uh, less than flattering. It was pretty quickly changed back. If there are topics or people about which you feel strongly, you can click a link on that page to monitor the page. Whenever someone modifies the page, you get an email. So if you admire Michelle Obama, and want to make sure the dKp's article on her is accurate, you might want to monitor her page for vandalism. Another way to monitor changes is to check out the Special:Recentchanges page, or to subscribe to that page's RSS feed.
We can make the dKosopedia much more than it is. Try to provide sources for your info. If you don't have a source then put a "source needed" note by your contribution. And I know it's so tempting to write "...and the evil Karl Rove then..." but try to avoid adjectives. Keep things non-inflammatory. The Wikipedia has an NPOV (Neutral Point of View) policy, and while we're not neutral we are reality-based. Keep it that way.
(We completed moving the dKosopedia to nice, fast dKos servers a couple of weeks ago. A small issue remains. When creating a new account, you'll get a message saying there was an error mailing a confirmation. Ignore that, the message was sent, and you'll need to confirm your account using that mail message.
Oh, and in Daily Kos diaries and comments you can reference dKosopedia pages by putting the dKp page name in double square brackets. That's what I did above: [[Michelle Obama]] becomes Michelle Obama.)