Wikipedia, famously, has lots of information. Do you want a thorough page for every season, episode, and character on The Wire? Wikipedia’s got you covered. How about a separate page for each season of the Cleveland Browns since 1946? Again, you can find them all on Wikipedia. It’s even got a tremendously lengthy and detailed page on itself – nearly 15,000 words on Wikipedia, about Wikipedia!
But state legislatures, those 99 legislative bodies that do a huge portion of the actual governing in this country, remain a significant blindspot on the site. Hundreds upon hundreds of state legislators don’t have pages, and many of the pages that do exist are sparse or inaccurate. State legislative districts are even worse off, with the vast majority lacking their own pages, or any information whatsoever.
In some ways, Wikipedia is a symptom of broader ignorance about state legislatures – even those of us heavily involved in American politics may not know much about them, and Wikipedia is nothing but a compendium of what the online community already knows. But Wikipedia’s shortcomings also contribute to that ignorance; if people can’t look up their legislator or district on something as ubiquitous as Wikipedia, it’s that much harder for them to inform themselves.
A little over a year ago, I noticed this problem in my home state of New York, and set out to do something about it. The New York State Senate – a perplexing and fascinating body whose tale of gerrymandering, corruption, and general tomfoolery over the past decade is one for the ages – had decent pages for its senators, but terrible pages (or none at all) for its districts, each of which represent over 300,000 people.
So: along with a friend, I taught myself how to use QGIS and made maps for each senate district in the state. I found that the California legislature already had detailed and good-looking district pages, and cribbed much of the formatting (on Wikipedia, that kind of copying is not only allowed, it’s encouraged). I gathered information from various sources, including Ballotpedia, official government pages, and who else but Daily Kos Elections.
The result is on the right. (This is my own beautiful Senate district, the 31st. I also didn’t screenshot the entire page, which would be too long; these are just two parts of it.)
Since last summer, I’ve made district pages like this for state senates in 10 states – New York, Virginia, Louisiana, New Hampshire, West Virginia, Nevada, Colorado, Michigan, Delaware, and just recently Tennessee – as well as a few dozen pages for legislators in those states who were missing pages. (I’ve focused on state senates thus far because state houses are usually 2 or 3 times the amount of work, but for the same number of people – one day I’ll get around to some of them.)
My goals are not particularly lofty for this project. I know it’s a niche subject, and that many of the pages I made will get little, if any, traffic. But we, as progressives, claim freedom of information as a political and moral obligation – through affordable college, through net neutrality, through voter registration and education – and this is my small way of contributing to that vision.
If you’re interested in seeing the various pages I’ve made and revamped, you can visit my Wikipedia user page. And if you have any suggestions or anything like that, go ahead and comment on this article – I’ll be looking out for it. Thanks for reading, and keep up the good fight.