A professor of government at Bentley College in Massachusetts, Christine Williams (picture right) has been asking herself the same question since 2000: “Is the Web improving public debate, the political process and the campaigns?

Back in 2000, she studied the web sites created by candidates for the senate and concluded that they “failed to employ a relationship marketing strategy that would create repeat “customers” for the services of candidates for public office and raise the level of political discourse for voters.” With the advent of the Web 2.0, are political hopefuls doing a better job of engaging with potential voters on the Web?

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“User-generated content” is one of the catchphrases of Web 2.0. Behind it is the idea that we are better served when the many, instead of the few, can produce, share and rank information. That works well on YouTube, Flickr, Diggs or even Google. But when it comes to an encyclopaedia, it is nice to feel confident about the accuracy of the user-generated articles.

In 2001, Larry Sanger (picture right) co-founded Wikipedia, probably one of the world’s largest collaborative projects which currently contains over 1,5 million articles in English. But he has become convinced that expert editors are the only way to ensure reliability. “It is not an encyclopaedia until you have brought it to the point where it can be trusted,” he said. As a result, there is one major difference between Wikipedia and his new project Citizendium. “Wikipedia gives no special role to experts. On Citizendium, editors are able to set policies for articles and we are working on a method to let them resolve editing wars.”

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