Unlike “Rational”Wiki, skeptics.stackexchange doesn’t promote “snarky point of view”, so the personality type that enjoys making fun online of their political opponents wouldn’t be attracted there. (I’d go even further and say that unlike Wikipedia it doesn’t try to recruit people with specific political opinions, so it should be more balanced.) It probably isn’t perfect, but nothing is.
My concern would be simply too many questiong and not enough contributors, so there is a high risk of the specific question failing to attract any answer, or only getting one or two answers, in which case the opinion of the random person who posted the answer could be unrepresentative.
(I only had experience with the programmers’ stackexchange, and there many upvoted answers are great, and I also got some karma for answering other people’s question. But when I asked questions, they were often unanswered, or only received one wrong answer. My hypothesis is that the difficulty of question correlates negatively with the number of answers. Also the gamification aspect of getting karma for good answers is good at encouraging people to answer questions, but if people get into too competitive mindset, it may discourage them from answering more complex questions, because that gets them less karma per unit of time: both because answering a complex question takes more time, and because there will be less people voting on the complex question.)
Unlike “Rational”Wiki, skeptics.stackexchange doesn’t promote “snarky point of view”, so the personality type that enjoys making fun online of their political opponents wouldn’t be attracted there. (I’d go even further and say that unlike Wikipedia it doesn’t try to recruit people with specific political opinions, so it should be more balanced.) It probably isn’t perfect, but nothing is.
My concern would be simply too many questiong and not enough contributors, so there is a high risk of the specific question failing to attract any answer, or only getting one or two answers, in which case the opinion of the random person who posted the answer could be unrepresentative.
(I only had experience with the programmers’ stackexchange, and there many upvoted answers are great, and I also got some karma for answering other people’s question. But when I asked questions, they were often unanswered, or only received one wrong answer. My hypothesis is that the difficulty of question correlates negatively with the number of answers. Also the gamification aspect of getting karma for good answers is good at encouraging people to answer questions, but if people get into too competitive mindset, it may discourage them from answering more complex questions, because that gets them less karma per unit of time: both because answering a complex question takes more time, and because there will be less people voting on the complex question.)