Social Security information on Demopedia, please!

[Jim Lane]

I see many threads on the "Seniors & Aging" forum (as well as some elsewhere) with valuable information about Social Security. The trouble is that it's all flying by and will be very hard to locate even a week from now, let alone over the many months that we'll be fighting this battle.

This is exactly why Demopedia was created. If you find some information about Social Security that's not just ephemeral, but that should be preserved, and that would help orient a newcomer to the issue, please add it to Demopedia! I've created an initial "stub" article at <http://demopedia.democraticunderground.com/index.php/Social_Security>. You can go there, click on "Edit this page", and make changes. Perhaps other subjects would merit separate articles. For example, we might at some point have an article about the British system or the Chilean system, or perhaps a more general article about "Social Security privatization abroad".

For the "Social Security" article itself, we could use basic information about the system's history, how it functions, finances, projections, etc., along with descriptions of different approaches to change -- privatization should be covered, of course, along with the major alternatives, such as raising the cap on taxable income.

Some people are apparently intimidated by the Demopedia software. Just remember that Demopedia is a wiki. That means that anyone can edit it, and if you screw something up through ignorance, anyone else can fix your mistake. Even if you manage to delete an entire passage by mistake, it can be restored. (Click on "Discuss this page" over at the left, explain what you did, and someone more at home with the software can undo it.)

My ulterior motive in this is that I'm one of the people actively involved in editing the Wikipedia article on Social Security: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_%28United_States%29>. Any good stuff that shows up on Demopedia can be incorporated in the Wikipedia article. Of course, you can edit Wikipedia yourself, but I think a lot of DU regulars don't like the constraints of Wikipedia's "Neutral Point of View" policy. It is not an advocacy site. Denunciations of conservative ideas (let alone referring to Bush as "*" or "Shrubya") will be promptly reverted. Nevertheless, NPOV does allow presentation of facts. I'm used to dealing with its constraints. If you don't want to bother, just get good content into the Demopedia article, and I'll use what I can.

[REACTIVATED IN CT]

1. I asked for a new Forum on this topic...

but was turned down. So I've continued to post articles I receive to Seniors and Aging

I'm fairly new here and have no clue as to what Demopedia is

[Jim Lane]

2. What Demopedia is

You can click on the link at the top of the page that says "Demopedia (BETA)". The trouble is that, because it's still in beta, you can participate only if you were a DU member before December 7, 2004.

In brief, it's a wiki, a collection of articles that are constantly improved by open collaborative editing (anyone can edit any article). Thus, no one person needs to feel compelled to write the definitive treatise on Social Security. Just go to <http://demopedia.democraticunderground.com/index.php/Social_Security> and make the article better than it was. The sum of the improvements contributed by many people will (we hope) produce a comprehensive and useful article.

Anyone who wasn't a DU member before the cutoff date will have to wait until the beta period is over, when, I assume, new Demopedia memberships will be accepted.