SourceWatch:For citizen journalists and local bloggers
SourceWatch and its sub-wiki, Congresspedia, are great places for you to post your research and reporting as well as link back to your own site. With 60,000 visitors on an average weekday, posts to the wiki will get a wide reading and be integrated into a rapidly expanding body of research on politics and policy. As a non-profit, non-partisan, collaborative research project, we welcome posts that come from any perspective as long as the information is fair, factual and sourced. (More about Congresspedia/SourceWatch...)
Bloggers: With high search engine results for our pages on every member of Congress and many issues, adding a link to your blog is a great way to drive interested readers your way. Every page on a member of Congress has a "Local blogs and discussion sites" section specifically for links to blogs that are written locally and cover that member. Almost every other page on SourceWatch and Congresspedia has a "Articles and Resources" section where you could also add your blog if it is a topic you cover regularly.
Contact Congresspedia Editor Conor Kenny at  if you need any assistance in getting acquainted with our wiki or would like to get on the Sunlight Foundation's list of local blogs for announcements of available grants, services and open-source tools.
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Getting started
For a more detailed tour click here, but here's the quick version:
- We require a simple registration to edit, so go register and then log in.
- Search for a topic or start at the Congresspedia or SourceWatch homepages.
- Learn how to edit a page.
- Make sure to read the article guidelines for Congresspedia and SourceWatch (they're slightly different) and the policies for contributors.
That's about it (but here's the FAQ and the Help pages).
The ground rules: keep it honest, keep it sourced
Congresspedia hews to a policy of being "fair, accurate and non-partisan." This doesn't mean you have to go out of your way to post information that doesn't support your agenda, but it does mean the site's staff or users may come behind you and do just that. As long as all the information posted is factual, rhetoric-free and sourced, it is welcome.
Sourcing all assertions is the bedrock of what keeps the site trusted and verifiable (read the policy). Any reader should be able to find the sources for all information in any article. This assists the staff and volunteer editors in fact-checking postings and evaluating sources – while you should feel free to cite your own reporting as sources, expect users to examine them for inaccuracies or other flaws. This additionally allows members of the press or other researchers to correctly attribute the original source.
