Issuepedia:Link Filing

Issuepedia collects links to news articles and other pages that are relevant to the issues being discussed here. Rather than just adding the link to each page's contents, however, we create a page for each link (well... when we have time; ultimately this needs to be easier and more automated) which contains various bits of information about the link. These pages are generally referred to as filed link pages.

This allows us to make the following improvements to static linking within the page contents:

Commentary
Pages on the non-wiki portion of the web sometimes need to be corrected, updated, clarified, or otherwise edited as new information comes to light. Many of them, however, have no option for reader commentary; sometimes this capability is strictly limited, and frequently it requires creating an account on the link's site. Sometimes comments are censored, which may leave readers with the impression that there is no disagreement with the page's content.

Issuepedia's filed link pages collect not only commentary from Issuepedia editors, but also links to any off-site commentary we come across. This allows a more complete picture to emerge, and prevents misinformation from going unchallenged.

Filing by Topic
Every link can be tagged with the topics to which it relates. This allows one link -- along with all the information and commentary collected about it -- to be referenced from multiple Issuepedia pages. So, for example, a link to a single article -- in which, for example, Christopher Hitchens criticizes the US government for claiming that waterboarding is not torture (among other things) while lying about the treatment of detainees -- will appear, with a brief summary, on pages about torture, American dishonor, waterboarding, and Christopher Hitchens (currently this particular article appears on his writings subpage, but that will change when the filed link is updated to the latest format).

This gives someone reading about a given topic quick access to any articles about that topic without having to repost the link and summary on each page.

Filing by Author
Links whose authors are known are also filed by author, so that we can more easily determine what a given writer has had to say on various topics and thereby figure out what that writer's positions are. This makes it easier both to expose writers (and speakers whose words have been put into writing) who are hypocritical, unreliable, or inconsistent and to support those who are falsely accused of inconsistency (typically as part of an ad hominem, which isn't a valid form of argument -- but it's often nice to be able to cap off a solid rational rebuttal by pointing out that the arguer is also misrepresenting their source).