Editor's Note: this post comes to us from Brooks Lindsay, the founder of Debatepedia

Applying an encyclopedia of debates to solving global climate change  

Through October of 2008, the United Nations Foundation has partnered with the International Debate Education Association (IDEA) to develop the most comprehensive presentation ever assembled of the pro and con arguments surrounding solutions to global warming. The project has included the development of over 20 global warming debate articles on Debatepedia, a pro/con encyclopedia and project of IDEA. The project assists the UN Foundation's October 2008 The People Speak Global Debates as well as the larger public debate regarding solving global climate change. It is one of the most ambitious efforts to date to break-down the pros and cons of the primary approaches to solving global warming and to help develop the ideal global plan.

The intention of this Debatepedia-UNF initiative is to create the comprehensive resources necessary for citizens and leaders to better weigh the strengths and weaknesses of the many proposals for solving global warming. Debatepedia's founders believe that traditional forms of journalism and media are ill-equipped to provide the kind of breadth of information required for citizens to effectively deliberate through complicated opposing cases and draw sound conclusions. Debatepedia solves this problem by centralizing all of the pro and con arguments and supporting quotations in important public debates into a single pro/con encyclopedia.

Debatepedia's Global Warming Debates Series breaks-down the pros and cons of over twenty primary approaches to solving global warming, such as solar energy, wind power, "clean coal", electric cars, hydrogen vehicles, emissions trading, and even geo-engineering approaches like the iron fertilization of algae blooms. These pro/con articles provide a basis for fully comparing the relative strengths and weaknesses of different approaches, prioritizing the strongest ones, and developing a plan.

One of the goals of this project is to assist a UN Foundation debate contest called The People Speak Global Debates, which takes place through October of 2008. The topic of the contest is: "Resolved: the world should adopt our plan to significantly combat climate change." Debatepedia's twenty pro/con debate articles will help participants piece together superior plans, defend them, and critique opposing plans. After the contest is over, Debatepedia's global warming debate articles and portal will continue to grow and serve the global public debate on solving global climate change.

The joint project with the UN Foundation has been received well in the debate community and elsewhere for what it offers. Debatepedia's model for presenting public debates and their many arguments makes it as easy as possible for citizens to weigh opposing cases and draw conclusions. Its model combines a number of important elements. It starts by simply dividing a page into a splitscreen, in which pro arguments are located on the left side of the screen and con arguments on the right side. This helps readers weigh "opposing sides". Debatepedia's model further organizes debate articles with sub-debate sections, in which specific arguments and counter-arguments can be read and weighed side-by-side. Finally, it allows for specific bullet-point arguments to be made into their own individual pages, where all supporting quotations from scholars and leaders are presented. The idea in this model is to document the general pro/con bullet-points of a public debate on main debate pages, while allowing readers to go into much greater depth on individual argument pages. Synthesizing the pro/con essence of debates with the greater detail of argument pages is an important characteristic of Debatepedia.

The importance of this synthesis can be seen in Debatepedia's Global Warming Debate Series, where it is essential to make comprehensive yet simple presentations of the pros and cons of various methods of reversing climate change.

An additional characteristic of Debatepedia's model is its use of wiki technology. Utilizing MediaWiki software, Debatepedia aims to tap into a global pool of volunteer editors from around the world. On Debatepedia, editors can contribute content, edit content added by other users, and collaborate in building an encyclopedia of debates. This model is workable because editors are engaged in "documenting" public debates as they already exist in the public sphere among scholars and leaders, instead of users actually "debating" themselves. Debatepedia's founders hope to use its Global Warming Debate Series with the UN Foundation as a launching pad for engaging more editors from around the world in this collaborative effort.

Debatepedia was founded in the summer of 2006 by Brooks Lindsay and a group of Georgetown students and professors. Its founders merged it with the International Debate Education Association (a 501c3 non-profit foundation) in the summer of 2007. With many recent successes adding to its credibility, Debatepedia intends for its Global Warming Debate Series with the UN Foundation to be used widely among citizens, academics, debaters, and leaders to help resolve the most pressing crisis of our time.