Politics, sources of information and reliability network

Every day you can hear what government is doing, so you are informed, aren't you? How many people understand what is between lines of prepared and crafted by PR people speech or statement. Do you know what exactly those people are doing? Do you believe politics words?

During election campaign I want to know what are past achievements of candidates, an have a context to evaluate current plans and promises. Idea of democracy is that everyone should be able to do that.

There come government monitoring programs backed up by governmental or by independent NGOV organizations like Transparency International. On the other end we have press and media coverage of government actions. Everyday we are bombarded by vast amount of fragmented, incomplete and untrusted information. Our brains treat it as a noise.
Internet gave voice to independent single journalists. They are trying to consolidate their efforts, to be more visible and trusted source of information. You can find many sources like CyberPolitics blog tracking how the media uses the Internet and technology to cover the US presidential campaign. But for the most of citizens they are unknown and untrusted.

So I see two main problems. One is quality of information and second is reliability. I like the idea of wikipedia. Wikipedia contributors are huge companies, single persons and other organizations. They are building base of knowledge that is improved over the time. Good information quality needs processing so here pays joined contributors effort. What about reliability? The UCSC associate professor Luca de Alfaro project aim is to automatically estimate the trustworthiness of each page based on article and user edits history. It's an interesting approach by analysis of huge scale publishing. It's not perfect but better than nothing.

We have one tool, invent another and maybe something like reliability network may be established. Imagine every person or organizations acting as source of information having place in reliability network, that keeps statistics about reputation and reliability. It's not easy to make secure and hard to exploit framework but I believe it's possible. Just keep that kind of information in structured framework and run evaluation algorithms to improve information quality. So maybe next time I will be able to get consolidated information and verify it's source, for example at politics-gov-wiki site.