[kauffj]

One possible improvement is to provide a way for the community at large to discuss/criticize possible problems with the data as well as for Our World in Data to respond to criticisms from the public.

Recently, Bill Gates issued a Tweet demonstrating excitement for progress in diminishing global poverty, citing Our World in Data: https://twitter.com/BillGates/status/1086662632587907072

This received substantial push back, with claims that this data is a reckless extrapolation of sketchy sources, such as this article by Jason Hickel: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/29/bill-g...

Is there anything Our World in Data can do to better facilitate this discussion, note that it is happening, or respond to criticism?

[nettamar]

The Guardian article by Hickel is misinforming readers.

Hickel just wants attention for himself. Nothing else.

He does not care about the steps the world's poorest have made. Yes, small steps, but it's important and it's awful to spread misinformation like he does.

(Also, for The Guardian he chose the headline 'Bill Gates says poverty is decreasing. He couldn’t be more wrong' and elsewhere Hickel is acknowledging that this is not true and is contradicting himself: https://www.cgdev.org/blog/12-things-we-can-agree-about-glob...)

[andrewmutz]

I think a more charitable interpretation of Hickel's article is that all people experience confirmation bias and much of the data presented on OurWorldInData is inconsistent with the Hickel's political beliefs.

It is not just Hickel that experiences this. Many people have a world view and political view that assumes that the current world is in terrible shape and the prevailing political establishment is failing all of us. When people with these entrenched views encounter the trends cataloged on OurWorldInData, a great deal of motivated reasoning occurs in order to discredit the trends.

[ourworldindata]

A community discussion forum to discuss research would be great. I'd be interested in hearing what you would suggest? We have discussed whether something like StackOverflow, but for global development, would be possible. I think we are too small for it though. If we'd build a platform we'd need a big group of engaged contributors and we don't think we are big enough for that yet.

I read the newspaper article and have been in a lot of contact with the author, we agree on many points, especially that higher poverty lines are needed to track what is happening and that it is surely not enough to look at extreme poverty. But low poverty lines are needed so that we see what is happening to world's poorest. One of the biggest failures of development over the last decades is that incomes of the very poorest on the planet have not risen: https://voxeu.org/article/assessing-progress-poorest-new-evi... This is not widely known because the extreme poverty line is not low enough to focus on what happens to the very poorest. So overall I think it is very important that we keep track of what happens relative to different poverty lines (and we do https://ourworldindata.org/poverty-at-higher-poverty-lines) On the particular point you emphasize, that historians have a poor understanding of poverty and prosperity in the past I do not agree that it is a 'reckless extrapolation of sketchy sources'. I think this is overstating the existing uncertainties and it's not a fair description of the careful and tedious work that historians do. And we did respond to it here https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-history-methods and go in some detail of this historical work. We understand our job as providing access to good, existing research and so our job is to understand the research that is out there and bring it together on the web to make it possible for everyone to understand it, and access it. A very thorough book on what we know about poverty, including the historical decline of the share living on less than an extremely low poverty threshold, is Martin Ravallion's 'The Economics of Poverty: History, Measurement, and Policy'. Let me know what you think!

[bjelkeman-again]

We have been trying to engage the international development community in working with crowdsourcing of content in a wiki around water issues, https://akvopedia.org It hasn’t been very successful.

I have seen efforts around using a StackOverflow model to get engagement, but it hasn’t been successful.

The way we ended up getting content varied. We convinced those that had content to allow us to republish it in wiki suitable format. We hired an editor to do a lot of the work. We built in content publishing in the Akvopedia as a way to publish results from programmes.

It is interesting how reluctant a group of professionals can be at contributing, despite it being an appreciated source. We hear from UN organisations HQ in New York that when they get new staff they send them to the Akvopedia to read up on the subject. We know thousands of people read the content, from all over the world. I meet people at conferences that used the resource.

We specifically licensed the content to be portable to the Wikipedia, but the Wikipedia editors we have encountered are not very helpful when trying to move content over or linking content. The exception has been some content we have managed to get onto Wikiversity. But even there we met some resistance.

I think it is really important that we try different methods to spread this type of information. Something will stick at some point I am sure. Keep up the good work.

[Hannah_OWID]

Thanks for sharing your experiences on this. I hadn't heard of Akvopedia before, so it's new to me.

Agree that finding the right solution that sticks: is read by many, consistently kept up-to-date and gets the level so detail correct/unbiased is difficult to do.

We're trying our best to do our version of this work. It's reaching some people, but we can always do more/better. It's really helpful to hear experiences/responses from elsewhere which we can learn what works and doesn't.

[kauffj]

Appreciate the response. I wish I had some great ideas here, but I don't. Maybe allow a discussion area, but only from those willing to go through some kind of accreditation process?

The blog post that you link (https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-history-methods) is a great follow-up. But it looks like there is no connection to it from the source page (https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-condit...), nor the source charts. Perhaps simply figuring out a way to connect your own commentary to the data it is commenting on would be a place to start.

[Hannah_OWID]

It's funny that you make these suggestions, because they're all things we're grappling with/considering at the moment.

Until now, most of our work has been supply-driven: we write and work on what we think people want to know rather than actually asking them. This has probably been a mistake. We're really changing the way we work to be more demand-driven. This means possibly having some kind of area where people can ask questions, have discussions etc. It's definitely something we're considering.

And you're also right that we need to work on the connectivity between aspects of the site. We're in the middle of trying different designs and formats to try to nail down the best way to do this.

[Quanttek]

I'm on mobile, so I can't provide you the full run-down. In short, I feel like the main problem is an understanding of "development" that may agree with popular conceptions, the UN, and the concept used by economists. However, this doesn't incorporate the thoughtful critiques of critical scholars that show the limits of such a narrow concept centered around economic development. There's a lot on how the cultural, social, political, and ecological dimensions are neglected, how it's operationalizations cover only a tiny sector of the economy (ignoring nature's and subsistence economy which are reduced whenever the financial economy is expanded), or how it reinforces Western and North-South power relations.

There's a lot of literature you might use to read up on this topic, especially critiques of the concept of sustainable topic. Of the top of my head, I can only think of "Ecofeminism" by Vandana Shiva & Maria Mies. While I personally disagree with the conclusions/recommendations of the book, this revolutionary book provides a thoughtful critique of development.

[elefanten]

I really doubt that people working on development in 2019 haven't even heard of critical development studies, especially Shiva who's been making these arguments for like 40 years.

Like, twenty years ago, a basic education on the topic would make the notion of "how the cultural, social, political, and ecological dimensions are neglected" a primary subject.

Every "popular" economist and UN official has doubtless engaged with these ideas. The fact that their work doesn't revolve around them or immediately agree with every component of them doesn't mean the development community is following narrow ideologies from 60 years ago.

[ikeboy]

A subreddit would be great, no minimum size to open

[ourworldindata]

I didn't think of that. Sounds like a good idea!

[korax]

Or a Kialo argument tree, in case you want to facilitate, capture and visualize thoughtful reasoning in a multi layered argument tree.

Here is one I participated in about G censoring in CN: https://www.kialo.com/18304/

[alanaut24]

I had been working on a pedagogical approach to social impact learning for many years now.

http://www.developfy.com became AmplifyAI.