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This is great! Nice job balancing data with explanations. Health data is often oversimplified or not understandable by lay people. For the cancer section, I'm pretty sure you're showing net survival rates. You should mention this to avoid people from thinking they're actual survival rates. In the last two charts on the cancer page, what does the circle size show? Total GDP? Patient count?
Good luck guys, we are rooting for you
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 b…
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…
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.
Hey guys, great to see OurWorldInData here, huge fan! I've been following Max and the project for years. One thing I would love to see is "Immigration" as a category and consequently more data about the movement of people.
We have a long list of topics that we want to work on https://ourworldindata.org/about/list-of-all-data-entries (And further work on the existing ones.)
It's not just you, a research project on migration is on the very top of what our readers ask us. Currently we try to make the structure of the site clear and the interactive charts intuitive. But once we get back to research your topic will be one of the first ones we work on. (We are just 4 researchers doing this so it might take some months still though)
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 b…
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…
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.
I applaud what you're trying to do, and look forward to using it, but the problem is that the most studiously honest broker can be slandered as either the plaything or the cynical agent of vested interests at virtually no cost. The arguments of bad faith actors are not based on substantive disagreement but on inducement of emotional posture.
One strategic response to this might be to formalize your citation process. You cite various media organs that use OWID as a source; could you establish partnerships or public agreements such that if a media outlet uses your material as a source, they do not cherry-pick but must present it in an embed to the reader, and can be called out, cut off, or be subject to contractual penalties if they knowingly misrepresent the source data?
https://ourworldindata.org/about/coverage#coverage
Edit to add that this isn't a problem I think you can or should have to unilaterally solve, but rather than observation that our lack of any good mechanism for certifying sufficient consensus is an unfortunate obstacle to OWID's very worthy mission.
I thought that this was what https://www.gapminder.org/ was for, ever since 2005? And yet you don’t mention them?
The work of Gapminder, and Hans Rosling in particular, was a major motivation for the work we do. In fact, Max worked a lot with Hans Rosling in the past: in this BBC documentary on ending global poverty, for example ( https://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-end-poverty/ ). You can find him listed as collaborator in the sources ( https://www.gapminder.org/news/data-sources-dont-panic-end-p... ). As you say, Gapmi…
A couple of long-term ideas:
- breadth of topic: global development trends are a natural and important place to start. However, this is pretty remote, non-experiential stuff for most people. What about a canonical, accessible repository of what is known about nutrition and health, for instance? (“Is bacon really bad for me?” ... with links to every study ever, statistical meta-studies on top of these “research atoms”, and a Vox-esque explainer/lit review layered on top, giving laypeople the tldr). This example is well outside your (well-chosen) scope, probably, but IMO the generic problem here is access to intelligible (scientific) knowledge about anything that affects people and their understanding of the world around them.
- moving the data to the “point of sale”: a huge fraction of the people asking “is the world getting more violent” won’t ever find your website, because people don’t think in terms of “global development trends data websites”, but they just ask questions, and expect Google to answer them. It seems like the long term play is to make expert knowledge itself computational and linked, and for domain-specific knowledge aggregators and synthesizers such as yourselves to work with the Googles of the world so that when I ask “hey Siri, is the world getting more violent?” I get a crisp “no. There are fewer wars and crime trends are declining in most countries, tap to find out more,” with the tap taking me to a source I can trust (because it references said underlying knowledge base) instead of some random shallow news article. I’m in in no way knocking your current product strategy of putting up a high quality space on the web you can curate and control - it’s practical, valuable, and honorable - but I think the future ultimately lies in making expert knowledge structured, and linking it directly to answers to low-intent, everyday questions that everybody has, instead of hoping people know about the domain / are motivated enough to find and dig through your website.