Brother, Can You Give Your Two Cents’ Worth to the Recession Wiki?

September 30, 2009

By Peter A. McKay, The Wall Street Journal

Everyone has a favorite company or person or event to blame for the economic downturn that has gripped the U.S. for nearly two years. Now they’ll have a new venue to argue about it.

The Museum of American Finance today launched a new site dubbed Recessipedia, which borrows Wikipedia’s underlying technology and wisdom-of-crowds concept to tackle the relatively narrow topic of the recent recession. But there are some twists.

Like Wikipedia, Recessipedia will have community-generated encyclopedia entries on key players in the crisis, such as Lehman Brothers and the Federal Deposit Insurance Co. However, it will also invite personal testimonials about the recession from traders, investors, executives, government officials, and the public, with participants allowed to make submissions under pseudonyms.