Can't seem to find a central place where people's opinions are aggregated for all controversial issues. Religious articles are frequently ousted from Wikepedia; one can only find average looking pictures on hotornot.com anyway. People express their opinions on blogs, comments, taking polls with surveymonkey, but how to mine that data and generate useful information and insights?
Here's an idea. Host a stackoverflow-like user generated content site, where users can propose a controversial issue, post opinions and articles on any existing issue, or rate other users' articles. The end result is an aggregation of user produced, user rated, meta-tagged opinions and reference information for any controversial topic.
It's different from urtak, where you see no user comments or reference links except the percentage numbers; it's different from whereistand, where, similarly, you hardly find people's rationales, or the reasons why people take a particular stand on a particular issue. In other words, the underline wisdom of why people make choices for a controversial issue is missing.
In sum, the new service will not only provide the statistics, but also references, information on the backgrounds, and most importantly, the wisdom behind people's minds. As I have commented before, the user voices can be extremely valuable and represents a potential gold mine.
Update (8/23/2009): dibake.com provides such a forum for user rated discussion on controversial issues.
photo credit slworking2