From the about page:
It’s time to democratise data. Data is a language in which few are literate, and the resulting constraints at an individual and societal level are similar to those experienced when the proportion of the population able to read was small. When people require intermediaries before digesting information, the capacity for generating insights is reduced.
To democratise data we need to put users at the centre of our models, we need to design our systems and processes for users of data, and we need to realise that everyone can be a user. We will all win when everyone can make evidence-based decisions.
Wiki New Zealand is a charity devoted to getting people to use data about New Zealand.
We do this by pulling together New Zealand’s public sector, private sector and academic data in one place and making it easy for people to use in simple graphical form for free through this website.
We believe that informed decisions are better decisions. There is a lot of data about New Zealand available online today, but it is too difficult to access and too hard to use. We think that providing usable, clear, digestible and unbiased information will help you make better decisions, and will lead to better outcomes for you, for your community and for New Zealand.
We also believe that by working together we can build the most comprehensive, useful and accurate representation of New Zealand’s situation and performance: the “wiki” part of the name means “collaborative website”. Our site is open and free to use for everyone. Soon, anyone will be able to upload data and make graphs and submit them through our auditing process. We are really passionate about engaging with domain and data experts on their speciality areas.
We will not tell you what to think. We present topics from multiple angles, in wider contexts and over time. All our data is presented in charts that are designed to be compared easily with each other and constructed with as little bias as possible. Our job is to present data on a wide range of subjects relevant to you. Your job is to draw your own conclusions, develop your own opinions and make your decisions.
Whether you want to make a business decision based on how big your market is, fact-check a newspaper story, put together a school project, resolve an argument, build an app based on clean public licensed data, or just get to know this country better, we have made this for you.
Isn’t New Zealand a post-apocalypse destination? Thinking however great it may be now, the neighborhood is going down when all the post-apocalypse folks arrive. Something on the order of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood to Max Max Beyond Thunderdome. 😉
Hopefully, if there is an apocalypse, it will happen quickly enough to prevent a large influx of undesirables into New Zealand.
I first saw this in a tweet by Neil Saunders.