The book "You Bet Your Life: Your Guide to Deadly Risk" by Buff & Buff is a similar aggregation/breakdown of death statistics, though since it is a book it is not interactive. Perhaps you or other contributors could look through it for sources or inspiration.
The "Point"lessness of RiskiPedia.
There is a lot of valuable knowledge in RiskiPedia since many of these risks will likely be encountered by many people. Many of these same risks will be encountered by many people such as a visit to the ER, a car accident, a house fire, a bankruptcy etc...
The main problem is that these Risks will not be properly routed to the person whom they effect. For example, Risk X may be of significant concern to me, but if I am not aware of this risk due to my limited Attention Span, I will never query the website to become knowledgeable of it.
Another problem is that Risk is not the only type of information that a person would care about. The Risk of ending up in the ER may be 1 in a 1000, but the cost of that trip is also important. To evaluate the significance of the event, we may need to know Probability of it occurring, cost of event, mortality risk, time wasted and other information.
For a specific calculator such as ER risk, you assume that the input dimensions are X, Y and Z. Another researcher may claim dimension W is important. Sometimes dimension Y may not be available but dimensions X and Z are. RiskiPedia only offers YOUR perspective and not the perspective of other researchers.
Finally there is the problem of Trust. What integrity mechanisms are available to protect this valuable knowledge from misinformation or malicious intent. For Example, the risk of contracting Lung Cancer if your are a smoker may be X. But how do I know that the tobacco company did not corrupt you to modify the risk from X to X - delta.
Overall, this is valuable knowledge but your website is a suboptimal platform for the dissemination of it. What if there was a superior method to disseminate it?
Thanks for taking the time to comment!
RE: routing risks to the people who need to see them: if your great aunt bertha is worried that you'll get killed by a grizzly bear because you're visiting Yosemite in a month, I'm hoping you would route the "risk of being killed by a bear" page to her. Numbers might not convince her... but I think they will sway some people.
RE: costs: good idea. If you like, you can create an account and add cost information to the ER visit page-- dollars or hours. Or maybe create a sub-page with dollar/time costs, since those might vary a lot by country or state or city.
RE: different dimensions: if a risk is controversial, I'll be encouraging page authors to include multiple risk models and present worst case / best case estimates to users. I can't solve the problem of no data being available for some dimension of a risk (but that could be modeled, too-- just use a very wide min/max estimate).
RE: trust: It's the Wikipedia model. Pure peer-review, with open editing. That seems to work about as well as anything else that has been tried up to this point in history.
And I'm curious about what the better way of disseminating information is!
Great initiative! I'd also like to point out that a Wikipedia-like site like this could be part of the solution, that is to day: if there are superior ways pf disseminating information, those could rely on this site while doing their own thing (e.g. social media posts which link back with this as tertiary source).
It's reasonable to set a main goal, hosting and centralising information on risk, and let disseminating information be a secondary goal.
RiskiPedia is a collaborative, data-driven, interactive encyclopedia of risks. Well, it is far from an encyclopedia right now; it is just launching, and mostly consists of half-baked pages I’ve created to exercise the MediaWiki extensions that make the pages interactive.
Try it at https://riski.wiki -- you can explore the chances you'll end up in the emergency room tomorrow or the risk you'll get mauled by a grizzly if you spend all summer hiking in Glacier National park.
I’m working on it because I’ve been frustrated that risks are typically presented as binary “safe” or “dangerous”, usually with no mention of how dangerous or safe. I hope it will help people think more clearly about risks, so at least a few of them stop worrying about things that aren't very risky and maybe start worrying more about the things that actually are risky. Like driving.
I’m hoping to recruit early contributors from the rational thinking community to help launch RiskiPedia by:
Anybody can create an account and contribute, don't feel like you need permission to jump in and help out.
RiskiPedia is not a business; if it is wildly successful there might be a RiskiPedia Foundation to support it. For now, I'll be funding anything that absolutely needs funding (like the server that it runs on) out of my own pocket.