How The Integrity Wiki Works

🎯 Mission

The Integrity Wiki is a crowdsourced political campaign finance integrity index. We track politicians' financial interests, PAC money, stock trades, and corruption pledges across all levels of government — from President down to local city council members.

📝 Contributing Data

Every data field on a candidate's page is editable through our proposal system. Here's how it works:

Sign up with Google to create an account and start earning credibility points.
New accounts start with 100 credibility points.
Submit a proposal for any field by providing a value and citations (URLs with optional explanations). This costs 10 credibility points.
Upvote proposals you believe are accurate. You can upvote one proposal per field.
The top-voted proposal becomes the displayed value, but only if accounts with at least a combined 500 credibility points have upvoted it. Otherwise, the field shows "Unknown."
Admins can "pin" a proposal to lock it as verified. Pinning a proposal locks the field, preventing any new proposals or votes, and awards 200 points to the poster and 150 points to upvoters (minus any daily points they have already accumulated from this proposal).

⭐ Credibility Points

Credibility points measure your trustworthiness as a contributor. Here's how they work:

Starting balance: 100 points on account creation
Daily earnings: If your proposal or a proposal you upvoted is the top proposal, you earn X points per day (starting 3 days after you voted).
Formula: X = round(max(0, 5 - (k/10) + p)) where k = upvote count when you voted and p = 5 if you're the original poster, else 0.
Early upvotes are worth more. The fewer upvotes a proposal had when you voted, the more daily points you earn.
Switching your upvote resets the 3-day timer.
Accountability Period limit: Daily points only accrue while the candidate's accountability period is active. Once the period ends (i.e., after the final calendar year of holding or running for office), points stop accumulating.
Tiebreaker rules: If multiple proposals for a field have the same number of upvotes, the tie is broken first by the **author's account age** (older accounts win), and then by the **author's credibility points** (higher points win). Users are encouraged to upvote the oldest matching proposal rather than submitting duplicates.
Pinned proposals: The poster gets 200 points and upvoters get 150 points, minus any daily points already earned from that proposal.
Creating candidate pages: State/local candidates cost 1,000 points. Adding positions also costs 1,000 points.

🏅 Integrity Badges

Each candidate can earn (or lose) integrity badges based on their pledges and actions:

No Corporate PAC Money

The candidate has pledged to not accept money from corporate PACs. Corporate PACs are political action committees funded by corporations, as opposed to those funded by individuals or trade associations.

Supports Congressional Stock Trading Ban

The candidate supports legislation to ban members of Congress and senior executive officials from trading individual stocks while in office, closing a major conflict of interest.

Supports Closing the Revolving Door

The candidate supports closing the "revolving door" between government and lobbying, including extending cooling-off periods before former officials can lobby their former colleagues.

Supports Overturning Citizens United

The candidate supports a constitutional amendment or legislation to overturn the Supreme Court's Citizens United v. FEC (2010) decision, which allowed unlimited corporate and union spending on elections.

Disavows Dark Money & Discloses Bundlers

The candidate disavows 527 groups (tax-exempt political organizations), publicly discloses all "bundlers" (individuals who collect and forward donations from multiple donors), and requests no dark money influence from outside groups.

Pledges Blind Trust / Asset Divestiture

The candidate pledges to either sell all personal financial assets or place them in an independently managed qualified blind trust upon taking office, eliminating financial conflicts of interest.

Leadership PAC for Campaigning Only

The candidate pledges to use their leadership PAC funds exclusively for legitimate campaign and political activities, not for personal expenditures such as travel, dining, or entertainment.

Supports Small Donor Matching

The candidate supports a system of public financing that matches small-dollar donations (typically under $200) at a multiple (e.g., 6:1), empowering everyday voters and reducing reliance on large donors.

Badge Statuses:

Unknown — No data on whether the candidate has pledged
Pledged — Candidate has pledged and taken no contradicting actions
Denied — Candidate has explicitly refused or already contradicted the pledge
Unkept — Candidate made a pledge and broke it. This turns ALL other badges grey because the candidate can't be trusted to keep promises.

🏛️ Accountability Periods

An accountability period covers all the months during which a candidate is fundraising for, running for, and (if they win) holding office. This includes both primary and general elections. Each candidate page lets you select a specific accountability period to view campaign finance data relevant to that race.

⚖️ Moderation & Transparency

All admin actions are logged in a public audit log for full transparency.
Admins can pin proposals, ban users (temporarily or permanently), and award or remove credibility points.
Banned users cannot submit proposals or vote. Bans apply to both account and IP. Bans automatically expire at the end of their period if temporary, or never if permanent.
Duplicate proposals can result in temporary bans — always upvote the oldest matching proposal.
Users cannot delete their own proposals, but can request deletion from an admin.
Reporting Accountability Periods: You can report a period as nonexistent (never happened) for 200 points. The period is temporarily hidden pending admin review. If accurate, the period is deleted and you are awarded 400 points. Otherwise, the period is restored.
Reporting Proposals: You can report a proposal for inappropriate or malicious material for 5 points. If an admin confirms the report, the proposal is deleted, you get 15 points back, and the offending user may be banned.