User:Gavinandresen/Blog/2025-10-16 RiskiPedia announcement

RiskiPedia

RiskiPedia is my latest project: https://riski.wiki. It's like WikiPedia, but it's interactive and all about risks.

I'm working on it because I don't like the way I see risks presented in popular media. Usually there are two choices: either something is "safe" or it is "dangerous." Drinking alcohol while pregnant? Dangerous! Visiting the emergency room to get your sprained ankle looked at? Safe!

The media is really bad at quantifying risks-- they almost never tell us "how dangerous" or "how safe." And they're bad at putting risks into context-- I want to know how dangerous something is compared to other risks in my life.

And if they talk about reducing risk, they almost never quantify that -- if I do the thing you say will make me safer, how much safer will it make me?

I'm also not happy with the way most peer-reviewed studies present risks. Studies are good at quantifying risks, giving probabilities and odds ratios. But they're usually bad at putting a risk into context, and often use measures that make risks seem greater than they actually are. "20% increased risk of a dying of something" sounds serious... unless you know that the base risk of dying of that something is 1 in a million. 20% greater risk is about a 1 in 800,000 chance, which is so small you shouldn't worry about it.

The goal of RiskiPedia is to take the best available data and present it in an easy to understand way. There is still a lot of work to do to achieve that goal, both technical/programming and creating pages for all the things people tend to worry about (or pages for things that people don't tend to worry about, but should).

I don't want RiskiPedia to be a bunch of static web pages like WikiPedia-- I want people to be able to explore risks. How risky is driving if you drive the typical 14,000 miles per year? What if you text sometimes while you drive? How likely is your alcoholic cousin to get in a car crash if they drive drunk three times a week?

Go play with the RiskiPedia driving page to find out!

If you agree with me that giving people a better understanding of everyday risks is a worthwhile project, I could use your help. Create an account at riski.wiki then improve an existing page. Or create a new one; there is pretty good documentation describing how.

If you're a coder and want to help out, go look at the repositories at Github; help fix bugs or implement new features. RiskiPedia is an extension of MediaWiki, which is written in PHP and JavaScript.

A few notes about what RiskiPedia is NOT:

It's not a for-profit business. I'm doing this because I've been thinking about doing it for years, and I still enjoy writing code. It is funded out of my own pocket to start. It has nothing to do with Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies; there will NOT be a token or any fundraising (if you are contacted by somebody pretending to be me telling you otherwise, please ignore them-- I'm retired from all things crypto).

If it manages to become popular, there might eventually be a RiskiPedia Foundation non-profit to pay people to keep the infrastructure running, in case I get killed by a grizzly in Glacier National Park.