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About ALEC Exposed

This site is built by ordinary people, like you, who are concerned about the excessive influence of corporations on our laws and our lives.

We encourage you to post your discoveries about individual bills based ALEC's "model" legislation in your state to this wiki page! Scroll down or click here to learn how!

We also encourage you to share discoveries about particular corporations or individuals involved with ALEC. To do that, please visit our sister site SourceWatch and add to our articles there, or start a new article of your own! Scroll down or click here to learn how! Much more help is also available on SourceWatch.

Post Articles to ALEC Exposed

• Identify bills from the collection of bills introduced in your state or that you are interested in. Help us keep this wiki up-to-date. This is a collaborative project and relies on the contributions of citizens on the ground in states throughout the country. Your expertise is welcome and, indeed, completely necessary to make this project effective!

• Start by searching for your bill and/or your state in the search box in the upper right-hand corner of the wiki. If a page has already been created for that bill or that state, that will show first in the results. If not, the first result will be a red link like the following:

"Create the page 'Paycheck Protection Act' on this wiki!"

Click this link and it will take you to a new page for you to start your article.

• Focus on the most important facets of the bill and be organized in your writing. What is the bill and what does it do? What would it mean for the commonwealth of your state? Who stands to benefit and who stands to lose from this bill? Where has this bill been introduced? What other bills has it been combined with if you have seen it in omnibus-style legislation? Are there ongoing legislative battles surrounding this bill? If this “model” bill has become law, how has it affected you and your state?
  

These are all important questions to answer when writing wiki entries for bills. If you need an organizational guideline, look to other good SourceWatch and/or Wikipedia entries you have seen in the past and model your contributions after their well-organized contributions. Look, for example at the SourceWatch article on Monsanto.

• Strive for brevity. Concise, attention-catching writing, journalistic-style, is preferable to long-winded academic-style writing. Avoid run-on sentences.

• Use a clear style. Think about the writing that you would like to read as someone going to ALEC Exposed and/or SourceWatch for the very first time. Avoid wonky jargon and gear your writing for a general audience, not strictly policy experts.

• Don't bury the lead! We ask you to put the important material first, and then the rest in descending order of importance. Don't bury the lead and waste "above-the-fold" space on minutiae.

• Focus on the facts. We do not require a "neutral point of view." We are seeking editors concerned about ALEC's efforts to achieve the agenda of big corporations. That said, let the facts speak for themselves and avoid excessive editorializing. The misdeeds of corporations and politicians who serve them generally speak for themselves.

• Be accurate. The standard for adding information to this collaborative site is that it be accurate.

• Cite sources. This site is focused on building core information on ALEC's activities to help the American people understand this organization and to aid journalists and activists. Accordingly, we are seeking primary sources as well as other documentation to build the record of the breadth and depth of ALEC's efforts to rewrite the laws governing our lives and our democracy, in states across the country and in Congress.

• Stay engaged and help other stay engaged! Share your work with fellow bloggers, journalists, friends, family, and colleagues through social media websites like Twitter and Facebook. On Twitter, make sure to tag your contributions with the #ALECexposed hash tag so that others in your state and around the country can learn from your work!

• Commentary is welcome. Start a discussion on our Community Discussion page.

• Be bold. You are helping to write history.

Post Articles to SourceWatch

• Add information about people, names, lobbyists, lobbying firms, politicians and others that are vital to telling the story of how ALEC has affected your schools, neighborhoods, cities, universities, states, etc., to SourceWatch.

• Before starting a new article on SourceWatch, check to see if an article already exists on that topic (perhaps the name or corporation you want to create a page for is already mentioned on a different SourceWatch page). If SourceWatch contains nothing on a corporation, politician, organization, lobbying group, etc., that you would like to create an entry for, simply type in that name in the SourceWatch “search” function. A link should appear to "create this page," like the following:

"There is no page titled 'Freedom Foundation.' You can create this page."

Click this link and it will take you to a new page for you to start your article.

• Make sure to use internal links when applicable. For instance, when referring to a subject page on ALEC Exposed from within the ALEC wiki entries, use the "double bracket"

  ("[[" and "]]")

  symbols. For example,

  [[Tort Reform, Corporate Liability and the Rights of Injured Americans]]

  becomes Tort Reform, Corporate Liability and the Rights of Injured Americans and

  [[Taxes and Budgets]]

  shows as Taxes and Budgets. When citing ALEC Exposed pages within SourceWatch articles, add an external link as shown here:

<ref>Center for Media and Democracy, "[http://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/Workers_Rights, Workers Rights," ALECexposed.org, Accessed May 29, 2011.</ref>

• When doing external citations within the bill and/or state wiki entries, follow the same format for citations as you would follow for linking to SourceWatch. Think back to “footnoting” you used to do or still do for papers in school. Use the

  <ref>

  tag format as seen above. An example of how this format is best used can be seen in the sentence below:

On Feb. 23, 2011, New Hampshire's overwhelmingly Republican House of Representatives voted to support HB 519, a bill that would repeal participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which has cut [[greenhouse gas]] emissions and other pollution and made improvements in [[energy efficiency]]. The bill passed by a nearly party-line vote of 246 to 104 (13 Republicans voted against, two Democrats for). The bill has to pass through the finance committee before a final house vote and consideration by the senate. Gov. John Lynch (D-NH), who has touted the success of RGGI in making the air healthier while increasing economic prosperity, is expected to veto the bill, but Republicans hold veto-proof majorities in both chambers of the New Hampshire legislature. The bill was aided by robocalls from the Koch-funded [[Americans for Prosperity]] group, which flooded the state with calls in support the bill. Rep. Sandra Keans (D-Rochester), told the ''Nashua Telegraph'' that AFP’s calls were “sleazy” and deliberately false: “I have never seen such a cowardly perpetration pulled on the citizens of New Hampshire."<ref>[http://climateprogress.org/2011/02/28/koch-tea-party-climate-denial-bill-new-hampshire-man-cow-global-warming/#more-43550 "New Hampshire: “Neither man nor cow is responsible for global warming”] Climate Progress, Feb. 28, 2011.</ref>

Shows as:

On Feb. 23, 2011, New Hampshire's overwhelmingly Republican House of Representatives voted to support HB 519, a bill that would repeal participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which has cut greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution and made improvements in energy efficiency. The bill passed by a nearly party-line vote of 246 to 104 (13 Republicans voted against, two Democrats for). The bill has to pass through the finance committee before a final house vote and consideration by the senate. Gov. John Lynch (D-NH), who has touted the success of RGGI in making the air healthier while increasing economic prosperity, is expected to veto the bill, but Republicans hold veto-proof majorities in both chambers of the New Hampshire legislature. The bill was aided by robocalls from the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity group, which flooded the state with calls in support the bill. Rep. Sandra Keans (D-Rochester), told the Nashua Telegraph that AFP’s calls were “sleazy” and deliberately false: “I have never seen such a cowardly perpetration pulled on the citizens of New Hampshire."

• Organization counts and can be the difference between keeping and losing a reader. Make sure to use

  “==”

  signs for sections, and

  “===”

  and

  “====”

  signs for subsequent sub-sections. For example, see below:

Wiki Syntax	Displays As
==Membership== ===Dues=== ====Corporate Dues==== ====Politician Dues==== =====Can Citizens Actually Become Members?===== ==Personnel==	Membership Dues Corporate Dues Politician Dues Can Citizens Actually Become Members? Personnel

• Consult our "SourceWatch Research Guides" for how to do the meticulous research necessary to create good SourceWatch and/or ALEC Exposed pages.

Once you've created or edited these SourceWatch articles, link to them externally when contributing to ALEC Exposed wiki entries. An example of a proper external link to a SourceWatch page can be seen below:

<ref>"[http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Citizens_United Citizens United]," SourceWatch.org, Accessed May 29, 2011.</ref>

• For the most extensive style tips on writing SourceWatch articles and for a great overview and framework, please read over our SourceWatch Manual of Style.