Tyler Friedman

Tyler Friedman

"Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory, the second philosophy."
-Abbé Faria, The Count of Monte Cristo

Idealogs


Idealogs is a crowdsourcing project for creating literature reviews on controversial subjects. It integrates features of a wiki, blog, and digital object identification system into one simple website. Its main innovations are

  1. a model that explains the fundamental relationship between understanding and context;
  2. a wiki engine that implements that model; and
  3. a linking policy that makes it scalable.

The result is a platform for collaboratively summarizing discussions of complex topics.

Motivations

  • Context: There is a fundamental lack of context in electronic media. There is desperate need for information models rooted in context, not clickability.
  • Public affairs journalism: Journalism is under siege, both figuratively and literally. Crowdsourcing is a unique mechanism for incentivizing original, fact-based reporting while discouraging derivative, emotion-driven clickbait.
  • Misinformation: A recent analysis of how true and false news spreads on Twitter found that not only did falsehoods spread more widely and at a faster rate than the truth, but that it was humans, not robots, who were more likely to spread it. Frighteningly, a nontrivial percentage of peer-reviewed, quantitative research findings appear to be false as well. Literature reviews are a powerful framework for making sense of complex discourse, from its least to its most structured forms.

Technology Stack

Idealogs is only possible due to some incredible open source projects.