A Key Idea is a piece of knowledge that’s concise, valuable, and new to our database.

Please use the following form to propose a key idea http://bit.ly/keyideasubmit

The easiest way to add a key idea that satisfies all requirements is to find an article or a book by an authoritative practitioner or scholar, and to extract the most important ideas from it. You can literally copy-paste a paragraph or two that concisely communicates the idea and a paragraph that provides an evidence. Do not forget to provide proper citations and to check whether the idea is already in our database.

Here are more details on how we evaluate a proposed idea:

Concise:
The key idea has a title and about half a page description. Each sentence in the description part should be absolutely necessary. No fluff or verbal padding is allowed. While striving for brevity, don’t neglect clarity. The key idea should be easily understandable to people with a basic knowledge in a given field.

Valuable:
The knowledge of the key idea saves months or years of intellectual effort to solve an important real world problem. In some circumstances, this knowledge helps a person to solve problems previously unsolvable by him/her.
The key idea should not be obvious and should be applicable to an important problem. Otherwise, its knowledge would not add any value.

It is essential to provide evidence showing that the key idea is actually valuable. The following types of evidence are acceptable:
a. Authoritative scholarly research
b. Endorsements by authoritative individuals, companies or universities

The evidence should be easy to verify. E.g. an author may provide a short summary and a link to the source. Examples of evidence are provided below.

New:
The proposed key idea must be new to our database. Please check the database at http://bit.ly/KeyIdeaDB2

The database is crowdsourced, thus may contain ideas that do not satisfy our criteria. We periodically review and remove low-quality entries.