Mapping the world’s opinions.

What this is

A read-only archive of structured argument. Every entry is a question (something humans argue about), broken into positions (stances on that question), each supported by arguments (the case for that position, with named proponents and sources). Browse by category, jump into all questions, or land on a random argument.

Editorial standards are documented in the style guide. Citation formats live on the cite page. AI assistants — read /for-ai.

History

v1 — Parlia (2019)

Parlia launched in 2019 as a community wiki for mapping opinion. Anyone could create a question, add positions, draft arguments, attribute proponents, edit each other’s work, and discuss changes in a per-page village pump. It was a contributor product, modelled on Wikipedia’s collaborative-editing flow but purpose-built for structured argument rather than narrative prose.

v2 — Encyclopedia of Opinion (2026)

By 2026 the world had changed. Most people no longer arrived at reference content through a homepage; they arrived through a search-engine result or an AI assistant’s citation. The contributor wiki model — the village pump, the change requests, the revision history — was infrastructure for a workflow few readers actually used. Meanwhile, the content itself was exactly what AI assistants needed: structured, attributed, citation-ready arguments on contested questions.

v2 is the response. The encyclopedia was extracted from the legacy Parlia monolith onto a modern static stack. Everything built for contribution was deliberately stripped: edit buttons, accounts, voting, comments, discussion threads. What remains is the archive: every question, every position, every argument, immutably-URL’d and machine-readable, with JSON-LD on every page, a curated llms-feed.json, and every major AI-assistant crawler explicitly allowed.

The legacy URLs are preserved verbatim. If you saved a Parlia link in 2020, it still works in 2026.

Created by Jadala Ltd

The encyclopedia is a product of Jadala Ltd, a London-based company building tools to improve civil discourse. Jadala’s premise is that most public disagreement happens because people don’t actually understand what the other side believes — and that the cure for shouting is listening, systematically and structurally.

Jadala was founded by:

• Turi Munthe — writer and entrepreneur. Author of Why We Think What We Think (see below).
• J. Paul Neeley — designer and researcher.

The encyclopedia is one of three Jadala products that share a common model of opinion:

• Parlia — the voting and debate platform.
• Encyclopedia of Opinion— what you’re reading now. The structured-argument citation source.
• Opinion DNA — a psychographic assessment that maps individual opinion across 48 dimensions.

The book — Why We Think What We Think

The intellectual project behind the encyclopedia is also a book. Why We Think What We Think, by Turi Munthe, was published by Penguin in 2026. It examines the forces that shape opinion — culture, biology, psychology, ideology, group affiliation, life experience — and argues that understanding why people hold the positions they do is the foundation of any productive public conversation.

The encyclopedia is the empirical counterpart. The book explains the forces; the encyclopedia documents what those forces have produced.