Tree of Knowledge

I've always thought that there's a sad disconnect between the state of knowledge in research and the state of knowledge of the public. Climate change is the poster child of scientific ignorance, but there are lots of other, subtler examples in health, psychology, dietary science, and so on. Basically anywhere public opinion intersects with science tends to be a disaster. Surprisingly, many scientists don't seem to think much of pop science writers and science journalists, though without them I doubt most people would learn any science at all.

What's missing is a robust bridge between the kinds of questions scientists ask and the kinds of questions the public asks. The closest things so far are The Straight Dope, reddit's /r/askscience and the various sciencey Stack Exchanges, but I think we can do better. The problem is that any explanation quickly turns into a list of citations which you are, realistically, unlikely to verify. These sites translate science into English, but they don't give you any way to explore or learn beyond what you've been given. It's a one-way street.

My idea for an alternative is called the Tree of Knowledge: an arbitrary store of scientific papers and results, interlinked not just by references (the current state of the art), but by dependencies. Each paper has a page which links to previous results or ideas it depends on. That is, which other papers would invalidate this paper if they were invalidated themselves. This is the treelike structure of the Tree of Knowledge. Crucially, at the farthest extent of the tree would be the leaves: answers to nonscientific questions, articles and lay summaries of scientific knowledge.

The process would look like this: you want to know "does it matter what time I go to sleep or just that I get eight hours every night?". Someone has already answered this question (or you ask it yourself and it is then answered). The answer is not just someone making stuff up, but a distillation of the current state of scientific knowledge on the subject. The answer links back to different papers, which you can follow to see a community-edited summary of each paper, its current validity, the full text of the paper itself, and even more links back to the papers it depends on and forward to papers (and leaves) that depend on it. In this way you explore up and down the Tree of Knowledge, following each branch as suits your interests and seamlessly going back and forth between research and pop science.

The great thing about this is it could be a tool that benefits not just the general public but scientists as well. As well as making it easier to get a sense of the state of research before diving into the papers themselves, the Tree would help scientists to popularise their work in a way that still preserves its integrity. It's my belief that, beyond just thinking it's not their game, many researchers are distrustful of pop science and science journalism because of their tendency towards inaccuracy and sensationalism. The Tree of Knowledge could popularise science verifiably, and in a way that's still bound up with the rigor that makes science work.

Also, yes, technically it wouldn't be a tree because a paper can depend on multiple other papers, but Directed Acyclic Graph of Knowledge doesn't quite have the same ring to it.