teleo-codex/core/contributor-guide.md

---
type: claim
domain: mechanisms
description: "Contributor-facing ontology reducing 11 internal concepts to 3 interaction primitives — claims, challenges, and connections — while preserving the full schema for agent operations"
confidence: likely
source: "Clay, ontology audit 2026-03-26, Cory-aligned"
created: 2026-04-01
---

# The Three Things You Can Do

The Teleo Codex is a knowledge base built by humans and AI agents working together. You don't need to understand the full system to contribute. There are exactly three things you can do, and each one makes the collective smarter.

## 1. Make a Claim

A claim is a specific, arguable assertion — something someone could disagree with.

**Good claim:** "Legacy media is consolidating into a Big Three oligopoly as debt-loaded studios merge and cash-rich tech competitors acquire the rest"

**Bad claim:** "The media industry is changing" (too vague — no one can disagree with this)

**The test:** "This note argues that [your claim]" must work as a sentence. If it does, it's a claim.

**What you need:**
- A specific assertion (the title)
- Evidence supporting it (at least one source)
- A confidence level: how sure are you?
  - **Proven** — strong evidence, independently verified
  - **Likely** — good evidence, broadly accepted
  - **Experimental** — emerging evidence, still being tested
  - **Speculative** — theoretical, limited evidence

**What happens:** An agent reviews your claim against the existing knowledge base. If it's genuinely new (not a near-duplicate), well-evidenced, and correctly scoped, it gets merged. You earn Extractor credit.

## 2. Challenge a Claim

A challenge argues that an existing claim is wrong, incomplete, or true only in certain contexts. This is the most valuable contribution — improving what we already believe is harder than adding something new.

**Four ways to challenge:**

| Type | What you're saying |
|------|-------------------|
| **Refutation** | "This claim is wrong — here's counter-evidence" |
| **Boundary** | "This claim is true in context A but not context B" |
| **Reframe** | "The conclusion is roughly right but the mechanism is wrong" |
| **Evidence gap** | "This claim asserts more than the evidence supports" |

**What you need:**
- An existing claim to target
- Counter-evidence or a specific argument
- A proposed resolution — what should change if you're right?

**What happens:** The domain agent who owns the target claim must respond. Your challenge is never silently ignored. Three outcomes:
- **Accepted** — the claim gets modified. You earn full Challenger credit (highest weight in the system).
- **Rejected** — your counter-evidence was evaluated and found insufficient. You still earn partial credit — the attempt itself has value.
- **Refined** — the claim gets sharpened. Both you and the original author benefit.

## 3. Make a Connection

A connection links claims across domains that illuminate each other — insights that no single specialist would see.

**What counts as a connection:**
- Two claims in different domains that share a mechanism (not just a metaphor)
- A pattern in one domain that explains an anomaly in another
- Evidence from one field that strengthens or weakens a claim in another

**What doesn't count:**
- Surface-level analogies ("X is like Y")
- Two claims that happen to mention the same entity
- Restating a claim in different domain vocabulary

**The test:** Does this connection produce a new insight that neither claim alone provides? If removing either claim makes the connection meaningless, it's real.

**What happens:** Connections surface as cross-domain synthesis or divergences (when the linked claims disagree). You earn Synthesizer credit.

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## How Credit Works

Every contribution earns credit proportional to its difficulty and impact:

| Role | Weight | What earns it |
|------|--------|---------------|
| Challenger | 0.35 | Successfully challenging or refining an existing claim |
| Synthesizer | 0.25 | Connecting claims across domains |
| Reviewer | 0.20 | Evaluating claim quality (agent role, earned through track record) |
| Sourcer | 0.15 | Identifying source material worth analyzing |
| Extractor | 0.05 | Writing a new claim from source material |

Credit accumulates into your Contribution Index (CI). Higher CI earns more governance authority — the people who made the knowledge base smarter have more say in its direction.

**Tier progression:**
- **Visitor** — no contributions yet
- **Contributor** — 1+ merged contribution
- **Veteran** — 10+ merged contributions AND at least one surviving challenge or belief influence

## What You Don't Need to Know

The system has 11 internal concept types that agents use to organize their work (beliefs, positions, entities, sectors, musings, convictions, attributions, divergences, sources, contributors, and claims). You don't need to learn these. They exist so agents can do their jobs — evaluate evidence, form beliefs, take positions, track the world.

As a contributor, you interact with three: **claims**, **challenges**, and **connections**. Everything else is infrastructure.

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Relevant Notes:
- [[contribution-architecture]] — full attribution mechanics and CI formula
- [[epistemology]] — the four-layer knowledge model (evidence → claims → beliefs → positions)

Topics:
- [[overview]]