Evidence in Debate and an Introduction to the WIKI

Succeeding in evidentiary debate formats such as Public Forum, Lincoln Douglas, and Policy requires a ton of evidence. Thanks to growing community participating in evidence disclosure practices, nearly every card read within the last decade is accessible online. First, the Wiki. 

This is the debate wiki, formally called openCaselist, the premier website for evidence disclosure in the Public Forum, Lincoln Douglas, and Policy debate formats. Disclosure is the practice of open-sourcing all of the evidence you've read in debate rounds for other teams to use.

You might be thinking this: why should I give my own evidence away? Here's the answer: through decades of iterative development, the community has come to the consensus that the benefits of evidentiary debate formats are best accrued if teams can engage with each other's literature bases before the round starts. Here are six easy steps to use the wiki: 

First, the Wiki
 
This is the debate wiki, formally called openCaselist, the premier website for evidence disclosure in the Public Forum, Lincoln Douglas, and Policy debate formats. Disclosure is the practice of open-sourcing all of the evidence you've read in debate rounds for other teams to use. You might be thinking this: why should I give my own evidence away? Here's the answer: through decades of iterative development, the community has come to the consensus that the benefits of evidentiary debate formats are best accrued if teams can engage with each other's literature bases before the round starts. This section will teach you how to navigate the site, find desired evidence, and disclose yourself.

Step 1: Log In
 Log in with your username and password from Tabroom. openCaselist and Tabroom are integrated platforms.

Step 2: Choose Your Format
Choose which format you are seeking disclosure for. openCaselist includes disclosure for Public Forum, Lincoln Douglas, and Policy at the high school and college levels. If you are looking to disclosure yourself, choose your own format. The disclosure process is explained later in this section. For now, if you are looking to find specific pieces of evidence, the best place to look is the college Policy debate disclosure page, called "NDT-CEDA" at the top-left, where evidence is highest quality simply because participants are college students who have the most experience researching. Once you're here, specify the season you're looking for, shown by the red arrow. There's a new resolution every year, so look for topics related to what you're looking for.

Step 3: Choose A Team
 The next step is to choose which school's disclosure page you want to visit, listed on the far left. If you're unsure, some historically successful schools you can look at are Michigan, Dartmouth, Emory, Northwestern, or Kansas.
Now, choose a team from the school that you've selected. Scour through some college Policy tournaments on Tabroom to get a sense of which teams to keep an eye out for.  Once you've accessed a team's disclosure page, all the information you need is laid out in front of you. After deciding the round you want to see, just click the blue icon, indicated by the red arrows, to download.

Step 4: Disclose
If you were reading just to find evidence, your job is done. However, as explained above, disclosure only works if there is community buy-in. If large parts of the community benefited from disclosure without contributing themselves, then the whole system would collapse. If you want a more selfish reason, not disclosing consistently will leave you vulnerable to Disclosure Theory, losing you many rounds throughout a season. For starters, the norm in all formats is to disclose 30 minutes before the start of the next round. The details of disclosure vary between formats. In Policy, where disclosure has had time to develop for longer, teams disclose all the evidence they read in the previous round. In Public Forum, where disclosure has recently become popular, the norm is to disclose only the evidence you read in the First Constructive speech. As a rule of thumb, disclose everything. Here's how to do it. Skip this step if your school is already included on the left side list. If not, ask your coach for help or create one yourself by clicking the button as shown by the red arrow.  If you don't already see your team, ask your coach for help or create one yourself as shown by the red arrow. Click on your team code to see your disclosure page. To disclose a new round, click "Add Round" as shown by the red arrow. 

Second, Databases

As explained earlier, thousands of unique cards are disclosed on the wiki each year. To find a specific card, you can try your luck with debate databases. There are lots of options, but the most popular is Logos. First, the homepage. Let's find evidence that nuclear war causes extinction. Use key words like "nuclear war extinction." Here's our results. You can click through each individual entry to see what the card says. Click the wiki files shown by the red arrows to download the Microsoft Word doc from when the card was read. Cmd/Ctrl-F the tag to find the card.