Introducing La Dudoteca, the platform where we all ask, and verified experts respond to our doubts

At Maldita.es Foundation, we understand fighting misinformation as a collaborative effort within the community, serving as an engine to build public trust. Citizens pose their information inquiries, contribute their expert knowledge to resolve them, and share reliable content.

How does it work?

In La Dudoteca, anyone can submit a query via the form without the need to register. Questions can relate to any topic.

These questions will be answered by verified experts who, after registration, undergo an internal validation process to verify their credentials in the relevant fields of expertise before they can respond.

Both questions and answers undergo moderation by the team, ensuring they adhere to the platform’s usage guidelines. The aim is to ensure the published content is useful for any user, hence contributors are encouraged to provide references and documents to corroborate the information.

Expert knowledge takes precedence in citizen trust

La Dudoteca is born to reduce noise and provide citizens with access to reliable, data-driven information without facing hundreds or thousands of difficult-to-assess responses.

Citizens are aware of the unreliability and danger of responses they may encounter on the internet. As evidence, during the pandemic, expert individuals were the most trusted sources for reliable COVID-19 information by 86% of the population in Spain, according to the «An Ongoing Infodemic» study by the Reuters Institute of Oxford in 2021. This trend persists in 2023, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer, where 83% of respondents in Spain trust scientists as the primary institution because they do the right thing. La Dudoteca serves as the meeting point between citizen inquiries and the knowledge of verified expert individuals.

«On the internet, there are millions of instant answers to our questions, even more so now with artificial intelligence, but the challenge of our time is knowing which ones to trust,» says Carlos Hernández-Echevarría, Deputy Director of Maldita.es. «La Dudoteca is that trusted place where someone has already verified that the person answering your question claiming to be an expert is indeed a true expert. An expert who has prepared for it, not an algorithm that automatically copies and pastes.»