The Digital Polarization Initiative (DigiPo) was a multi-institutional project launched in December 2016 through AASCU's (American Association of State Colleges and Universities) American Democracy Project. Students across campuses collaboratively fact-checked and contextualized viral claims, news stories, and statistical assertions, publishing their findings on a shared wiki.
The project used federated wiki technology — each participating campus ran its own wiki instance, but pages could be forked and built upon across institutions. This created a network where a student at one university could extend or challenge the fact-checking work of a student at another, producing a "chorus of voices" around contested claims. Topics ranged from immigration statistics to climate claims to viral social media posts.
DigiPo was significant as one of the earliest large-scale attempts to teach information literacy through collaborative, cross-institutional student research rather than through classroom instruction alone. It represented the practical convergence of Caulfield's federated wiki work with his emerging fact-checking pedagogy, and the lessons learned from running it informed the development of the SIFT method and Check, Please! course. The project demonstrated that students could do real, useful fact-checking work while learning — not just practice exercises, but contributions that added to public knowledge.