Open Knowledge Conference/Program/Collaborative Structuring of Knowledge by Experts and the Public

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Title

Collaborative Structuring of Knowledge by Experts and the Public

Authors

Tom Morris & Daniel Mietchen (User:Tom Morris and User:Daniel Mietchen)

Keywords

open knowledge, open education, open science, open governance, wikis, expertise, Citizendium, Semantic Web

Abstract

There is much debate on how public participation and expertise can be brought together in collaborative knowledge environments. One of the experiments addressing the issue directly is Citizendium. In seeking to harvest the strengths (and avoiding the major pitfalls) of both user-generated wiki projects and traditional expert-approved reference works, it is a wiki to which anybody can contribute using their real names, while those with specific expertise are given a special role in assessing the quality of content. Upon fulfillment of a set of criteria like factual and linguistic accuracy, lack of bias, and readability by non-specialists, these entries are forked into two versions: a stable (and thus citable) approved "cluster" (an article with subpages providing supplementary information) and a draft version, the latter to allow for further development and updates. We provide an overview of how Citizendium is structured and what it offers to the open knowledge communities, particularly to those engaged in education and research. Special attention will be paid to the structures and processes put in place to provide for transparent governance, to encourage collaboration, to resolve disputes in a civil manner and by taking into account expert opinions, and to facilitate navigation of the site and contextualization of its contents.

Full text

• Slides
• Source code (LaTeX) and submitted version (PDF) of the paper, identical to the final published version

Live notes

• set up by Larry Sanger

• Like Wikipedia but with editors and citation names of people who write articles.

• There are also sub pages of information - e.g. the page with the OKCon 2010 program is at http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Open_Knowledge_Conference/Program/OKCon_2010 , a subpage of the OKCon page - so despite all sessions and papers of OKCon being on the wiki, they merely count as one article (which can also host the data for previous and upcoming installments); similar example: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/English_spellings

• going beyond an encylopedia: "there is but one journal: the scientific literature" - from http://www.plosmedicine.org/annotation/listThread.action?inReplyTo=info%3Adoi/10.1371/annotation/b70a4689-cf09-4db6-a97b-8608b87e629e&root=info%3Adoi/10.1371/annotation/b70a4689-cf09-4db6-a97b-8608b87e629e

• governance model: editorial council, management council, constabulary, ombudsman - preliminary charter at http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Charter_drafting

• Eduzendium: getting universities involved. http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Eduzendium

• goal of 100k by 2012; not realistic at present

• "the crank problem" <- fakers; from the paper: "hard to handle from an editorial perspective because those willing to invest their time on the topics are usually heavily biased in their approach, and most of those capable of evidence-based comment prefer not to contribute to these topics."

Blog coverage

• Open Shakespear at OKCon — OKCon 2010 summary by James Harriman-Smith, includes coverage of this talk