Epistemic community
Epistemic community is a large network of people who work towards a common knowledge-based goal—like the community of people who work together to create and maintain Wikipedia.[1]
An epistemic community is a group of people who do not have any specific history together. They join to form a kind of community based on a similar focus on an information-based project.
The community group can be made of people with a range of special interests.[2]
This kind of community has four characteristics or typical features:[3]
- a shared set of principles or value-based explanations for how the community functions
- a shared understanding of the way things happen, including problems and policies and outcomes[4]
- shared ideas about what is acceptable or valid according to specially defined ideas and evaluation practices
- a common enterprise or shared goals[5]
The shared explanations for how the community functions includes "the appalling silence of good people",[6] which encourages the growth of perverse incentives.
An example of a scientific epistemic community is the 1975 Mediterranean Action Plan (MAP). This is a marine pollution control regime for the Mediterranean Sea developed by the United Nations.[7]
Related pages[change | change source]
References[change | change source]
- ↑ Waldman, Simon. "Who knows?" The Guardian (UK). October 26, 2004; excerpt, "The site is manned by volunteers, and now owned by a foundation, which means people willingly give their time and intellectual property to the venture.... There are hundreds of thousands of "Wikipedians" who have contributed or edited articles."
- ↑ Haas, P. (1990). "Obtaining international environmental protection through epistemic consensus," Millennium Journal of International Studies 19:3, 347-363.
- ↑ Haas, P. (1992). "Introduction: epistemic communities and international policy coordination," International Organization 46:1, 1-35.
- ↑ Compare P. B. de Laat, (2012) "Coercion or empowerment? Moderation of content in Wikipedia as 'essentially contested' bureaucratic rules."[permanent dead link] Ethics and Information Technology, pp. 1–13; retrieved 2013-1-25.
- ↑ Compare K. Brad Wray, "The Epistemic Cultures of Science and Wikipedia: A Comparison," 'Episteme, Vol. 6, Issue 1, February 2009, pp. 38-51; retrieved 2012-1-25.
- ↑ Axelrod, Rise B. and Charles R. Cooper (2011). Axelrod & Cooper's Concise Guide to Writing, p. 333; Ansbro, John J. (2000). Martin Luther King, Jr.: Nonviolent Strategies and Tactics for Social Change, p. 227.
- ↑ Haas, P. (1989) "Do regimes matter? Epistemic communities and Mediterranean pollution control," International Organization, 43:3, 377-403.
Other websites[change | change source]
- UNEP Mediterranean Action Plan website Archived 2019-09-02 at the Wayback Machine
- Dobusch, Leonhard and Sigrid Quack, Epistemic Communities and Social Movements: Transnational Dynamics in the Case of Creative Commons," Archived 2014-11-23 at the Wayback Machine Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung, Köln (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne), September 2008.
- Fallis, Don. "Toward an Epistemology of Wikipedia," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vol. 59, No. 10, pp. 1662-1674, 2008.
