Epistemic community facts for kids
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.
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.
This kind of community has four characteristics or typical features:
- 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
- shared ideas about what is acceptable or valid according to specially defined ideas and evaluation practices
- a common enterprise or shared goals
The shared explanations for how the community functions includes "the appalling silence of good people", 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.
Related pages
- Dobusch, Leonhard and Sigrid Quack, Epistemic Communities and Social Movements: Transnational Dynamics in the Case of Creative Commons," 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.
