Epistemic community facts for kids

An epistemic community is like a big group of people who work together to reach a common goal using their knowledge. Think of the people who help create and keep Wikipedia updated – they are a great example!

This kind of community is made up of people who might not know each other from before. They come together because they all care about a project that involves sharing and building information.

People in an epistemic community can have many different special interests, but they all focus on the same main goal.

What Makes an Epistemic Community?

Epistemic communities have four main features that make them special:

• Shared beliefs: They agree on important ideas and values about how their group should work.
• Common understanding: They see problems and how things happen in a similar way, which helps them work together.
• Agreed-upon rules for truth: They have shared ideas about what information is correct and how to check if it's true.
• One big goal: Everyone in the group is working towards the same main purpose.

Examples of Epistemic Communities

A good example of an epistemic community in science is the Mediterranean Action Plan (MAP) from 1975. This was a project started by the United Nations. Experts from different countries worked together to create rules and plans to control pollution in the Mediterranean Sea. They all shared the goal of protecting the sea and used their knowledge to make it happen.

Another easy-to-understand example is the community of people who contribute to and edit Wikipedia. They all share the goal of creating a free, reliable source of information for everyone. They agree on rules for how articles should be written, what sources are trustworthy, and how to handle disagreements.

Related topics

• Epistemology
• Invisible College
• Royal Society
• Intensity of preference

• 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.