Supporting content curation communities: The case of the Encyclopedia of Life

Abstract

This article explores the opportunities and challenges of creating and sustaining large‐scale “content curation communities” through an in‐depth case study of the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL). Content curation communities are large‐scale crowdsourcing endeavors that aim to curate existing content into a single repository, making these communities different from content creation communities such as Wikipedia. In this article, we define content curation communities and provide examples of this increasingly important genre. We then follow by presenting EOL, a compelling example of a content curation community, and describe a case study of EOL based on analysis of interviews, online discussions, and survey data. Our findings are characterized into two broad categories: information integration and social integration. Information integration challenges at EOL include the need to (a) accommodate and validate multiple sources and (b) integrate traditional peer reviewed sources with user‐generated, nonpeer‐reviewed content. Social integration challenges at EOL include the need to (a) establish the credibility of open‐access resources within the scientific community and (b) facilitate collaboration between experts and novices. After identifying the challenges, we discuss the potential strategies EOL and other content curation communities can use to address them, and provide technical, content, and social design recommendations for overcoming them.

TraitBank: Practical semantics for organism attribute data

“…TraitBank leverages EOL's existing network of content partners and Content Creation Community [39] and employs the EOL relational database frameworks (providing advanced taxonomic names resolution) in combination with existing data standards and domain ontologies. Rather than developing a comprehensive semantic framework for the integration of trait data, TraitBank simply links data records to relevant ontologies and controlled vocabularies.…”

“…Searches can be refined by specifying a value or range of values, and they can be restricted to a particular taxonomic group. Filtering by group currently relies on parent/child relationships in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) 39 and Catalogue of Life [38] classifications, so only records for taxa that are featured in one or both of these hierarchies are returned for taxon-restriced queries.…”

Understanding How GitHub Supports Curation Repositories

“…Curation is defined as the process that involves identifying, selecting, validating, organizing, describing, maintaining, and preserving existing artifacts [11]. Duh et al the one who collects and organizes existing content into a larger unit, emphasizing the manual effort of curation as compared to automatic methods such as algorithmic search and aggregation [5].…”

Towards the Hci Living Curriculum

“…For instance [16] cited the Encyclopedia of Life as using featured contributor pages to recognize important contributors. Impact factors of various kinds can also be used.…”