Is the Information Commons another Wikipedia?

Wikipedia is an online encylopedia which is generated by the collaboration of its readers, using much the same sort of technology used to generate this page. Wikipedia is completely in the public domain, it's a mine of useful information and its extremely cool. Several of us who work at MAYA are active contributors.

We've often been asked if the Information Commons is trying to be another Wikipedia. However, there are two main differences between Wikipedia and the Information Commons.

Unstructured vs. semi-structured data

The first is the difference between unstructured and semi-structured data. If you make an entry for a new city in Wikipedia, there's nothing to say "hey, this looks like an entry for a city - give me a latitude and longitude so I can put it on a map." All of the information structure has to be provided by users on a case by case basis. Generally, if you want anything to be linked to anything else, you have to put the link in. What we want to create is a commons where there is (for example) a universal representation for space so that (say) towns, national parks and demographic statistics can all be linked from the same map if a user wants this.

Neutral Point of View and Editorial Agreement

The second difference is the problem of collaboration. Wikipedia tries to present an NPOV ("Neutral Point of View") article because that's what an encyclopedia should be. This leads to problems - Wikipedia entries for some topics such as Communism or Circumcision can lead to very heated and inflammatory discussions. Such Wikipedia pages have to be declared as 'contested' or 'pending agreement. Fortunately, the Wikipedia community is very good at making changes and trying to resolve such conflicts, though there is always the danger that a few individuals will try to make their own point of view the only valid point of view (passionate individuals may be particuarly susceptible to this danger).

What we're trying to make available in the Information Commons is a system where there is some definitive information (e.g. coastlines) but which also enables the different world views of different contributors to live side by side. Coastlines may be definitive, but we don't want to try and arbitrate between one point of view and another about drawing boundaries between countries - we want to enable a user to see (for example) different version of the 'true map of the middle-east', and to see exactly which publisher supplied which information.

In practice, the ability of different publishers to contribute information about the same topic or place is supported by UUID indexing.

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