Introduction

At a recent American Astronomical Society ("AAS") conference there were laments from many professors and teachers that students were going to the Wikipedia as their one and only source of information. Working together we can create a far better resource for astronomy and space science.

The Encyclopedia of the Cosmos can become the largest reliable information resource on these topics. It will be the first web-based information resource that combines the trustworthiness and authority of scientific review with the power of web-based collaboration, all enabled by a state-of-the-art technology platform.

The Encyclopedia will be free to the public, have no advertising, be fully searchable and governed by scientists, educators, and professionals.

The Cosmos Portal and the Digital Universe

The Encyclopedia is one component of the Cosmos Portal, which will contain news services, structured metadata, a federated search engine, and a suite of stewarding tools that will enable users to effortlessly build subject-specific portals. Both the Encyclopedia and the Cosmos Portal are part of the Digital Universe, an education initiative of the Digital Universe Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. The goal of the Digital Universe is to organize a worldwide network of scholars to create a subset of the Web in which high-quality information is well organized and readily available as a free public service. Think of the Digital Universe in relation to the general Web as public television is to commercial television.

ManyOne Networks, Inc., the technology partner of the Cosmos Portal is providing both the infrastructure and the mechanism for sustained funding.

Audience

The Encyclopedia has two parts or branches.

The general encyclopedia is geared toward the educated lay public—people who think about the Universe and wish to expand their understanding or just keep up with the latest explorations and discoveries. Their education levels will be from high school graduate to Ph.D. in other fields. The level of writing will fall somewhere between that found in a good newspaper (e.g. NY Times, LA Times) and that found in a good general encyclopedia (e.g. Encyclopedia Britannica).

The technical encyclopedia (coming later) are Review Articles section will be for specialists, ranging from graduate students to seasoned researchers, who want to get a summary of the latest information about various fields. Technical articles can be expected to resemble reviews of the literature, and not necessarily to be accessible to the general public or even to undergraduates studying the relevant field.

Editorial Board

The Editorial Board of the Encyclopedia is comprised of credentialed researchers and educators. The Board will shape the overall vision of the Encyclopedia, guide the selection of content areas, help establish and enforce governance procedures, and otherwise set policy that maintains the highest degree of academic integrity. Board members will be chosen based on their expertise on specific topics and on their ability to help foster a collaborative intellectual work environment.

Contributors

Authors will be recognized based on their expertise on specific topics and on their ability to communicate jargon-free technical information with sophistication and clarity. This community includes scientists and educators at major research universities as well as teaching-oriented colleges and community colleges; some high school educators; scientists/analysts at think tanks, NGOs, government agencies, etc. who are appropriately qualified.

Topic Editors

Topic Editors are those who review an entry and decide if it is ready to be published, arbitrate disptutes, and help set overall editorial policy. Just as authors serve as referees in academic publishing, authors may serve as Topic Editors, and conversely Topic Editors as Authors, but of course not on the same article.

When an author feels that an article is ready to be published, a Topic Editor is notified and then reviews the article. If it is of sufficiently high quality, the Topic Editor then moves the article to the public site. After initial publication, the article on the author's wiki continues to be expanded, revised, and improved. When an author feels that the wiki version is superior to the public version, he may ask a Topic Editor to repeat the review and publication process, following which the revised article replaces the previous one at the public site.

Organization

The Encyclopedia will be built from the bottom-up through the use of a wiki-software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Once given access to the wiki, authors can write articles on topics of their choosing, and comment, edit, and contribute to existing entries. New collaborations, ideas, and entries will dynamically evolve in this environment. In this way, the Encyclopedia will be a constantly evolving, self-organizing, expert-reviewed representation of the most reliable knowledge about the Universe. This extraordinary resource will be available to the general public without cost or advertising.

A somewhat similar process was used to build Wikipedia, the free, general encyclopedia project. Wikipedia, however, which allows all web users to quickly and easily edit content, lacks quality control and reflects a deeply held view that the involvement of experts is unnecessary. As a result, criticism has arisen regarding the variable accuracy of Wikipedia content. There is consensus on one aspect of the wiki process, however: the model provides a way for people to pool their efforts and collaborate, producing something far better than what the average contributor could produce alone. The Encyclopedia will allow experts in a given area to work together in ways that simply are not possible in standard modes of joint work, opening new frontiers in the quality and amount of work that can be done.

Governance

The Encyclopedia will be developed using the Authors' Wiki, which will only be accessible to those individuals the Digital Universe has approved as scientific authorities on a particular subject(s). Once approved, individuals will have the freedom to contribute original entries or to edit the work of other authors. All entries, however, will be approved by a Topic Editor before becoming visible to the public.

For more detail, see FAQs.