SciCom Wiki: A Digital Library to Support the Science Communication Knowledge Infrastructure for Videos and Podcasts

TL;DR

This paper introduces SciCom Wiki, a collaborative platform designed to enhance the FAIR representation and curation of videos and podcasts within the Science Communication Knowledge Infrastructure, addressing current fragmentation and scalability issues.

Contribution

It presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of an open-source platform based on Wikibase to support systematic, FAIR, and collaborative curation of science communication media.

Findings

SciCom Wiki effectively addresses stakeholder requirements.

The SciCom KI is underdeveloped in FAIR knowledge and collaborative curation.

The platform shows promise for scaling science communication media management.

Abstract

Videos and Podcasts have established themselves as the medium of choice for civic dissemination, but also as carriers of misinformation. The emerging Science Communication Knowledge Infrastructure (SciCom KI), which curates these increasingly non-textual media, remains fragmented and inadequately equipped to scale against the content flood. Our work sets out to support the SciCom KI with a central, collaborative platform, the SciCom Wiki, to facilitate FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) media representation, particularly for videos and podcasts. We survey requirements from 53 stakeholders and individually refine these insights in 11 interviews. We then design and implement an open-source service system centered on Wikibase and evaluate our prototype with another 14 participants. Overall, our findings identified several needs to support the SciCom KI systematically. Our SciCom Wiki approach was found suitable to address the raised requirements. Further, we identified that the SciCom KI is severely underdeveloped regarding FAIR knowledge and related systems facilitating its collaborative creation and curation. Our system can provide a central knowledge node similar to Wikidata, yet a collaborative effort is required to scale the necessary features against the imminent (mis-)information flood.