Democratization of knowledge

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The term Democratization of Knowledge can be used to describe the rather recent advancement in the way knowledge is constructed, most notably influenced by the internet. Defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, democracy is "Government by the people; that form of government in which the sovereign power resides in the people as a whole...," applied to the concept of knowledge, implies a body of public knowledge that can be manipulated by the people, not necessarily experts. Wikipedia itself can be considered an influential method of democratizing knowledge.

Wikipedia co-founder, Larry Sanger, states in his article^[1], that “Professionals are no longer needed for the bare purpose of the mass distribution of information and the shaping of opinion.” Sanger’s article confronts the existence of “common knowledge” and pits it against knowledge that everyone agrees on.

[edit] Concerns

Some concerns arise over the development of democratized knowledge - specifically on the issues of this knowledge being biased and corrupted due to its establishment by non-scholarly sources.