Towards Managing Knowledge Collection from Volunteer Contributors

A new generation of intelligent applications can be enabled by broad-coverage, up-to-date repositories of knowledge. One emerging approach to constructing such repositories is proactive knowledge collection from volunteer contributors. In this paper, we study the quality of the knowledge repository resulting from collecting spontaneous, little guided contributions of volunteers. In a representative collection of part-of information contributed by volunteers, we study the coverage and quality of the resulting collection. As a possible way to address the deficiencies, we outline a more managed, three-stage approach to the collection process, consisting of collection, evaluation & revision, and publication.