Knowledge & Data Commoning represents a civic innovation paradigm that treats information, data, and knowledge as collectively owned and managed resources rather than private commodities. Drawing on the principles of commons governance, this domain encompasses the practices, platforms, and policies that enable communities to collaboratively create, curate, and share knowledge for the common good — from Wikipedia and Wikidata to open educational resources and citizen-generated datasets.
The knowledge commons differs fundamentally from physical commons in that digital resources are non-subtractible — one person's use does not diminish another's ability to use the same information. This characteristic enables unprecedented scales of collaborative knowledge production through what researchers call "commons-based peer production" and "collective intelligence." Major exemplars include MIT OpenCourseWare (open educational resources), Wikipedia (collaborative encyclopedia), Creative Commons (licensing infrastructure), the Science Commons (open research), and the Public Library of Science (open-access publishing).
Wikidata, launched in 2012, exemplifies the cutting edge of collaborative knowledge infrastructure. As the world's largest open-source collaborative knowledge graph with over 100 million concepts contributed by 560,000+ editors, it provides structured, machine-readable data that powers Wikipedia and countless other applications. The infrastructure of Wikidata is built through commons-based peer production, with every user able to extend and edit stored information. This "Wikipedia for data" represents a crucial evolution toward semantic knowledge commons that can support both human understanding and AI systems.