Standardokban

Standardokban is a community-driven standard for structuring and exchanging content in open knowledge bases. It provides a unified set of rules for article layout, metadata, references, and inter-article linking to improve consistency, interoperability, and machine readability across platforms such as wikis and knowledge graphs.

Origin and scope: Initiated in the late 2010s by the Standardokban Consortium, a coalition of editors, researchers, and platform developers. The standard covers content organization (lead, sections, infoboxes), metadata fields (title, author, date, license, provenance, reliability), citation formatting, and link handling (persistent identifiers, URI normalization). It also prescribes accessibility practices and supports export in machine-readable formats like JSON-LD and RDFa.

Governance and versions: The standard evolves through community drafts, public review, and periodic releases. A steering council and technical working groups oversee updates, with platforms contributing conformance test suites and validators to assess compliance.

Adoption and impact: Several major wiki projects offer optional or mandatory support for standardokban, and plugins exist to validate articles. The standard has facilitated data export to knowledge graphs and improved cross-site search and attribution.

Criticism and challenges: Critics note that the standard can be complex for smaller communities, and that inconsistent enforcement leads to fragmentation. Adoption costs, tooling needs, and legacy content compatibility remain ongoing concerns.

See also: Dublin Core, schema.org, Wikidata, Creative Commons, content accessibility guidelines.