Curating

Gathering what is relevant to a subject and adding value by the selecting — choosing, ordering, and then looking after what has been chosen.

Curating has three parts and the middle one is the one people mean. Gathering is collecting what exists. Selecting and organising is where the value is added: deciding what belongs, what is representative, what order makes it usable, and — hardest — what to leave out. Looking after is the part almost everyone forgets: a collection is not finished when it is assembled, and an unmaintained one decays into a list of dead references (Commons-Tending · Prune · Improvement log).

It is distinct from authoring and from summarising, and the distinction is worth holding. An author makes something new. A summariser replaces the sources with a shorter thing. A curator leaves the sources standing and adds a path through them, which is why curating preserves a reader's ability to go and check (Author's Voice Is Sovereign · Provenance · Attribution · Weave, don't delete · MindWeaving).

In this canon it has a specific use named beside it: curating part of the core material, alone or together, and — when it is ready — making the curated thing the executive summary of what it curates. That is how a large body becomes enterable without anyone having to read all of it first (Careful Editing of the Core · Maps of Content · Bottom Line Up Front · Foundational Literature).

The discipline that keeps it honest is declaring the selection. Every curation is a set of choices, and a collection presented as though it were simply what exists has hidden its own editing. Say what was included, on what basis, and what was left out (Transparency · Gaps Not Yet Closed · Elision · Second reader).

And it is an act of service rather than of ownership. What is curated belongs to the people it was curated for (Knowledge as commons · Stewardship · Gift).

Also called: content curation Stands on: Language · Stewardship · Discernment Opens onto: Chunking · Careful Editing of the Core · Maps of Content · Foundational Literature · MindWeaving · Knowledge as commons · Prune · The Living Library In play: the library — whenever a body decides what a newcomer should meet first Sources: Admin and Help/How We Wiki/Curating (stub — the page marks itself as a stub asking to be improved, and its body is a quoted encyclopedia definition) · Careful Editing of the Core (draft, which names the practice) · lionsberg.wiki: Curating Open: The source page is a received definition with no LIØNSBERG reading and asks on its own face to be improved; everything beyond the definition here is a first articulation. · Inbound links were not counted.