When knowledge entities in an online community are poorly connected, contributors have difficulty discovering related entities already in the system. This reduced discoverability increases the likelihood that they independently create knowledge entities duplicating prior contributions.

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Connecting the knowledge acquired from courses, books, and other sources can be challenging as authors and instructors often focus on making their material coherent within the scope of their work, disregarding its coherence in relation to other courses, books, or resources that the reader may have encountered earlier.

Disconnected knowledge entities in Online Communities

- Disconnected Knowledge Entities
- Stand Alone Learning Content

Causes of Dupicate Knowledge Entities in Online Communities 

- Emphasizing links
- Using indexes
- Citing references
- Search Engines

Solutions to disconnected knowledge entities

While crowdsourcing video content on platforms like YouTube, Vimeo, and TikTok has significantly improved free knowledge sharing, the generated content is often highly disconnected. This lack of structure fails to provide clear learning pathways, making it difficult for learners to start from an arbitrary video and systematically achieve their educational objectives.

Disconnected Learning Entities in Crowdsourced Videos

Disconnected Knowledge Entities Increase Duplicate Creation in Online Communities

Stand-alone knowledge entities (e.g., Wikipedia articles, YouTube videos, StackExchange posts) are self-contained, so they often restate information also covered by other entities to give their subject context. This produces a spectrum of duplication: a weak form, where entities summarize or paraphrase overlapping content, and a stronger form, where content is duplicated in its entirety.

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