geni wrote: Which for the average expert is going to mean 5-10 minutes per article, only enough time for the most minimal fact-checking, let alone making it a "featured article". Even if you pinch down and say that a good reference needs only 100K articles, you're still only getting an hour or so on each. Reading between the lines, I think what they're really hoping is to leverage the $10M for infrastructure, with most expert content creators being "paid" in the form of bylines. For many experts, this will be sufficient draw; they will be able to justify it as part of work, it will be a way to get ahead, etc. DU is also going to be able to advertise itself as a cretin-free zone, which starts to look pretty good after an hour of RC patrol here. The most concerning aspect for us is the potential to drain away activity in science and technical areas, leaving WP to evolve into the "free encyclopedia of garage bands and manga trivia". (You laugh, but consider vandals gradually blanking math articles that are not on any active editor's watchlist, and not noticed in RC because of the continuous flood of recategorization edits.) Stan

geni wrote: Somewhere in the verbiage they mentioned the PhDs as leaders accepting contributions. Students (including a professor's own students) and talented amateurs could find themselves more motivated to tweak a high-quality high-reputation article rather than to try to turn an almost-English stub into something minimally coherent. DU has a lot of hurdles, but they know all about WP and are seeking to capitalize on our weakest points. We shouldn't get too complacent. Stan

On Mon, 2006-01-09 at 06:25 -0800, Stan Shebs wrote: This doesnt happen. Academics and so forth are busy and expect to be paid for this type of thing. Bylines in an encyclopaedia dont cut it any more. Will be interesting. Justinc

On 1/9/06, Stan Shebs <shebs(a)apple.com> wrote: If the source text written for free is well referenced an hour wouldn't be too bad. Of course, what people really seem to be missing is that the $10 million is merely the seed money. *If* they can get some good content created by that (even just 2000 articles would probably do it), there should be no problem raising more money (through donations, sales, services, etc.). What did Wikipedia start with, half a million and one paid expert? Then Larry was fired for lack of funding. I'm sure in his opinion, if Wikipedia could have afforded to pay 10 times as many experts for twice as long, they wouldn't have the credibility problem they have today. Anthony

On 1/9/06, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote: I'm not sure what you're comparing them to, but I'll comment on your points as is. Digital Universe Foundation is a non-profit organization incorporated in Nevada. See for youself at https://esos.state.nv.us/SOSServices/AnonymousAccess/CorpSearch/CorpSearch.…. There is a for-profit which runs the ISP but supposedly this is set up in a way so that most of the profits from the for-profit go to the non-profit. I'm not sure exactly what the arrangement is, though. Small time people, maybe, but the larger grant money which they are probably targetting is actually more likely to donate to a company which isn't hanging on by a thread. For donations of time, I'm not sure I agree, but you might be right. I think it depends more on how they spend their money than how much of it there is, though. I have an account and didn't pay anything. AFAIK you only have to pay if you subscribe to the ISP. Seems to me they will release *some* things under proprietary licenses and some things under free licenses. I certainly agree it will be tough to get people to contribute to those parts under the proprietary licenses for free, though if it's set up right maybe not too hard (people will donate time to proprietary non-profit projects in some circumstances). What's murky, it seems, is exactly what they're going to do. I'm sure it'll be clear once they start publicizing this. Well, you seem to have been misinformed on all your points. But I see them filling a different niche from Wikipedia anyway. I have my doubts as to whether or not DU will be successful. It's really a matter of how well it's managed. I think the idea is a good one, though. (I've personally watched a company I've co-founded, with a similar idea, waste millions of dollars and go out of business, during the dot-com days. Actually when I showed this to one of the other co-founders he asked me if this was our old CEO, who botched the thing up back then, trying the idea again. It isn't.) Anthony

On 1/9/06, Justin Cormack <justin(a)specialbusservice.com> wrote: Is there a license that isn't compatible with the stuff on commons?

On 1/9/06, Justin Cormack <justin(a)specialbusservice.com> wrote: Yeah, I hope they keep the vast majority of their content non-proprietary (I'd say all of it, but I've kind of given up on that one). Otherwise there's not much of a point. There's plenty of no-cost proprietary information already out there. I guess most of it isn't ad-free, but I don't see that as *that* big of a draw. Using the GFDLed stuff is more problematic. Using it was, in hindsight, probably the biggest mistake made by Wikipedia. It might be worth starting over from scratch just to get rid of the ties to the GFDL. Of course one can always hope that the FSF is finally going to fix that license, but we've been asking for years and it hasn't happened yet. Anthony

On 1/9/06, Justin Cormack <justin(a)specialbusservice.com> wrote: Not Anthony, but thought I'd put my oar in. I'd rather the GFDL had been something like the GPL, but for documents. Easy to understand, not very burdensome requirements. Instead you get all the complexity about invariant sections, about author attribution, about prohibiting DRM, about all kinds of things. Part of the problem was that the FSF seem to have been only thinking of conventional books when they invented the GFDL. Many of its requirements (e.g. having to include the whole license with any re-use, rather than simply a pointer to it) make sense with a book but not if you want to re-use just a tiny portion of the work. Bear in mind that Wikipedia is in actuality rather far from complete compliance with the GFDL ourselves, even though we officially 'turn off' parts of the GFDL for Wikipedia. I'm not the person to go to about this, but others on this list have studied this in more depth. The Creative Commons people got a lot more right, although people have issues with parts of it, e.g. no requirement for the original source to be available. -Matt

On 1/9/06, Justin Cormack <justin(a)specialbusservice.com> wrote: My problem is pretty much everything in the GFDL that isn't in CC-by-SA. See Section 4 of the GFDL - everything there except the requirement to attribute authors (and personally I don't even like that requirement, which is arguably too onerous for a wiki, but it's a compromise to at least keep in the spirit of the GFDL). The perfect fix (that is at all possible) would be to create a new version of the GFDL which says something to the effect of "You may opt to apply the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 instead of this license." Of course, it's probably more realistic to expect more gradual changes. Anthony

On 1/9/06, Wikiacc <wikiacc(a)gmail.com> wrote: According to Larry Sanger, they will not use Wikipedia content to "bootstrap" their content. -Andrew (User:Fuzheado)