http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=7350
This posits Knol as something to get knowledge out of employees. Much like an intranet wiki but somehow more efficient for useful braindumping.
(I'm a *tremendous* fan of office wikis. Best idea ever IMO.)
- d.
On Dec 14, 2007 4:03 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
(I'm a *tremendous* fan of office wikis. Best idea ever IMO.)
I love them, but I also find it nigh-on impossible to fight the corporate need to CONTROL them in useless ways. They tend to want complicated permissions structures and stuff like that which end up ruining the wiki idea under a pile of red tape.
-Matt
Quoting Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com:
On Dec 14, 2007 4:03 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
(I'm a *tremendous* fan of office wikis. Best idea ever IMO.)
I love them, but I also find it nigh-on impossible to fight the corporate need to CONTROL them in useless ways. They tend to want complicated permissions structures and stuff like that which end up ruining the wiki idea under a pile of red tape.
-Matt
There's another serious problem: public wikis work great because they harness to a large extent what would be procrastination time. In essence, Wikipedia is a [[distributed computing]] system using human brains as the substrate.{{or}}. People are less inclined to work on office wikis in their free time. So one is using up resources that would get used productively anyways. There might be other advantages but the primary advantage of open-wikis is substantially curtailed.
Depends on if the management culture promotes it to enough extent. The best example in my opinion has to be Intellipedia - an enormous volume of knowledge, harnessed to solve major problems of synthesis in a community with a huge but distributed pool of intellectual firepower.
On Dec 14, 2007 8:43 PM, joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
Quoting Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com:
On Dec 14, 2007 4:03 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
(I'm a *tremendous* fan of office wikis. Best idea ever IMO.)
I love them, but I also find it nigh-on impossible to fight the corporate need to CONTROL them in useless ways. They tend to want complicated permissions structures and stuff like that which end up ruining the wiki idea under a pile of red tape.
-Matt
There's another serious problem: public wikis work great because they harness to a large extent what would be procrastination time. In essence, Wikipedia is a [[distributed computing]] system using human brains as the substrate.{{or}}. People are less inclined to work on office wikis in their free time. So one is using up resources that would get used productively anyways. There might be other advantages but the primary advantage of open-wikis is substantially curtailed.
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Yes but also a canonical example of where they can't get the distributed computing effect since they are not allowed to edit from home for security reasons.
Quoting Nathan Awrich nawrich@gmail.com:
Depends on if the management culture promotes it to enough extent. The best example in my opinion has to be Intellipedia - an enormous volume of knowledge, harnessed to solve major problems of synthesis in a community with a huge but distributed pool of intellectual firepower.
On Dec 14, 2007 8:43 PM, joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
Quoting Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com:
On Dec 14, 2007 4:03 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
(I'm a *tremendous* fan of office wikis. Best idea ever IMO.)
I love them, but I also find it nigh-on impossible to fight the corporate need to CONTROL them in useless ways. They tend to want complicated permissions structures and stuff like that which end up ruining the wiki idea under a pile of red tape.
-Matt
There's another serious problem: public wikis work great because they harness to a large extent what would be procrastination time. In essence, Wikipedia is a [[distributed computing]] system using human brains as the substrate.{{or}}. People are less inclined to work on office wikis in their free time. So one is using up resources that would get used productively anyways. There might be other advantages but the primary advantage of open-wikis is substantially curtailed.
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On 15/12/2007, Nathan Awrich nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
Depends on if the management culture promotes it to enough extent. The best example in my opinion has to be Intellipedia - an enormous volume of knowledge, harnessed to solve major problems of synthesis in a community with a huge but distributed pool of intellectual firepower.
I find it useful to sell the idea as "office whiteboard". "You know how Bob did that job for two years, and then he left, and no-one has any idea how it's done? That need never happen again."
- d.
On 15/12/2007, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On Dec 14, 2007 4:03 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
(I'm a *tremendous* fan of office wikis. Best idea ever IMO.)
I love them, but I also find it nigh-on impossible to fight the corporate need to CONTROL them in useless ways. They tend to want complicated permissions structures and stuff like that which end up ruining the wiki idea under a pile of red tape.
That's why I'm setting up our office wikifarm on Mediawiki, where that stuff is never going into the core code ;-) Anyone who demands TWiki or Confluence for severe ACLs deserves the wiki they end up with.
- d.
On Dec 15, 2007 4:08 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
That's why I'm setting up our office wikifarm on Mediawiki, where that stuff is never going into the core code ;-) Anyone who demands TWiki or Confluence for severe ACLs deserves the wiki they end up with.
I am unfortunately being forced to use Confluence. We almost had MediaWiki and then staff changes tilted the balance of power. Ugh. It could still be worse, though.
It's also Shibbolized and has a nasty interaction where if you have a page in edit over 30 minutes your credentials are lost and your change lost.
-Matt
Question: What are the licensing issues related to using Media Wiki in a closed corporate environment? Is there a non-free license one can purchase so that GFDL does not allow the whole world access to proprietary info?
cs
On 15/12/2007, crock spot crockspot@gmail.com wrote:
Question: What are the licensing issues related to using Media Wiki in a closed corporate environment? Is there a non-free license one can purchase so that GFDL does not allow the whole world access to proprietary info?
a) There is no requirement to license the content GFDL
b) Even if you did, you could always just keep it *private* ;-)
On 15/12/2007, crock spot crockspot@gmail.com wrote:
Question: What are the licensing issues related to using Media Wiki in a closed corporate environment?
None whatsoever. The content is yours. There are bits of the MediaWiki: space (the user interface) you will almost certainly want to modify. Read http://mediawiki.org/ for all the info.
- d.
On Dec 15, 2007 11:56 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 15/12/2007, crock spot crockspot@gmail.com wrote:
Question: What are the licensing issues related to using Media Wiki in a closed corporate environment?
None whatsoever. The content is yours. There are bits of the MediaWiki: space (the user interface) you will almost certainly want to modify. Read http://mediawiki.org/ for all the info.
- d.
Allrighty then, I guess I should get reading. Thanks.
cs
On 15/12/2007, crock spot crockspot@gmail.com wrote:
On Dec 15, 2007 11:56 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 15/12/2007, crock spot crockspot@gmail.com wrote:
Question: What are the licensing issues related to using Media Wiki in a closed corporate environment?
None whatsoever. The content is yours. There are bits of the MediaWiki: space (the user interface) you will almost certainly want to modify. Read http://mediawiki.org/ for all the info.
Allrighty then, I guess I should get reading. Thanks.
This, btw, is why the Help: page space on mediawiki.org is all Public Domain rather than GFDL - specifically so that it can be included in the distribution and anyone can copy it to their own wiki.
- d.
On 15/12/2007, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
This, btw, is why the Help: page space on mediawiki.org is all Public Domain rather than GFDL - specifically so that it can be included in the distribution and anyone can copy it to their own wiki.
So the thing closest to an actual software manual is PD rather than GFDL?
On 15/12/2007, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 15/12/2007, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
This, btw, is why the Help: page space on mediawiki.org is all Public Domain rather than GFDL - specifically so that it can be included in the distribution and anyone can copy it to their own wiki.
So the thing closest to an actual software manual is PD rather than GFDL?
No, the second-closest - the Manual: space pages are actually GFDL :-)
- d.
Quoting crock spot crockspot@gmail.com:
Question: What are the licensing issues related to using Media Wiki in a closed corporate environment? Is there a non-free license one can purchase so that GFDL does not allow the whole world access to proprietary info?
cs
You can use MediaWiki with any license you want. MediaWiki is itself GFDL but things made with MediaWiki are not. If you edited the MediaWiki software the GFDL would inherit to that but not if you write a document with it. A large variety of licenses are used for various projects. The English Wikinews for example uses Creative Commons Attribution 2.5. And Conservapedia uses a unique one http://www.conservapedia.com/Conservapedia:Copyright (I love how even on that page they still feel a need to compare themselves to Wikipedia. They have just a tiny obsession with us it seems). Anyways, the point is that you can use MediaWiki without having to worry about the GFDL.
On 15/12/2007, joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
You can use MediaWiki with any license you want. MediaWiki is itself GFDL but things made with MediaWiki are not. If you edited the MediaWiki software the GFDL would inherit to that but not if you write a document with it.
The software itself is actually GPL, not GFDL. But you would only have to distribute your changes if you copy your modified version (all the powers of the GPL come from copyright) for distribution outside the company. (You can put it on a public-facing website without triggering this.)
A large variety of licenses are used for various projects. The English Wikinews for example uses Creative Commons Attribution 2.5. And Conservapedia uses a unique one http://www.conservapedia.com/Conservapedia:Copyright (I love how even on that page they still feel a need to compare themselves to Wikipedia. They have just a tiny obsession with us it seems). Anyways, the point is that you can use MediaWiki without having to worry about the GFDL.
yep :-)
- d.
It's all making sense now. Wikinfo allows a variety of "open sorce" licenses, and even the publishing of protected "no modification" pages of original research under real names non-commercial free, but the author retaining commercial rights. I just recently started looking at the variety of Creative Commons options, very cool stuff. Never paid a lot of attention to licensing in the past, but I'm learning that I really should.
cs
On Dec 15, 2007 1:11 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 15/12/2007, joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu joshua.zelinsky@yale.edu wrote:
You can use MediaWiki with any license you want. MediaWiki is itself
GFDL but
things made with MediaWiki are not. If you edited the MediaWiki software
the
GFDL would inherit to that but not if you write a document with it.
The software itself is actually GPL, not GFDL. But you would only have to distribute your changes if you copy your modified version (all the powers of the GPL come from copyright) for distribution outside the company. (You can put it on a public-facing website without triggering this.)
A large variety of licenses are used for various projects. The English Wikinews
for
example uses Creative Commons Attribution 2.5. And Conservapedia uses a
unique
one http://www.conservapedia.com/Conservapedia:Copyright (I love how even on that page they still feel a need to compare
themselves to
Wikipedia. They have just a tiny obsession with us it seems). Anyways,
the
point is that you can use MediaWiki without having to worry about the
GFDL.
yep :-)
- d.
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Sorce should be source. (Or sores :) )
On Dec 15, 2007 1:42 PM, crock spot crockspot@gmail.com wrote:
It's all making sense now. Wikinfo allows a variety of "open sorce" licenses, and even the publishing of protected "no modification" pages of original research under real names non-commercial free, but the author retaining commercial rights. I just recently started looking at the variety of Creative Commons options, very cool stuff. Never paid a lot of attention to licensing in the past, but I'm learning that I really should.
cs
On 15/12/2007, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On Dec 14, 2007 4:03 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
(I'm a *tremendous* fan of office wikis. Best idea ever IMO.)
I love them, but I also find it nigh-on impossible to fight the corporate need to CONTROL them in useless ways. They tend to want complicated permissions structures and stuff like that which end up ruining the wiki idea under a pile of red tape.
The general response seems to be:
a) use ingenuity; deflect them into controlling trivial stuff
b) fait accompli; get it up and running on a small scale without any of that, and use inertia to roll it out elsewhere unchanged
[The cynics make like to read this as "don't tell them, and when you must, fib"]