Dear all,
First post to list - hello to all.
I am particularly interested in access / digital divide issues
regarding online media and Open Educational Resources, particularly
with regard to technical issues, such as poor bandwidth or mobile
accessibility. I am not sure what discussion there has been on this
list regarding digital divide issues around mediawiki / wikipedia, and
I am sure there are quite a few ideas around how to improve (low
bandwidth) access.
I thought you might be interested in an upcoming mailinglist-based
discussion around digital divide / access issues for OER (on the
mailing list of UNESCO's international Community on Open Educational
Resources), and I would like to invite you all to participate (if
interested).
The discussion starts this coming Monday (9th Feb), and to participate
you simply subscribe to the mailing list: https://communities.unesco.org/wws/info/iiep-oer-opencontent
Further details below and on http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org . Feel
free to email me if you have any questions.
I hope this is of interest - apologies if this list isn't quite the
right forum.
All the best,
Bjoern
UNESCO launches new discussion on Open Educational Resources (OER):
access to Open Educational Resources, 9-27 February 2009
The UNESCO Open Educational Resources Community is launching a new
three-week discussion on the subject of access issues. The discussion
will take place from 9 to 27 February 2009 and is open to all.
During the first week the community will focus on identifying - and
attempting to classify - the main problems in accessing OER. The theme
of the second and third weeks will be "tried and tested solutions", as
participants are invited to share their experiences in working around
such problems.
The discussion will be facilitated by Bjoern Hassler of Cambridge
University’s Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies.
About the community: UNESCO’s international Community on Open
Educational Resources has been active since 2005. It connects over 700
individuals in 105 countries to share information and discuss issues
surrounding the production and use of Open Educational Resources – web-
based materials offered freely and openly for use and reuse in
teaching, learning and research. UNESCO’s work on Open Educational
Resources is generously supported by the William and Flora Hewlett
Foundation.
Participate in the discussion:
• For more information, see the Access2OER page on the UNESCO OER
Community wiki http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org/index.php?title=Access2OER
• Subscribe to the mailing list here: https://communities.unesco.org/wws/info/iiep-oer-opencontent
Even if the buyer loses the attribution information, I'd bet that, under the
first sale doctrine, they can resell the poster. (Just not copy and
redistribute.) Right?
On Feb 4, 2009 8:24 AM, "Chad" <innocentkiller(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 7:34 AM, Andre Engels <andreengels(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 a...
Agreed. If the license and attribution are provided to the poster-
buyer, then we (as a content provider) and the printer (as a
content distributor) have done our parts. We have facilitated the
reuse of our content in accordance with the terms of the license.
Now, if the buyer goes and loses the license and authors the next
day, that's their problem. The only exception being a poster
intended for public display and/or the buyer wanting to redistribute
it themselves, where the license/attribution would need to stay
alongside it.
-Chad
_______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l(a)lists.wikimed...
Hoi,
I selected a great picture from Commons. I loaded it on my memory stick. I
went to a copy shop and had it printed in poster format for little money. No
fuss. I did not even need to bring it on a memory stick, I could have
downloaded the picture at the copy shop. This is the real world. There is
nothing stopping anyone from printing one of the great pictures from
Commons.
With all the talk about the French chapter's cottage village solution to
printing, the reality is that printing a poster is not a problem anyway.
Given this reality, what are we talking about. What do we think we
realistically achieve. You have to appreciate that the poster has to be
shipped, there has to be something for the French chapter and all the
overhead you think up has to be paid. In another thread all kinds of
difficult theories are discussed about atribution. The more complicated it
is in the real world, the more likely it is that the chapter will end up
with very little indeed and that all this talk will only kill a goose that
lays "golden" eggs.
Thanks,
GerardM
This is a request for comment. I've posted a draft proposal for the
license update here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update
It is not intended to be final, but I hope we can arrive at a final
version by February 1.
We would appreciate questions, comments, feedback. If there are
obvious edits which you feel would make the proposal clearer, please
do go ahead and make them, but please be careful about edits that
substantially alter the proposal itself.
Thanks!
Erik
--
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Licensing interim update
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <f80608430902031035t1206cf11le8662f33f39ae50d(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> 2009/2/3 Brian <Brian.Mingus(a)colorado.edu>:
>> Where can I read about what, exactly, the spirit of the GFDL is?
>
> Start with the license preamble "Secondarily, this License preserves
> for the author and publisher a way to get credit for their work,"
>
> Now remember despite claims to the country the GFDL is basically
> thinking about printed books. The wording is such that you would have
> to include the required credit in a printed form with the book.
>
> So effectively the spirit is that the credit stays with the work. So
> if the work is on a website the credit should be on that website. If
> the work is on a T-shirt the credit should distributed with the
> T-shirt perhaps as part of the packaging (of course things get a bit
> tricky when someone wears the t-shirt but that is a secondary
> problem).
I fully agree with this.
The list of all contributors has to be on the same server or in the
same offline product or in the same printed medium.
Did anybody mention the Wikihow attribution CC-BY-SA-NC here? Have a
look e.g. at the authors attribution at
http://www.wikihow.com/Throw-a-Super-Bowl-Commercial-Watching-Party
The problem with the Wikihow link attribution is that it doesn't work
if the website disappears.
Klaus Graf
Hoi,
Can someone please explain why this is ?
Thanks,
GerardM
2009/2/1 Marcus Buck <wiki(a)marcusbuck.org>
> According to SiteMatrix we have 739 projects at the moment. There are
> three master partitions for the servers: s1 for enwiki only, s2 for 19
> other projects and s3 for all the rest (that's 719 projects).
>
> My homewiki is one of those 719 projects. And I feel a bit neglected.
> Replication is halted since 34 days. LuceneSearch 2.1 is active on
> enwiki since October and on dewiki and some other big wikis since
> December. Most other wikis have still no access to the new features.
> Even the "+incategory:" feature which is active on enwiki since April
> 2008 is not active on most wikis as of February 2009.
>
> It seems, we are very low at the priority list.
>
> Marcus Buck
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitech-l mailing list
> Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
>
Ray Saintonge writes
>
> > Trying to cite the Declaration of Independence as the basis for your
> > legal defense in a criminal case -- "Hey, I was just exercising my
> > right to resist a bad king!" -- is a good way to guarantee going to
> > jail.
> >
> >
>
> So much for the right to bear arms! :-)
Oh, the Second Amendment can be invoked, sometimes even successfully, these
days. But remember that's in the Bill of Rights to the Constitution. Anthony
was citing the Declaration of Independence, incorrectly, as the basis of the
American legal system. Actually, the Constitution is the basis for that.
Incidentally, the Constitution does not guarantee either rights in copyright
generally, or rights of attribution specifically. What it does do
specifically is allow the Congress to *create* such rights -- a notion that
natural-rights copyright theorists can't quite explain.
--Mike
So, whatever way we decide to go with licenses or attribution
requirements when this debate has settled, at some point our
prospective reader will find themselves confronted with a long list of
names, whether printed on the page or at the end of a URL or
steganographically encoded into the site logo. :-)
On this list, a minority will be real names ("John Smith"); the rest,
if we discount the thousand variants on "anonymous" via our IP
editors, are pseudonyms ("WikiUser") or modified names
("JohnSmith78").
In some cases, users adopt pseudonyms out of a desire for privacy, but
in many cases, it doesn't signify much more than a simple decision
that a username is a lot easier to work with internally, or a general
habit of using some kind of nickname online... or the fact that "John
Smith" was taken. And many of *those* people would, no doubt, prefer
to be credited by a real name (or at least a real-sounding nom de
plume...). Similarly, some of those using pseudonyms who don't want to
use real names, may prefer a different pseudonym... etc, etc, etc.
It would be helpful to figure out some way of (automatically) being
able to have a given username "translate" into a different name when a
list of credits is generated - we would have a list which better
reflects the attribution wishes of our users, and one which looks a
little "neater" for the reuser to put in their Respectable Scholarly
Publication. Win-win situation.
So how could we do it? At a rough sketch, I'm envisaging:
* each user has a "credit" field which they can (optionally!) set
through preferences
* when we generate the list of contributors to an article, in whatever
way we end up deciding to do that, the system can be set to read off
this "credit name" rather than simply using the normal internal
username, if one is available.
I note that MediaWiki already has a user_real_name field - could we
use it for this sort of purpose? Would this be technically practical?
--
- Andrew Gray
andrew.gray(a)dunelm.org.uk
Anthony writes:
>> Actually, the difference is quite relevant in a courtroom,
>> especially when
>> dealing with constitutional issues. That's why I find it nearly
>> impossible
>> to believe that Mike doesn't understand this. How in the world can
>> you
>> defend people's constitutional rights if you think they're made up
>> out of
>> nowhere? Why defend free speech if it's just a couple words some
>> guys made
>> up and wrote down on paper? The very nature of the legal system in
>> the
>> United States of America is based upon natural rights. "We hold
>> these
>> truths to be self-evident". Self-evident. Not created by
>> congressmen.
It is a common mistake to confuse the Declaration of Independence
(which Anthony quotes above), which uses the rhetoric of natural
rights, with the U.S. Constitution, which does not use that rhetoric.
The first was published in 1776; the second was completed in 1787,
with the Bill of Rights added in 1791. The reason for the addition of
the Bill of Rights was precisely that the Framers and the voters came
to believe that no concept of "natural rights" was adequate to
guarantee protection of things like "the freedom of speech," even
under a government of limited and specified powers.
Of course, any historically informed reading of the Declaration of
Independence can see that its natural-rights rhetoric can be
understand in ways that are consistent with the explicit creation of
rights in the Constitution. To wit, we may be said to have the general
natural right to create our own specific Constitutionally and legally
guaranteed rights. (This is more or less what the Declaration of
Independence says.)
But it's quite clear that the Declaration of Independence, standing
alone, has no legal force. It's a rhetorical document, not a legal
one, which may be why Anthony prefers quoting the Declaration to
quoting the Constitution (in whose Amendments "the freedom of speech"
is guaranteed). It should be noted that the Constitution does not even
grant rights to Authors and Inventors. What it does, expressly, is
give Congress the power to create such rights (without specifying what
those rights might be). It would clearly be constitutional for
Congress to change rights in copyright, or even remove them. Such a
change is not the sort of thing that can be understood by any naive
natural-rights theory of copyright.
Trying to cite the Declaration of Independence as the basis for your
legal defense in a criminal case -- "Hey, I was just exercising my
right to resist a bad king!" -- is a good way to guarantee going to
jail.
--Mike
Hi all,
1) There's a new list summary here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LSS/foundation-l-archives/2009_January_16-31
2) Can someone *please* do a huge community service, and work on a
page on Meta that summarizes some of the community concerns re: the
licensing proposal, before voting starts? I have not seen such a page
(did I miss it?). The talk page of the FAQ is a little spare, with
virtually no participation from the people arguing on this list, and a
dedicated page on the subject would be nice.
There are many reasons for doing this:
* Re-licensing all the projects is a Big Deal, and many people who
haven't participated in the discussion yet will likely have the same
concerns or ideas; these should be consolidated on a discussion page
for reference.
* This mailing list seems to have been the main venue for community
discussion to date, but it's very difficult to participate in. With
dozens of threads over the last few months (believe me, I know, having
read all of them for LSS) it's very hard to know what has already been
discussed, what hasn't, where answers to questions were posted, etc.
Using the mailing list for active discussion requires that one be
subscribed and have the time and English-language ability to read
dozens of messages a day -- a high barrier for entry for an all-hands
question.
* The mailing list is also difficult to participate in because this
conversation has been dominated by just a few people. While most all
the points that have been made are valid and interesting, it's a
little hard to tell when the same five people keep posting them. It's
also difficult to get a post in edgewise. Please consider that if
you've posted every other day on this topic for the past month, you're
making a hostile environment for the rest of us who may not be as sure
in our views on the subject.
A (NPOV?) meta page that summarizes the various points that have been
raised -- people who think that every author must be attributed,
people who think a URL is sufficient, people who think that we must
make our content easy for reusers, people who think that we have to
stick to the GFDL on principle, etc. etc. -- would be super helpful as
we progress into straw polls and voting.
best,
Phoebe
--
* I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers
<at> gmail.com *