What is a guru license, and what is a non-guru license?
A guru license is a license where a guru can change the terms of the
license according to his whims.
You can recognise the existense of a guru to the presence of the
following lines :
CC-BY-SA 3.0 : "either this or a later license version".
GFDL : "The Free Software Foundation may publish new, revised versions
of the GNU Free Documentation License from time to time" (but you can
opt-out of the guru if you remove "or any later version" from your
licensing statement).
Conversely, CC-BY-SA 1.0 does not contain any such revision mechanism.
To the contrary of the other CC licenses, the following sentence at
the end of the license : "This License constitutes the entire
agreement between the parties with respect to the Work licensed here.
There are no understandings, agreements or representations with
respect to the Work not specified here", is true to its meaning.
Philosophically, I don't see why I should choose for my created
contents, or recommend to other creators to choose a guru-license.
Depending on the whims of a guru amounts to the servitude denounced by
Étienne de La Boétie (1530-1563) in his 1548 essay "Discourse on
voluntary servitude"(1)
CC-BY-SA-Guru is CC-BY-SA 3.0
CC-BY-SA-NonGuru is CC-BY-SA 1.0
GFDL-Guru is "GFDL + version number or any later version"
GDFL-NonGuru is "GFDL version + version number" practically that means
"GFDL 1.2" (GFDL 1.3 has to be avoided because of its transfer
mechanism to Creative Commons)
Both the CC-BY-SA 1.0, and the strict GFDL 1.2 must be included in the
upload wizard.
The uploading tutorial should explain beginners the difference between
these licenses and the other licenses, enabling them to choose in full
knowledge of the facts.
(1) http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Discourse_on_Voluntary_Servitude
I was looking for something unrelated in the archives and came across an email
[1] that I believe people might find informative wrt to the Identification
Policy which I believe has had discussion tabled for the moment. It seems to be
the original suggestion that WMF needs some sort of identification policy by
then volunteer/board-member Erik. He was *not* a staff member at the time of
this message, just to be clear, since people seem to be fond of re-framing
debate along such lines lately. Summary of the context follows (Not perfectly
accurate chronologically speaking):
A female leader in the zh.WP community was harassed/threatened by the creation
of an account User:Rape[HerRealName]. Advice was sought in handling the
situation. There was talk about going to the authorities. There was talk about
which information about the account creator could be given to the authorities
under what circumstances. The existing privacy policy was quoted as "6 Where it
is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of the
Wikimedia Foundation, its users or the public." . There was talk about it
essentially being a matter of mature judgment to differentiate between
derogatory comments, which however reprehensible, do not merit violating a
user's privacy and threats of violence which would compel the violation of
privacy in order to attempt to prevent such threats from being carried out. The
idea was suggested that perhaps those with the technical ability to access
private information need to be identified to WMF so that WMF will know who deal
with in case of abuse.
It seemed to me that many people were quite surprised that the WMF was planning
on recording the identifications of those with access to private information,
instead on the non-recording of this correspondense which I believe has been the
previous practice. It even seemed to me as though some were shocked at the
implication that WMF may perhaps be looking for legal accountability for the
judgments made by those with this access. So I found it very interesting when I
stumbled across evidence of public discussion of the need to record the
identities of trusted users in order to be able to deal with any abuse of
private information by one of the Community-seat Board Members before the
adoption of the resolution that has become controversial so recently. I don't
mean to suggest that the surprise and shock were insincere, just that they seem
to be rather uninformed as to the genesis of the resolution. It seems to me
that those things were in fact the original intentions behind the resolution and
the staff does have an obligation, however unpopular this obligation may have
become during the time period it has been left unfulfilled, to see to recording
such identities.
Granted there are good reasons the obligation was left unfulfilled before,
namely the lack of confidence in the WMF Office's technical and organizational
ability to keep these records secure. But once the WMF Office reaches a level of
reliability in organizational and technical competence where that objection is
mitigated, they then must address their obligation to keep identification
records. Also there are valid concerns over the ambiguity over whether the
access to which particular tools should qualify people as subject to the
Identification Resolution. What, however, in hindsight do not appear to be valid
concerns to me are why the WMF "wants" to "change" things, or that the decision
to keep such records was not in given a proper public place for discussion.
I can imagine that the staff (who are much in contact with Erik who we must
grant understood the intentions of a resolution he himself suggested the seed of
in 2006) to some degree assumed that the trusted volunteers understood that the
Identification Resolution's ultimate goal was the production of records and that
practice of destroying correspondence was done out of responsibility for the
fact that staff did not feel confident in their current ability to keep such
records. I can also imagine the trusted volunteers who were upset by the idea
of such records being kept to some degree assumed because there has sometimes
been a practice of destroying identification correspondence that this practice
was in fact the agreed upon policy of the Identification Resolution and also
because they could not recall otherwise trusted volunteers to some degree
assumed the potential policy of actually keeping identification records and why
such records may be needed had never been brought up for public discussion until
after it had been adopted.
Certainly the exact thoughts and communications during this recent
misunderstanding were rather more varied, less articulated, and altogether a
shade more grey than my speculation. But I am confident that my speculations
are not entirely inaccurate and that they are completely in good faith. There
has recently been a lot of discussion about getting back to the tenet of
assuming good faith. Here is as a good a place to start that journey as any.
On the tabled issue we are still left at least two important questions that need
resolution through an open discussion that succeeds in convincing those
volunteers who may be affected:
*How can volunteers be made be confident in the security of their identification
as records are being collected, recorded, and stored? How can this confidence
be maintained changes occur at WMF? Do these concerns merit the expense of
security audits?
*What tools that volunteers use in order to do the work of WMF will require them
to become a subject of the Identification Resolution? As new tools are
developed, who will be responsible for keeping track of their existence and
seeing that it is determined whether or not those who will be given access to
them will need to become a subject of the Identification Resolution?
Birgitte SB
[1] http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/74095#74095
Upload wizard: the different attribution mechanisms and spirits of
GFDL and Creative Commons
Two small words make a big difference in the attribution mechanism of
CC-BY-SA : "if supplied" in
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode 4(c).
Put together with "designate another party or parties (...) for
attribution", this enables sharks to rob the small fishes'
attribution.
Actually they don't have to rob it. They can use an inequal power
relationship in their favor to persuade the small fish to waive their
attribution and to designate the sharks as the "attribution party".
The sharks can also add "You agree to be credited, at minimum, through
a hyperlink or URL when your contributions are reused in any form" on
edit boxes, or perhaps, even on upload wizards.
To the contrary, the sharks don't have such a possibility with the
GFDL. Because the GFDL requires to keep the license notice and the
history, sharks cannot rewrite history in their favor and erase the
small fishes' names.
Creative Commons is shark-friendly. GFDL is small-fish-friendly. This
is why they don't have the same spirit.
The upload wizard must guarantee that the uploader will be fully
attributed and MUST NOT require uploaders to waive their attribution
rights.
See also "If the sharks were people" by Bertholt Brecht at
http://everything2.com/title/If+the+Sharks+Were+People (and just add
"free" before "culture").
The Upload wizard distorts competition in favour of Creative Commons,
for the purpose of creating a monopoly (0).
Instead, it would be safer that for every file licensed under a
Creative Commons license, one licenses one other file under GFDL and
another file under "Art libre", "open
source music license", LGPL, etc.
One should not put all her eggs in the same basket(1), keeping open
the option to switch back to GFDL : one should keep a leverage to
pressure the Creative Commons
organization, at the very least to ensure that CC 4.0 won't be worse
than 3.0, and that 5.0 won't be worse than 4.0.
Instead of patching the holes in the CC-BY-SA, the Creative Commons
organization is supplying weapons to the ennemy.
CC Zero (2), perhaps named after Imperial Japan's fighter aircraft
(3), is a weapon of mass destruction against the attributive
share-alike community, putting the Creative
Commons organization on the side of those who want to reuse contents
without crediting the creators. As an open attack on moral rights,
that license is morally flawed.
Although they created the LGPL (more permissive, yet fully
attributive), the Free Software Foundation seems to present its
copyleft GPL license as its main license
representing their philosophy and what they fight for. On the other
hand, the Creative Commons organization has no philosophy and is
losing its soul.
If the Creative Commons guru decides that CC 4.0 is CC Zero, do we
have any legal tool to fight against it ? I am afraid we don't. This
would leave us nothing but our eyes
to cry with.
(0) http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia:Upload_wizard/Questions_%26_…
(1) I was objected some time ago that I use too many agricultural
metaphors. Sorry for this one again, but IANAEP : I am not an English
poet ;
(2) http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_A6M_Zero This one is not
an agricultural metaphor.
There are several drawbacks to the idea of splitting EN wiki by
project, and I suspect the drawbacks will be equally true in other
languages.
1 Not everything fits neatly once into one project. So an article
about a Chilean Volcano might be of interest to projects as diverse as
Vulcanology, Chile, Rockclimbing and Botany. Together that makes for a
much better general article than if each project was only writing
about its aspect of the mountain.
2 Gnomes are useful, and will work across all sorts of articles across
one wiki, whether it is resolving death anomalies, adding intrawiki
links or resolving obscure typos. If you split EN wiki into seven
hundred or so different specialist pedia I might stay involved in some
of them - but I have no real interest in Bollywood or anime; Yet I
have huge numbers of edits there dealing with actors who were
"staring" in particular movies and heroes who "posses" particular
abilities.
3 We need 24/7 cover for admins to delete attack pages and block
vandals, and though our number of active admins on EN wiki is falling
by 1% a month, at present we can still provide that cover almost all
the time. Divide us into several hundred projects and we lose that - I
have admin rights on a small wiki outside Wikimedia where vandalism
can be up for hours.
4 As for splitting off BLPs - that would be as arbitrary and
unsuccessful as if we split off a pedia about places, buildings or
articles beginning in R. An article about a Taiwanese Baseball player
is a biography, but more significantly it is about a Baseball player
and a Taiwanese one at that.
Wikipedia is an incredible example of how the sum can be greater than
the parts, and in some aspects of economies of scale. But there is
more than that it - having a general encyclopaedia interlinked and
organised the way we have almost inevitably lures people away from
their initial interest and into editing stuff they might never
otherwise have dreamed of getting involved in. If anyone had told me a
few years ago that I would voluntarily be editing stuff about sport,
weather or MilHist I would think they were mad. But I love being
involved in topics as diverse as King John, the Somerset levels and
Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Johnstown Inclined
Plane/archive1 If wikipedia had been fragmented by project I would
probably still be doing a daily Sudoku and my garden would be somewhat
better tended.
WereSpielChequers
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 5
> Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2011 15:35:39 -0500
> From: David Goodman <dggenwp(a)gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] breaking English Wikipedia apart
> To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
> <foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> <AANLkTi=rcoQVdkLa4mVFkaf2uEAUEOOJchx7os-EFvUp(a)mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> To the extent that the enWP is a project to build a practical
> encyclopedia, it seems to have been getting increased acceptance as it
> gets larger. There is no indication that this trend is ceasing or or
> even faltering.
>
> To the extent that WP is an experiment, the experiment has already
> succeeded beyond the limits of similar projects, and there is no
> reason to stop at this point. Predictions that there would be a size
> beyond which it no longer scales have so far all of them been wrong.
> Splitting the encyclopedia is irreversible--we can always decide to
> split, but it is very unlikely that after sections develop separately
> they will be able to recombine. But there is nothing to stop anyone
> from making a split if they desire while leaving the actual Wikipedia
> as it is. I think WP can only benefit from serious competition.
>
> I agree the role of the wikiprojects should be increased and perhaps
> formalized, but already over the last few years at the enWP, some
> of the various WikiProjects and less organized impromptu groups of
> people interested in various aspects have made decisions that the
> community has not supported. There is an advantage in having an
> Encyclopedia with uniform policies that have general agreement--people
> read it as a whole & have common expectations.
>
> And with respect to BLPs, the biographical information about living
> people permeates most areas of the Encyclopedia, not just the articles
> with a living person's name as the title.
>
>
> On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 7:33 PM, John Vandenberg <jayvdb(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>> Was: Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness (was: Missing Wikipedians: An Essay)
>> Was: Re: [Foundation-l] Friendliness
>>
>> On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 10:17 AM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
>>> On 2/25/11 3:11 PM, John Vandenberg wrote:
>>>> On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 11:18 PM, ?<dex2000(a)pc.dk> wrote:
>>>>> ..
>>>>> I think it could also be considered to divide our huge language wikis
>>>>> into smaller parts. The existing WikiProjects could be made virtual wikis
>>>>> with their own admins, recent changes etc. That way, each project is in
>>>>> fact like a small wiki to which the newbie could sign up according to
>>>>> 'hers' area of interest and where the clarrity and friendlier atmosphere
>>>>> of the smaller wikis could prevail.
>>>>
>>>> This is the best solution, in my opinion.
>>>
>>> Yes, the larger wikis need to become WikiProject-centric. First step in
>>> doing this would be to create a WikiProject namespace. Second step would
>>> be to make WikiProject article tagging/assessment part of the software
>>> instead of template-based.
>>
>> I can see how those would be useful steps, however I think those steps
>> are part of a 10 year plan.
>>
>> A 10 year plan will be overrun by events.
>>
>> We need a much more direct plan.
>>
>> I recommend breaking enWP apart by finding easy chunks and moving them
>> to a separate instance, and having readonly copies on the main project
>> like we do for File: pages from Commons.
>>
>> IMO, the simplest and most useful set of articles to break apart is BLPs.
>> The criteria is really simple, and those articles already have lots of
>> policy differences around them.
>>
>> By the time we have perfected this system with the BLPs, the community
>> will have come to understand the costs/benefits of moving other
>> clusters of articles to separate projects, and we'll see other
>> clusters of articles migrated to sub-projects.
>>
>> btw, this idea is not new, but maybe its time has come.
>> http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=29729
>>
>> --
>> John Vandenberg
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> foundation-l mailing list
>> foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
>> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>>
Here are some more details to flesh out my proposal for new admin creation.
Proposed rate of automatic new admin creation: 5% a month, until back to
early-Wikipedia proportions of admin number relative to edit rate.
Although this sounds a lot, it's only about 3 new admins a day.
---------------------
State transitions:
IP user
|
| Creates an account, passes captcha test
V
User
|
| Time passes
V
Autoconfirmed user
|
| Time passes. User gets chosen at random from pool of all editors,
followed by machine checking for good participation. The daily rate of
random selection is tuned to generate the correct rate of new admins
over the long term.
V
Proposed new admin
|
| Gets message. Sends a request message to a list. Any "old admin"
checks for human-like edits, then performs one-click action to issue
admin bit. If they don't respond within (say) two weeks, the invitation
is withdrawn, and they have to wait to be be drawn again at random.
V
New admin, with limited powers
|
| One year passes without being de-adminned
V
Old admin, with full powers
----------------------
Some possible machine-detectable criteria for "good participation",
based on edits:
* Account age: Has been a Wikipedia contributor for at least two years.
* Recent activity: Has made at least one edit in at least X days in the
last three months.
* Recent blocks: has not been blocked at all in the last year
* Responsiveness: Has edited a user page of an editor who has edited
their user page, at least Y times in the last three months.
* Edit comments: Has added a non-trivial edit comment to at least Z% of
their edits
* Namespaces: Has edited some balanced mix of articles, talk pages, user
talk pages, and project talk pages, within the last three months
Note that this is a satisficing activity -- the aim is not to find the
best editors, or to be fair, but just to select active Wikipedia
participants who know their way around, and are not misbehaving, and
then select some of them by lot.
The final test, for humanness, necessarily needs to be performed by a
human being, to avoid the threat of bots gaming the system, but, if as
suggested above, there are only about three or four candidates proposed
each day.
Note also that almost this process can be implemented in a bot,
independently of the actual wikipedia software itself.
-- Neil
All,
The Election is almost coming to an end. Kindly cast you vote if you havent
already.
Thanks.
Regards,
Jyothis.
http://www.Jyothis.net
My Malayalam Wikipedia page <http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jyothis>
Metawiki page <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jyothis>
I am the first customer of http://www.netdotnet.com
My toolserver tools <http://toolserver.org/~jyothis>
woods are lovely dark and deep,
but i have promises to keep and
miles to go before i sleep and
*lines to go before I press sleep*
completion date = (start date + ((estimated effort x 3.1415926) / resources)
+ ((total coffee breaks x 0.25) / 24)) + Effort in meetings
>
> This is to some degree a question of balance in approach.
>
> Every day, thousands of absolutely idiotic, non notable articles get
> started that really have no point or hope. Every day, new page
> patrollers find (most) of those, and they go "kerpoof". It would
> largely be a waste of time to prod them, mark them "citation needed"
> talk to the new user. The user never had any intention of
> contributing legitimately to an online information resource /
> encyclopedia, they're just trying to insult/promote/blab about their
> friend/school/work/favorite whatever.
>
> We could emphasize a more positive engagement intended to get the
> message to these people about what an encyclopedia is, what Wikipedia
> is, and what contributions would be appropriate. But by and large
> these driveby contributions aren't intended to really stick. They're
> an advanced form of vandalism, and the perpetrators know it.
>
That's what I though: "There is too much garbage coming in, too few admins
to police. There is no way that we can deal with this other than nuke on
sight and who cares about collateral damage -- we have a war to fight!"
Then one day I stumbled upon Distributed Proofreaders (
http://www.pgdp.net/c/) and proofread a few pages. I couple days later I
received *three* *personalized* welcoming messages & evaluations "this is
what you got right, this is what you should improve". I was shocked. These
people are overworked, they have huge backlogs, they are stricter about
quality than the pickiest FAC reviewer, yet three of them found time,
energy, and good will to write lengthy personalized messages for a newbie
who reviewed 30 book pages... If it was Wikipedia and I was a newbie with 30
edits, best case scenario I would have been slapped with {{welcome}} and my
articles with endless variations of {{cleanup}}. This opened my eyes that
there *is* an alternative -- an unthinkable idea for someone born and raised
up in the Wikipedia battlefield zone.
The core of Wikipedia culture is battleground: fight vandals, nuke their
articles, whack them and quick! Yes, it is important for the integrity of
the encyclopedia. Yes, spam was prophesied to be the end of Wikipedia. But
what will surely kill it is lack of participation. And we are killing the
participation by whacking it with deletions, clean ups, bans, etc.
We have to make a profound choice in the culture here:
1) we continue with the whacking and scaring the newbies away (content
priority #1, people #2), or
2) we embrace the newbies and we let some spam through (people priority #1,
content #2).
So far we are steadily moving along the first route. I believe, it is time
we switch the priorities. People are important. It's the people who will be
creating content in the future, and not the other way around. Wikipedia will
inevitably fail without participation. And content... we are already the
largest and the best...
Renata
In a message dated 2/25/2011 3:12:17 PM Pacific Standard Time,
jayvdb(a)gmail.com writes:
> At the moment, we need admins who press buttons more than we need to
> welcome new users. It is unfortunate, but that is how it is.
> We need to find ways of reducing the amount of work needed, or
> radically increase the number of admins. >>
>
I have to respectfully disagree with John.
IMHO we need a more welcoming environment to new editors.
The idea that the vast majority of new contributors contribute nonsense, or
vandalize is in my opinion, not a well-founded claim.
I would agree with a statement like the vast majority of new contributors
don't really understand the now-Byzantine rule system in place, which is a
completely different situation.
I also agree that our templates make the I.R.S. appear friendly, and that
our user outreach is close to non-existent.
Whatever happened to the "Please Come Back" campaign which was seemingly
moribund before even getting launched ?
It's fine to say nothing's wrong as the Titanic sinks, but it's still
sinking.
W