Erik Moeller wrote:
On 7/30/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Citations and verifiability are absolutely essential to the credibility of Wikipedia and its sister projects. Nevertheless, a person undertaking to substantiate his contributions should not need a professional librarianship background to do so. Any manner of clearly identifying the source should be acceptable.
Absolutely. However, we should also make the tools of professional referencing as easy to use as possible. You're right on that freely available (not necessarily freely licensed) content will be the first to be referenced. Thus, it is likely that Wikimedia will become both a primary beneficiary and driving force of the open access movement.
I can be patient.
What is saddening to me is that even better referencing tools and systematic source checking processes will likely not be sufficient to deal adequately with the vast amounts of knowledge that is _not_ free or not even digital. Indeed, already today, I've seen quite a lot of cases where Wikipedians have reacted with intense frustration to the citation of sources that they could not verify simply by following a link.
That's not just sad; it's scary. It's on a par with saying, "If it's on the internet it must be true." It reflects a series of tendencies in the developed world with profound societal effects. When the most important factor for gaining knowledge is convenience it puts us on track for a Fahrenheit-451 kind of world. And I'm sure there is a certain segment of society that will be quite happy to encourage the people to take their new form of opium.
One of my great hopes is that a broad international coalition of NGOs will eventually emerge to call for harmonization of copyright terms to a reasonable length. Perhaps Wikimedia could be part of such a coalition. If I look at the fantastic work Project Gutenberg is doing on even the most obscure publications, I cannot begin to imagine the profound effects on our culture it would have if copyright would last, say, 14 years, with the option to renew for another 14: http://creativecommons.org/projects/founderscopyright/
Reducing the terms of copyright back to a reasonable level will be an uphill fight, and the way some of our collegues bend over to prevent the least suggestion of a copyright violation and stay law abiding does not give me a lot of hope.
Ec