The problem of content ownership hits any wiki at some point.
In the English Wikipedia it is governed by a policy called "WP:OWN" [1]. There's a similar policy in the Hebrew Wikipedia. Is this policy any different in other projects?
I am asking, because i agree with the English Wikipedia's policy in principle, but the reality is that sometimes instead of helping people write together, this policy drives people away from the project - people who could be very positive contributors, but who don't like their contributions edited by others without being asked. So i am wondering: maybe en.wp and he.wp can learn something from other languages here?
Thank you,
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ownership_of_articles
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com "We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace." - T. Moore
I think that such a policy could not be fundamentally different in other languages, since they all have the same license. However, the wording could be improved, for instance by explaining WHY one cannot consider himself as the owner of an article: by accepting the CC-BY-SA license, one gives up a significant amount of the rights and control offered by copyright laws. And this is not only from a legal POV, this is also true from a common sense perspective: more people approaching a problem often lead to better result than a single individual trying to solve that problem.
From what I see, presenting the rule, but not the reasons behind it,
is the main problem of the English version of WP:OWN.
Strainu
2011/6/17 Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il:
The problem of content ownership hits any wiki at some point.
In the English Wikipedia it is governed by a policy called "WP:OWN" [1]. There's a similar policy in the Hebrew Wikipedia. Is this policy any different in other projects?
I am asking, because i agree with the English Wikipedia's policy in principle, but the reality is that sometimes instead of helping people write together, this policy drives people away from the project - people who could be very positive contributors, but who don't like their contributions edited by others without being asked. So i am wondering: maybe en.wp and he.wp can learn something from other languages here?
Thank you,
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ownership_of_articles
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com "We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace." - T. Moore
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2011/6/17 Strainu strainu10@gmail.com:
I think that such a policy could not be fundamentally different in other languages, since they all have the same license. However, the wording could be improved, for instance by explaining WHY one cannot consider himself as the owner of an article: by accepting the CC-BY-SA license, one gives up a significant amount of the rights and control offered by copyright laws.
It's not so much about CC-BY-SA as it is about the fact that it's a wiki, where content is constantly changed by different people. This breaks the usual idea of authorship and makes quite a lot of people terribly uncomfortable and sometimes even violent. It's unpleasant, but i understand how their feel and i want to find a way to work with them.
But since you mention licensing, one possible solution to this problem that i though of is to suggest such people write their content on some other website where others can't change their text, but to release it as CC-BY-SA, so Wikipedia would be able to use. That could be a good use case for a project like Knol, which was advertised as "Wikipedia killer" once, but didn't grow much. Used wisely, these Wikipedia and Knol could actually help each other grow. This would cause forking, of course, but forking isn't really bad - a forked freely-licensed article is better than no freely-licensed article.
This solution is far from perfect, of course, because many people want Their articles on The Wikipedia, not on some other non-notable website...
2011/6/17 Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il:
2011/6/17 Strainu strainu10@gmail.com:
I think that such a policy could not be fundamentally different in other languages, since they all have the same license. However, the wording could be improved, for instance by explaining WHY one cannot consider himself as the owner of an article: by accepting the CC-BY-SA license, one gives up a significant amount of the rights and control offered by copyright laws.
It's not so much about CC-BY-SA as it is about the fact that it's a wiki, where content is constantly changed by different people. This breaks the usual idea of authorship and makes quite a lot of people terribly uncomfortable and sometimes even violent. It's unpleasant, but i understand how their feel and i want to find a way to work with them.
Well, a wiki promotes a certain way of collaborating, but that is not always sufficient. Think about a CC-BY-NC-ND wiki. Theoretically, one could only add content to that wiki, not edit what has already been written. Also, there are many © wikis, used only as CMSs, not to collaborate. That's why I believe that WP:OWN would be much harder to justify if we wouldn't be using CC-BY-SA.
Anyhow, my previous email presents a problem seen in many policies on multiple languages. Experienced wikimedians refer to policies with ease, by using shortcuts and assuming that the discussion partner knows what the policy is about. More often than not, this is not the case. This problem has been raised many times before and will probably be raised again in the future. It is in no way specific to WP:OWN.
Strainu
2011/6/17 Strainu strainu10@gmail.com:
Think about a CC-BY-NC-ND wiki. Theoretically, one could only add content to that wiki, not edit what has already been written.
Actually, I'm not even sure you could add content to articles on a CC-BY-NC-ND wiki. Would have to check with a lawyer...
Strainu
I guess that Amir was rather referring to the cultural aspect than the legal aspect. Even if you are legally allowed to change something, that doesnt mean the original author likes it. I assume that all Wiki projects have this culture in them, that nobody "owns" an article - this doesn't mean however that there are no exceptions (people who think they are exceptions or policies allowing temporary exceptions to be able to make a nice draft - for example in ones own usernamespace).
Amir, is there a specific background that you are thinking of which is why you are asking this? Maybe that helps people answering your question.
Best,
Lodewijk
2011/6/17 Strainu strainu10@gmail.com
2011/6/17 Strainu strainu10@gmail.com:
Think about a CC-BY-NC-ND wiki. Theoretically, one could only add content to that wiki, not edit what has already been written.
Actually, I'm not even sure you could add content to articles on a CC-BY-NC-ND wiki. Would have to check with a lawyer...
Strainu
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2011/6/17 Lodewijk lodewijk@effeietsanders.org:
I guess that Amir was rather referring to the cultural aspect than the legal aspect.
You guessed correctly.
Amir, is there a specific background that you are thinking of which is why you are asking this? Maybe that helps people answering your question.
Nothing in particular. Dozens of times every day i edit articles in which i see mistakes. Usually nobody complains, but sometimes the people who wrote most of the article get very upset about the fact that i touched it at all and send me messages saying this. I used to reply and politely explain that that, by definition, is the way wikis work and to cite WP:OWN or its Hebrew counterpart. Sometimes it helps, but sometimes it makes the person even more upset.
In such cases, as an Israeli saying goes, i am right, but i am not clever. It hurts that person and it hurts the project, because that person may otherwise be a very valuable contributor and such things often make people resign. And every time it happens i spend months thinking how i could avoid it.
Of course, i am not the only person to whom this happens and Hebrew and English are not the only languages in which this happens.
So, are we doomed to experience such things every once in a while? Or does anyone have a bright idea about improving the balance between ownership and wiki-ness?
On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 15:24, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
In such cases, as an Israeli saying goes, i am right, but i am not clever. It hurts that person and it hurts the project, because that person may otherwise be a very valuable contributor and such things often make people resign. And every time it happens i spend months thinking how i could avoid it.
I am not sure it is a valuable contributor who do not accept the base of the community work, who do not spend time to understand the legal license what is being used publishing and don't even take the time to listen to others.
S/he may be a future valuable contributor after serious education. Time. Energy.
So, are we doomed to experience such things every once in a while?
Definitely. People fight WARS over ownership of nothings. We're a pretty stupid, stubborn race. You know that very well in Israel. ;-)
Or does anyone have a bright idea about improving the balance between ownership and wiki-ness?
Apart from starting their own projects, I don't think so.
grin
2011/6/17 Peter Gervai grinapo@gmail.com:
On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 15:24, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
In such cases, as an Israeli saying goes, i am right, but i am not clever. It hurts that person and it hurts the project, because that person may otherwise be a very valuable contributor and such things often make people resign. And every time it happens i spend months thinking how i could avoid it.
I am not sure it is a valuable contributor who do not accept the base of the community work, who do not spend time to understand the legal license what is being used publishing and don't even take the time to listen to others.
Well, yes, but this solution is too easy.
This can be a valuable contributor, because he has extensive knowledge about a certain topic and has the time and the skill to write about it. We have a community tradition of doing things wiki way, but people who don't like the wiki idea can still be excellent physicist, historians or engineers, and we should want them to write for our projects.
Experts with writing skills can find other venues to publish their writings. It is us who want to publish these writings more widely and with a free license - "freely share in the sum of all knowledge". So we need them more than they need us.
S/he may be a future valuable contributor after serious education. Time. Energy.
Again, it's true, but in practice i feel too awkward to "educate" a person who is often older and much more educated than i am.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com "We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace." - T. Moore
On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 16:15, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
2011/6/17 Peter Gervai grinapo@gmail.com:
On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 15:24, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
I am not sure it is a valuable contributor who do not accept the base of the community work, who do not spend time to understand the legal license what is being used publishing and don't even take the time to listen to others.
Well, yes, but this solution is too easy.
By no means is this a solution, I just clearing the meaning of the terms. :-)
This can be a valuable contributor, because he has extensive knowledge about a certain topic and has the time and the skill to write about it. We have a community tradition of doing things wiki way, but people who don't like the wiki idea can still be excellent physicist, historians or engineers, and we should want them to write for our projects.
This _could_ be a valuable contributor in the future. He is not at the moment, since not understanding the basic principles means continuous conflicts with _everyone_.
Experts are great possible valuable contributors, right after they understand and accept the wiki way. See below.
Experts with writing skills can find other venues to publish their writings. It is us who want to publish these writings more widely and with a free license - "freely share in the sum of all knowledge". So we need them more than they need us.
In my experience there are two kinds of experts, and both sets are nice persons, to note it as the first thing, and they have low amount of free time both, which they intend to spend productively.
One kind loves to share knowledge, to correct others' mistakes and don't worry about copyrights. These people are usually already valuable contributors, only mildly annoyed by being corrected by amateurs (or worse, the lunatics).
The other kind have vast experience, is very important person globally or in his/her fields (collected prizes, scientific degrees, etc.) and publishes extensively, possibly earning money on the way. This kind wants to share his knowledge but expects humble respect from the others, and understanding silence from the unskilled masses. They are usually very picky about publishing rights, and find it unacceptable that someone modifies their work, not to mention correcting it.
This second kind is a very hard problem. Some of them will never be a wikipedia contributor, because they understand and reject free license. We have to respect their opinion and accept the decision, maybe try convincing them to change their view from time to time. But some of them are willing to publish but have to be educated about the way the free world works, about its pros and cons, whys and hows. I do not think educating a scientific genius about a community is outrageous; they usually willing to familiarize with new concepts. And we really have to spend time and energy to explain to them, to answer their questions and respond to their doubts. We - locally - have some editors who are willing to communicate with the scientific and literary people to help them get the point, and often it works out well, and sometimes it isn't be because they find it unacceptable to debate with an idiot or two, which occasionally happens. But if other editors willing to help to fend off idiots and let them concentrate on real talk between working editors then it could work.
And be bold. :-) You're knowledgeable enough to teach anyone how free licensed content works. Most experts are oblivious about this topic.
S/he may be a future valuable contributor after serious education. Time. Energy.
Again, it's true, but in practice i feel too awkward to "educate" a person who is often older and much more educated than i am.
Don't. The real smart people want to know new ways. Give them respect but be confident that you know the community better.
Peter Hungary
On 06/17/11 7:15 AM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
2011/6/17 Peter Gervaigrinapo@gmail.com:
On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 15:24, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
In such cases, as an Israeli saying goes, i am right, but i am not clever. It hurts that person and it hurts the project, because that person may otherwise be a very valuable contributor and such things often make people resign. And every time it happens i spend months thinking how i could avoid it.
I am not sure it is a valuable contributor who do not accept the base of the community work, who do not spend time to understand the legal license what is being used publishing and don't even take the time to listen to others.
This can be a valuable contributor, because he has extensive knowledge about a certain topic and has the time and the skill to write about it. We have a community tradition of doing things wiki way, but people who don't like the wiki idea can still be excellent physicist, historians or engineers, and we should want them to write for our projects.
Experts with writing skills can find other venues to publish their writings. It is us who want to publish these writings more widely and with a free license - "freely share in the sum of all knowledge". So we need them more than they need us
Non-ownership is an absolutely essential part of wiki work. While it may be tempting to link this to the notion of "ND" licences, those licences are really only about how the work is used downstream by other websites or publishers.
The site is about the contents, not its writers. The writing is about the science and the history, not about the scientist or the historian. If we were to accept that the writings of some contributors were sacred, whose point of view prevails in determining which shall be so privileged?
If their egos feel bruised because we do not accept their gospel, that's their problem not ours. If they have other venues for exercising their expertise, they're welcome to go there. We don't need them that badly.
Of course we don't want random idiots messing things up. Others should be prepared to confront the idiots, and not leave the lone expert flailing in the wind. Nevertheless, we should not be prepared to jump to the conclusion that every amateur is an idiot.
S/he may be a future valuable contributor after serious education. Time. Energy.
Again, it's true, but in practice i feel too awkward to "educate" a person who is often older and much more educated than i am.
What's "more educated?" It seems more quantitative than qualitative. The intimidation that you cite does happen, but that does not make it right. Respect for expertise should not be blind.
Ec
On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 8:24 AM, Amir E. Aharoni < amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
So, are we doomed to experience such things every once in a while? Or does anyone have a bright idea about improving the balance between ownership and wiki-ness?
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Speaking for the en.wp and OTRS volunteer perspective, this breaks down into three subtopics:
1. Fancruft, as we impolitely call it. 2. Professional/amateur specialists. 3. Living persons issues.
In each of the three cases, the big warning is intimidating and causes a negative reaction. People do not like to be warned when they are invited to edit, and they do not like to see content removed when they do not even know how to check a history page- which is simple but complicated at the same time. So we do have negative feedback and there are surely unthought of ways to help this.
The warnings on en.wp, because of its size and notoriety, need such a warning in some form. I'd rather have someone look for help pointers (like we provide) when feeling discouraged to get personal contact. We don't have raw data, but I'm sure that most that encounter this just leave and don't say boo. Again, we're speaking about the English Wikipedia, where authors with potential ownership issues are much more community managed because of popularity.
(All in my opinion from experience) So for fancruft, these users generally stick around. Specialists are more accepting of the community and get frustrated but still don't give up, and BLP subjects are either drastically confused or bound and determined to own the article. We work with them no matter the context when they seek the help.
We don't have a static system, it really depends on the project.
There are some technology changes that could make this much easier.
1) make it easy to see *your last version* of an article when you visit it. 2) provide a link to 'diffs since your last edit' 2.1) provide a way to comment directly on that diff, without having to laboriously cut and paste 3) make it easy to snapshot a version of a page and put it in [your userspace] for future work. For instance, there could be a one-click "move this revision to the same name in my userspace" button which would let you work on a set of ideas over time even if you had disagreements with others editing the article in a different direction. Once you were done, of course, you would still have to work out if or how to marge those changes back into the original 4) have an entire tag-set and cleanup section for "articles for merging" to address merge problems. 4.1) under the present process, the # of people who try to reach consensus on merge conflicts a) are few in number; there is nothing like an AfD cycle to bring in new eyes all the time; and b) work with tiny changes, so a 3-person team can simply shut down all incremental changes from someone whose changes they don't understand. Naturally frustrating.
Nothing in particular. Dozens of times every day i edit articles in which i see mistakes. Usually nobody complains, but sometimes the people who wrote most of the article get very upset about the fact that i touched it at all and send me messages saying this. I used to reply and politely explain that that, by definition, is the way wikis work and to cite WP:OWN or its Hebrew counterpart. Sometimes it helps, but sometimes it makes the person even more upset.
In such cases, as an Israeli saying goes, i am right, but i am not clever.
There's a tech/policy change that could make this easier:
Allow revisions to be named. We already allow multiple versions in a fundamental way - past revisions are kept forever. But we make it particularly hard to access them. By allowing revisions to have names or tags, we could make the sort of concern Amir mentions above help improve the project in a positive way, adding additional useful information for readers.
For instance, ARTICLE?u=amir could show the last revision edited by Amir, ARTICLE?t=good could show the last revision expressly marked as 'good' or better quality, ARTICLE?t=eb1911 could be the last revision tagged as 'from the 1911 Britannica' before it started to be significantly modified. Flagged revs could become a feature that chooses a tagset (beyond the most chronologically recent rev) used to decide what most visitors are shown when they visit a page. Users with accounts could choose their own default tagset.
The hard problem would remain deciding what the 99% of visitors who aren't logged in see when they visit a page -- the sort of decision that the flaggedrev feature determines, combined with editorial work of updating the article.
Apostolis writes:
If wikipedia allowed articles to be forked and defined a trust metric that showed which article is more trustworthy, that would solve both previous problems and would also have contradictory ideas together, thus allowing people to have their own opinion about those different opinions and wikipedia wouldnt need to hide the strugle behind curtains.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_in_research#Web_Researching...
Of course, this trust metric would have to be personalized, ie give different values depending on who the user trusts.
That's a slightly more radical proposal, but the basic idea of not hiding the struggle of assumptions and opinions from readers is important. Just as we try to recognize significant views within an article as neutral, we should recognize differing trust networks and opinions of reliability. This shoudl both make certain editorial work less burdensome, and provide more information [rather than forcing certain kinds of competing information to fight it out until one side is exhausted or defeated.]
SJ
On 17 June 2011 12:29, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
That could be a good use case for a project like Knol, which was advertised as "Wikipedia killer" once, but didn't grow much.
Minor note: as far as I know, *no-one* from Knol/Google ever claimed it had anything to do with WIkipedia. The entire notion appeared to me to have arisen in the technical press in the week after Knol's announcement, apparently on the basis that both were written by unfiltered contributors, which was still a radical notion to the press at the time. The comparison stuck, but I know of no evidence that that was the intention.
- d.
On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 13:56, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
use case for a project like Knol, which was advertised as "Wikipedia killer" once, but didn't grow much.
Minor note: as far as I know, *no-one* from Knol/Google ever claimed it had anything to do with WIkipedia. The entire notion appeared to me to have arisen in the technical press in the week after Knol's announcement, apparently on the basis that both were written by unfiltered contributors, which was still a radical notion to the press at the time. The comparison stuck, but I know of no evidence that that was the intention.
As a miscellaneous minor addition I'd say that in one point of view (where someone accepts the fact that google intends not to do evil) google hardly ever create a new feature to kill others but to satisfy their own needs to have it, either by technically or business-wise (eg. when they wanted to have the feature and the already existing technology owner don't want to sell it :)). So in that point of view I'd say there isn't really anything they release with the purpose of killing anyone in particular (much to the contrary of some of their rivals I'd prefer not to name here).
However this doesn't change the fact that this may very well result the smaller, original service to stagnate, lose population or die entirely, just because the movement of interest of the people. This have happened by their search engine (anyone remembers the name "Altavista"? Excite?), and may well happen again in the future. Wikipedia is, however, a pretty strong feature, with large, active community and pretty well defined and working workflows (with their own problems, yes, but it is pretty good anyway). It requires something extraordinary to move such amounts of people over, probably along the way of grabbing the current database and make something very new out of it. I don't expect this to happen soon.
Well regarding the original question, the mentioned policy is just a human readable translation of the license, or the effects of it. Creating free content means basically to disown it, to release modification rights, and to accept the fact that anyone can fork it, change it or incorporate it. In exchange of this you get free access to the work of OTHERS with the same freedom, and you act as a catalyser for more free content to be created. That is the deal, regardless of the phrasing of this or any similar "policies".
You release your rights to disallow others to use your content for (almost) whatever they please.
On 6/17/11, Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:
I think that such a policy could not be fundamentally different in other languages, since they all have the same license. However, the wording could be improved, for instance by explaining WHY one cannot consider himself as the owner of an article: by accepting the CC-BY-SA license, one gives up a significant amount of the rights and control offered by copyright laws. And this is not only from a legal POV, this is also true from a common sense perspective: more people approaching a problem often lead to better result than a single individual trying to solve that problem.
To be honest, when you release your work under cc-by-sa you grant a third party the right to reuse a (small or large) part of your work to make a derivative work. The license in itself is not what determines that the live version of a Wikipedia article is the last one, this happens because of Wikipedia policies. And of course, your (old) version is not deleted from the article history apart from a few cases. The point is: Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia, if people don't accept this they can always publish somewhere else. Cruccone
I am a bit biased since I have a project to add a trust metric on mediawiki but I think that content ownership is important. It lets us evaluate the content without reading it which is important to most of us who are only experts on one subject. Of course that poses the question why Knol didnt succeed as much as Wikimedia. I am in favor of forking articles, maybe though knol didnt have a good trust metric to help people choose between forked articles. In any case, if someone doesnt want other to change their articles, the best thing that could be done is forking the article. That of course is against the way Wikimedia works.
http://opensociety.referata.com/wiki/Main_Page http://opensociety.referata.com/wiki/Main_Page 2011/6/17 Marco Chiesa chiesa.marco@gmail.com
On 6/17/11, Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:
I think that such a policy could not be fundamentally different in other languages, since they all have the same license. However, the wording could be improved, for instance by explaining WHY one cannot consider himself as the owner of an article: by accepting the CC-BY-SA license, one gives up a significant amount of the rights and control offered by copyright laws. And this is not only from a legal POV, this is also true from a common sense perspective: more people approaching a problem often lead to better result than a single individual trying to solve that problem.
To be honest, when you release your work under cc-by-sa you grant a third party the right to reuse a (small or large) part of your work to make a derivative work. The license in itself is not what determines that the live version of a Wikipedia article is the last one, this happens because of Wikipedia policies. And of course, your (old) version is not deleted from the article history apart from a few cases. The point is: Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia, if people don't accept this they can always publish somewhere else. Cruccone
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On 06/17/11 5:01 PM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis wrote:
I am a bit biased since I have a project to add a trust metric on mediawiki but I think that content ownership is important. It lets us evaluate the content without reading it which is important to most of us who are only experts on one subject.
Somebody should still have to read the article to apply the trust metric. What are the criteria for the trust metric. Ultimately they are statistical determinations with stated deviations.
In any case, if someone doesnt want other to change their articles, the best thing that could be done is forking the article. That of course is against the way Wikimedia works.
Yes, I would encourage more forks, but how is it anti-wiki for them to start their own site?
Ec
The fact that the truth is determined by consensus between experts and unknowledgeable or between people with contrary ideas is a problem.
It is not a process that derives the truth since the truth is defined by the many, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_in_research#Wikipedia.27s_P...
or the more powerful. That leads to power struggles which many just dont want to fight. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_Wikipedia#Editorial_process
If wikipedia allowed articles to be forked and defined a trust metric that showed which article is more trustworthy, that would solve both previous problems and would also have contradictory ideas together, thus allowing people to have their own opinion about those different opinions and wikipedia wouldnt need to hide the strugle behind curtains.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_in_research#Web_Researching...
Of course, this trust metric would have to be personalized, ie give different values depending on who the user trusts.
Why do we need trust?
Let me just make a simple example. There is an architect , a doctor and an economist each writing an article on their fields. Each one of them wants to read the others article. They are unable to verify it is correct information because they are only experts on their field. How do they solve this problem? Well they use different skills, they don't judge the article, they try to check the person's credibility. My metric tries to use social relations so as to help people that have no knowledge about a specific subject judge the experts.
The absence of knowledge in all fields makes trust a necessity. Controversial topics also necessitate the existence of different articles.
I do agree though that knowledge is not a property of anyone other than humanity.
2011/6/18 Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net
On 06/17/11 5:01 PM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis wrote:
I am a bit biased since I have a project to add a trust metric on
mediawiki
but I think that content ownership is important. It lets us evaluate the content without reading it which is important to most of us who are only experts on one subject.
Somebody should still have to read the article to apply the trust metric. What are the criteria for the trust metric. Ultimately they are statistical determinations with stated deviations.
In any case, if someone doesnt want other to change their articles, the best thing that could be done is forking the article. That
of
course is against the way Wikimedia works.
Yes, I would encourage more forks, but how is it anti-wiki for them to start their own site?
Ec
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On 06/18/11 3:28 PM, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis wrote:
The fact that the truth is determined by consensus between experts and unknowledgeable or between people with contrary ideas is a problem.
It is not a process that derives the truth since the truth is defined by the many, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_in_research#Wikipedia.27s_P...
or the more powerful. That leads to power struggles which many just dont want to fight. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_of_Wikipedia#Editorial_process
If wikipedia allowed articles to be forked and defined a trust metric that showed which article is more trustworthy, that would solve both previous problems and would also have contradictory ideas together, thus allowing people to have their own opinion about those different opinions and wikipedia wouldnt need to hide the strugle behind curtains.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_in_research#Web_Researching...
Of course, this trust metric would have to be personalized, ie give different values depending on who the user trusts.
The best trust metric would need to be DEpersonalized. If trusting an article depends on who wrote it the situation becomes too quickly partisan. Even if experts are to be given greater weight in the metric there should be a firewall between those experts, and the ultimate metric. Crowd sourcing needs to be about everyone participating in both writing and evaluating articles. I often feel that the obsession that some Wikipedians harbour for perfect6ion can be counterproductive.
The paragraph you cite begins with "Not too many years ago, people looking for information typically researched one place: Google." That statement is a load of crap. Whatever happened to books and libraries? With the advent of Google did research really become so shallow? Where is the depth of understanding? What are the article's authors trying to accomplish with cutesy word play between "producers" and "produsers"?
Why do we need trust?
Let me just make a simple example. There is an architect , a doctor and an economist each writing an article on their fields. Each one of them wants to read the others article. They are unable to verify it is correct information because they are only experts on their field. How do they solve this problem? Well they use different skills, they don't judge the article, they try to check the person's credibility. My metric tries to use social relations so as to help people that have no knowledge about a specific subject judge the experts.
The absence of knowledge in all fields makes trust a necessity. Controversial topics also necessitate the existence of different articles.
I do agree though that knowledge is not a property of anyone other than humanity.
I don't dispute the need for trust. I merely dispute that it should be based solely on the *opinions* of experts. We would do better to foster critical thinking on the part of students, and that is woefully lacking in today's educational environment. It is so much easier to take the words of experts as authority. Maybe too, we need to reconsider the entire epistemological framework of a site like Wikipedia at a very deep level.
Ec
On 17 June 2011 16:08, Marco Chiesa chiesa.marco@gmail.com wrote:
To be honest, when you release your work under cc-by-sa you grant a third party the right to reuse a (small or large) part of your work to make a derivative work. The license in itself is not what determines that the live version of a Wikipedia article is the last one, this happens because of Wikipedia policies. And of course, your (old) version is not deleted from the article history apart from a few cases. The point is: Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia, if people don't accept this they can always publish somewhere else.
Indeed. "No ownership of articles" does not follow from the licence - it's just the way things happen to be done on Wikipedia.
For comparison, I understand that Wikibooks are considered somewhat "owned" by the person starting the book.
- d.
Ray, I agree with you. The trust metric is not meant to substitute critical thinking.
What I try to do seems to me quite interesting.Google uses links between pages to rank them. This metric uses links between people to rank pages. It is intended as a search engine. What is more, links between people have semantic meaning and pages have properties.
2011/6/19 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com
On 17 June 2011 16:08, Marco Chiesa chiesa.marco@gmail.com wrote:
To be honest, when you release your work under cc-by-sa you grant a third party the right to reuse a (small or large) part of your work to make a derivative work. The license in itself is not what determines that the live version of a Wikipedia article is the last one, this happens because of Wikipedia policies. And of course, your (old) version is not deleted from the article history apart from a few cases. The point is: Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia, if people don't accept this they can always publish somewhere else.
Indeed. "No ownership of articles" does not follow from the licence - it's just the way things happen to be done on Wikipedia.
For comparison, I understand that Wikibooks are considered somewhat "owned" by the person starting the book.
- d.
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On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 6:26 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 17 June 2011 16:08, Marco Chiesa chiesa.marco@gmail.com wrote:
To be honest, when you release your work under cc-by-sa you grant a third party the right to reuse a (small or large) part of your work to make a derivative work. The license in itself is not what determines that the live version of a Wikipedia article is the last one, this happens because of Wikipedia policies. And of course, your (old) version is not deleted from the article history apart from a few cases. The point is: Wikipedia is a collaborative encyclopedia, if people don't accept this they can always publish somewhere else.
Indeed. "No ownership of articles" does not follow from the licence - it's just the way things happen to be done on Wikipedia.
I believe this was Amir's original point - he was asking for examples from other projects where different social norms had had different (better?) results.
For comparison, I understand that Wikibooks are considered somewhat "owned" by the person starting the book.
A fair comparision, though as with Wikipedia editions I think this varies by language.
Sam.
I've had a go at some basic editing to the [[WP:OWN]] page to try and explain a bit better, rather than simply saying "IF YOU EDIT, YOU DO NOT OWN THE PAGE!" It still needs considerable work. Eyeballs and improvements...?
FT2
On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 11:50 AM, Amir E. Aharoni < amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
The problem of content ownership hits any wiki at some point.
In the English Wikipedia it is governed by a policy called "WP:OWN" [1]. There's a similar policy in the Hebrew Wikipedia. Is this policy any different in other projects?
I am asking, because i agree with the English Wikipedia's policy in principle, but the reality is that sometimes instead of helping people write together, this policy drives people away from the project - people who could be very positive contributors, but who don't like their contributions edited by others without being asked. So i am wondering: maybe en.wp and he.wp can learn something from other languages here?
Thank you,
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ownership_of_articles
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com "We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace." - T. Moore
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