2011/6/17 Strainu <strainu10(a)gmail.com>om>: 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 Strainu <strainu10(a)gmail.com>om>: 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

2011/6/17 Lodewijk <lodewijk(a)effeietsanders.org>rg>: You guessed correctly. 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?

2011/6/17 Peter Gervai <grinapo(a)gmail.com>om>: 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. 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 06/17/11 7:15 AM, Amir E. Aharoni wrote: 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. 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

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. 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: 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 Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 13:56, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: 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. --  byte-byte,     grin

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 &lt;chiesa.marco(a)gmail.com&gt;

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_… 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_Researchin… 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 &lt;saintonge(a)telus.net&gt;

On 17 June 2011 16:08, Marco Chiesa &lt;chiesa.marco(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: 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.

On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 6:26 AM, David Gerard &lt;dgerard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: 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. A fair comparision, though as with Wikipedia editions I think this varies by language. Sam.