[Foundation-l] Projekt: OpenCritics (let's free subjective content, too!!)

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Georg von Zimmermann

29 Aug 2009 29 Aug '09

6:52 a.m.

Dear “Wikipedians”, please allow us to introduce a project we have been working on for about a year now: Explaining the importance of the open-source movement for a free internet or the importance of Wikipedia (i.e. free content in the form of factual knowledge) here would be like carrying coals to Newcastle. The question, however, is why has *subjective* open content been neglected so far? In the realm of user reviews and ratings we have pretty much forfeited to closed systems like Amazon or Ciao. That's why we created OpenCritics.com. The idea of OpenCritics is to develop an open platform for freely licensed reviews. Published reviews are then not only available for visitors of certain websites, e.g Amazon, Ciao, etc. but can be copied freely. This also helps against the trend towards internet monopolies.(Please find an explanation and more advantages of this on: http://www.opencritics.com/sp-dsp-user_idea ) We started off with movie reviews; book reviews and more will follow. The ratings are published both on all participating websites as well as on OpenCritics.de (in German, other languages will follow). Who we are: --------------------- Our office, the development and my computer are financed by a private limited company. Eventually, I would be pleased if our company could move into the direction of a non-profit organization and funding through donations. However, I do have doubts about that since this is even difficult for Wikipedia. The second best (realistic) alternative is to do what many Linux-distributors, companies like Zend etc do: The content will remain free and open while the project is financed by consulting and support for commercial users. We are still a small team, mainly in our office in Hamburg ,with very different backgound (juristic, webdesign, journalistic and two students). How to help: ------------------- We are especially lacking a prominent team-member known even outside the world of free-internet-geeks who could help us let the little project rise above the attention threshold. Maybe you have an idea who we could contact? In the meantime we are happy about every blogentry (example: http://de.creativecommons.org/freiheit-fur-die-user-ratings/ [in German]) and appreciate critical feedback! Kind regards Georg

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Sage Ross

29 Aug 29 Aug

8:46 a.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Projekt: OpenCritics (let's free subjective content, too!!)

On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 6:52 AM, Georg von Zimmermann<g.v.zimmermann(a)evelope.de> wrote:

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In the realm of user reviews and ratings we have pretty much forfeited to closed systems like Amazon or Ciao. That's why we created OpenCritics.com. The idea of OpenCritics is to develop an open platform for freely licensed reviews.

I think this is an excellent, long overdue idea and something Wikimedia should be interested in. I was actually thinking of proposing something like this at strategy.wikimedia.org (and may still do so).

...

Our office, the development and my computer are financed by a private limited company. Eventually, I would be pleased if our company could move into the direction of a non-profit organization and funding through donations.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I'd be pleased to see a project like this become part of Wikimedia. We've never really absorbed other communities under the Wikimedia umbrella before (like Wikia has), but at this point Wikipedia has earned enough goodwill also support lesser known worthy projects. -Sage Ross

Victor Vasiliev

3:17 p.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Projekt: OpenCritics (let's free subjective content, too!!)

Sage Ross wrote:

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I don't think that creating such a project within Wikimedia would be a great idea. NPOV is one of the most important Wikimedia principles. --vvv

Joshua Gay

6:44 p.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Projekt: OpenCritics (let's free subjective content, too!!)

So, I think that such a project works well with the concept of NPOV. I think you can break the site into two distinct parts. Part 1: You collect opinions of various sorts in various ways. Part 2: You organize them in terms of their relative significance to each other and summarize them in a disinterested voice. This would be a lot like Wikibooks and Wikipedia; people write stuff on Wikibooks and then people cite those books on Wikipedia. -Josh On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 3:17 PM, Victor Vasiliev <vasilvv(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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Sage Ross wrote:

I don't think that creating such a project within Wikimedia would be a great idea. NPOV is one of the most important Wikimedia principles. --vvv _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

-- I am running the Arizona Rock'n'Roll marathon with Team in Training. Help me reach my fundraising goals: http://pages.teamintraining.org/ma/pfchangs10/joshuagay

David Goodman

11:20 p.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Projekt: OpenCritics (let's free subjective content, too!!)

People who want to write reviews of this sort generally want to propagandize either for or against something they have strong feelings about. The susceptibility of a project like this to campaigning and cabalism is so great, that i doubt a community run project could maintain objectivity. We have enough problem doing it at Wikipedia when the avowed purpose is to NOT offer opinion. I think maintaining NPOV --or anything like it--in this situation will be impossible. I'd like to see someone try nevertheless. I certainly am not opposing the project. But it should not be us--we should keep far away from that. David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 6:44 PM, Joshua Gay<joshuagay(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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Sage Ross wrote:

-- I am running the Arizona Rock'n'Roll marathon with Team in Training. Help me reach my fundraising goals: http://pages.teamintraining.org/ma/pfchangs10/joshuagay _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

11:50 p.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Projekt: OpenCritics (let's free subjective content, too!!)

Victor Vasiliev wrote:

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Sage Ross wrote:

I don't think that creating such a project within Wikimedia would be a great idea. NPOV is one of the most important Wikimedia principles.

No it is *not*. I will continue to combat this pernicious canard as long as there is breath in my body. NPOV is a band-aid that enables the writing of a collaboratively edited encyclopaedia about subjects which while they may be fixed as to their true nature, are inherently subjectively understood by various people. NPOV is *not* a transcendent principle. It shouldn't be raised to the level of something immutable and sacred. It is just a tool. Wikinews does not adhere to the strict NPOV interpretation that is inevitable for Wikipedia. Wikiversity could not even come close to employing anything remotely like it. Wikispecies actually doesn't have any need for anything like it. And for Wikisource, just as for Wikinews, NPOV can only be considered to apply in a thoroughly transmogrified form. Thank you. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen

Anthony

30 Aug 30 Aug

1:51 p.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Projekt: OpenCritics (let's free subjective content, too!!)

On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 11:50 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen < cimonavaro(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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Wikinews does not adhere to the strict NPOV interpretation that is inevitable for Wikipedia. Wikiversity could not even come close to employing anything remotely like it. Wikispecies actually doesn't have any need for anything like it. And for Wikisource, just as for Wikinews, NPOV can only be considered to apply in a thoroughly transmogrified form.

Knowing very little about Wikiversity and Wikispecies, I'd be interested in how that can work. I mean, for the general public to collaborate on a wiki, you have to have some form of rule about objectivity, don't you? I understand that NPOV has a meaning within the English Wikipedia which doesn't apply in most of the other projects, but there is an essence of it that applies to all the projects, isn't there? Maybe I'm wrong. I'm really interested in your answer if I am.

David Goodman

9:08 p.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Projekt: OpenCritics (let's free subjective content, too!!)

Myself, I consider NPOV as what distinguishes an encyclopedia from promotion and advocacy. Agreed it is hard to get there completely, but the effort to approximate it is what makes Wikipedia a work of reference, and conservopedia a joke. ~~~~ David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 1:51 PM, Anthony<wikimail(a)inbox.org> wrote:

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On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 11:50 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen < cimonavaro(a)gmail.com> wrote:

Anthony

31 Aug 31 Aug

9:59 a.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Projekt: OpenCritics (let's free subjective content, too!!)

On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 9:08 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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Myself, I consider NPOV as what distinguishes an encyclopedia from promotion and advocacy.

I don't think Wales or Sanger or whoever invented the term "NPOV" discovered the concept, so I'd avoid using that newly invented term to describe it. Agreed it is hard to get there completely, but

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the effort to approximate it is what makes Wikipedia a work of reference, and conservopedia a joke. ~~~~

Sometimes I think Wikipedia goes too far in the other direction, though: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Objectivity_(journalism)&diff…

teun spaans

29 Aug 29 Aug

9:42 a.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Projekt: OpenCritics (let's free subjective content, too!!)

This sounds like a good initiative. Wikimedia foundation favours neutral, factual content, so the initiative is an addition in the area of open licenses. The only question which your statement here raises is why you limit yourself to reviews. Imho there might be a considerable market area for people who have opinions to voice on politics, religion, etc. kind regards, teun spaans On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 12:52 PM, Georg von Zimmermann < g.v.zimmermann(a)evelope.de> wrote:

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Sage Ross

1:17 p.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Projekt: OpenCritics (let's free subjective content, too!!)

On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 9:42 AM, teun spaans<teun.spaans(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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The only question which your statement here raises is why you limit yourself to reviews. Imho there might be a considerable market area for people who have opinions to voice on politics, religion, etc.

Reviews are quite different political and religious opinion. Unlike political or religious commentary, reviews (especially if they combine numerical ratings with textual evaluation) are valuable in aggregate, as they can help others make yes/no decisions about whether to invest time and/or money into some particular, uniquely identifiable thing (whether watching a particular movie or buying a particular flashlight). Hence the desirability of creating a free alternative to Amazon's reviews. Amazon's reviews, especially for manufactured goods, are an extremely valuable public service (even if you don't shop at Amazon), and the fact they are controlled and maintained by a for-profit company means that the potential exists for Amazon to lock down access or suppress negative reviews (in fact, this happens already) for the good of their profits but to the detriment of the public good. Although individually such reviews have subjective elements, I don't see that as fundamentally incompatible with WMF values. -Sage

Delirium

30 Aug 30 Aug

5:10 a.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Projekt: OpenCritics (let's free subjective content, too!!)

Sage Ross wrote:

...

Hence the desirability of creating a free alternative to Amazon's reviews. Amazon's reviews, especially for manufactured goods, are an extremely valuable public service (even if you don't shop at Amazon), and the fact they are controlled and maintained by a for-profit company means that the potential exists for Amazon to lock down access or suppress negative reviews (in fact, this happens already) for the good of their profits but to the detriment of the public good.

I buy this, but my main question would be: why Wikimedia? It doesn't seem to have a lot to do with collaborative editing, wikis, knowledge production, or any of our other core areas. My guess for what the software would look like makes it not seem to overlap very much with any of our existing software, either. I'd certainly contribute reviews to a review site with a pledge of openness: some sort of non-content-specific filtering policy (allow spam to be filtered, but not negative reviews), availability of the metadata, etc. But people other than Wikimedia are allowed to set up worthwhile open-content projects. ;-) One corner of the open-review landscape even exists already: MusicBrainz (www.musicbrainz.org) recently added user-contributed reviews for music albums. -Mark

Sage Ross

10:37 a.m.

New subject: [Foundation-l] Projekt: OpenCritics (let's free subjective content, too!!)

On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 5:10 AM, Delirium<delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote:

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Sage Ross wrote:

Hence the desirability of creating a free alternative to Amazon's reviews.

I agree, it's something of a departure in being not directly collaborative and not well-suited for the standard wiki approach. I think it does have to do with knowledge production--it collects first-hand knowledge of how well goods function and what their shortcomings are, for example. The reason I think Wikimedia might ought to get involved in this area is because--in terms of public recognition and infrastructural stability--Wikimedia is becoming a cornerstone of the free culture ecosystem. So it makes sense to me to start supporting/mirroring/organizing/structuring useful free content that's being created within smaller, possibly financially unsustainable projects, and to make it possible for such projects to continue even if their original venues shut down. -Sage

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participants (9)

Anthony
David Goodman
Delirium
Georg von Zimmermann
Joshua Gay
Jussi-Ville Heiskanen
Sage Ross
teun spaans
Victor Vasiliev