Le 01/12/2017 à 09:34, Markus Kroetzsch a écrit :
Dear Mathieu,
You are in an impossible position. Either you want to be an objective researcher who tries to reconstruct past events as they happened, or you are pursuing an agenda to criticise and change some aspects of Wikidata. The way you do it, you are making yourself part of the debate that you claim you want to reconstruct.
Well, I guess this is a dilemma that many sociologists and anthropologists have to deal with. That's a really hard epistemic problem you are raising here, and I don't think this list is the place to discuss it extensively. So to make it short, I fully agree that your concern is legitimate, but if your implied conclusion is that it would be better to do nothing rather than going into a difficult epistemic position, I don't share this conclusion. Also, to my mind belief in absolute objectiveness is only delusion. I prefer to expose clearly what I can myself identify as my starting point of view and let audience take my biases into account rather than pretending that I aim presenting the ultimate objective truth.
So I recognize I have a strong bias toward copyleft licenses as general solution. But as I already stated in this thread, I am also for promoting solutions with less legal constraints depending on the context of production and fixed goals. And this nothing new, I surely might be able to provide links or get some testimony that here and there I do promote and myself use solutions with less legal constraints.
For this project, believe it or not, I had no pre-established agenda to criticise and change Wikidata in a predetermined fashion as point of departure. Of course before starting this project I had an opinion, and yes CC0 for Wikidata didn't look appealing to me. But a strong motivation behind this project was to give me a chance to change my mind with a broader view of this choice of CC0 as unique license. Its origin, its impact, and opinion of the Wikimedia community regarding this topic. And I stay in this open minded dynamic.
Now while doing my research with this goal, I found strong hints of potential conflict of interest, which was absolutely not what I was looking for. Now strong hints and potential conflict of interest are not proof of conflict of interest. If there was no such a thing, then it's great and I'll document that in this way.
Finally note that while I'm taking part of the debate right now won't change the fact that I didn't at the moment that the decision was took. That is, I don't have the power to change the past, and I am aiming at documenting past events on the topic using verifiable available sources. I don't expect anyone to blindly trust me. Don't blindly trust me. Everybody should really interested in the subject should check sources on which claims are done and possibly draw a different conclusion and be bold and make evolve the project or at least provide feedback.
From a research perspective, any material you gather in this way comes with a big question mark. You are not doing us much of a favour either, because by forcing us to refute accusations, you are placing our memories of the past events in a doubtful, heavily biased context.
Well, I'm sorry for that. But it's not nothing new that our community is full of freaks obsessed with transparency, "respect the license" and "reference needed", is it? So how possibly it wasn't envisioned that one day it would be embarrassing to not have a documented information about how exactly was done this license choice and by who? My guess is that the simple answer is that human make errors. I do errors. A lot of it. Many reply in this thread surely can attest that, doesn't it? But may be it would be good to recognize that you too can make errors, rather than trying to put all the shame on me for asking information about such an important topic so many time after the decision occurred.
Your overall approach of considering a theory to be true (or at least equally likely to be true) unless you are given "proofs that this claim is completely wrong" is not scientific.
Claiming that some approach is the one I'm following, discrediting this approach and conclude that anything I say is then wrong is not fair either.
Contemporary scientific method mostly agree that you have to come with a falsifiable theory, as exposed in by Thomas Kuhn in /The Structure of Scientific Revolutions/. So this is a condition to have any chance to have some scientific value. But of course this is not a guarantee that the theory is true. At best it makes the theory not proven wrong by any evidence.
This is not how research works. For a start, Occam's Razor should make you disregard overly complex theories for things that have much simpler explanations (in our case: CC0 is a respected license chosen by many other projects for good reasons, so it is entirely plausible that the founders of Wikidata also just picked it for the usual reasons, without any secret conspiracy).
Occam's Razor states that you should always prefer the theory which requires the smallest set of entities/rules couple available to explain a phenomena in regard of empirical data. It's completely different from opting for the simplest explanation. The possibility of conflict of interest require no hidden conspiracy, no additional entity, and simply consider the possibility of occurrence of a phenomena which is widely documented in social science fields.
Maybe at this point it might also be interesting to explicitly state that knowing that there was no conflict of interest intervening in this decision is interesting for the sake of governance transparency. But going with this hypothesis don't really have much importance with the rather independent question of whether using CC0 as unique license for Wikidata is the best choice for reaching the goal of the Wikimedia movement in a sustainable manner.
And once you have an interesting theory formed, you need to gather evidence for or against it in a way that is not affected by the theory (i.e., in particular, don't start calls for information with an emotional discussion of whether or not you would personally like the theory to turn out true).
I totally recognize that on this point I've misbehaved in this post, I should have refrain of adding so much emotional emphaze in my message.
What you are doing here is completely unscientific and I hope that your supervisor (?) will also point this out to you at some point. Moreover, I am afraid that you cannot really get back to the position of an objective observer from where you are now. Better leave this research to others who are not in publicly documented disagreement with the main historic witnesses.
This research don't have a supervisor. This is a Wikiversity research project. Anyone can join and improve it.
So you should understand that I don't feel compelled to give you a detailed account of every Wikidata-related discussion I had as if I were on some trial here. As a "researcher", it is you who has to prove your theories, not the rest of the world who has to disprove them. I already told you that your main guesses as far as they concern things I have witnessed are not true, and that's all from me for now.
The question is not whether you want to give me that kind of details. Me and the feelings I might inspire doesn't matter here. The question is whether you are willing to comply with the exigence of transparency that the Wikimedia movement is attached to, on a topic which directly impact its governance and future on a large scale.
Kind regards, mathieu
Kind regards,
Markus
On 01.12.2017 03:43, mathieu stumpf guntz wrote:
Hello Markus,
First rest assured that any feedback provided will be integrated in the research project on the topic with proper references, including this email. It might not come before beginning of next week however, as I'm already more than fully booked until then. But once again it's on a wiki, be bold.
Le 01/12/2017 à 01:18, Markus Krötzsch a écrit :
Dear Mathieu,
Your post demands my response since I was there when CC0 was first chosen (i.e., in the April meeting). I won't discuss your other claims here -- the discussions on the Wikidata list are already doing this, and I agree with Lydia that no shouting is necessary here.
Nevertheless, I must at least testify to what John wrote in his earlier message (quote included below this email for reference): it was not Denny's decision to go for CC0, but the outcome of a discussion among several people who had worked with open data for some time before Wikidata was born. I have personally supported this choice and still do. I have never received any money directly or indirectly from Google, though -- full disclosure -- I got several T-shirts for supervising in Summer of Code projects.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough on that too, but to my mind the problem is not money but governance. Anyone with too much cash can throw it wherever wanted, and if some fall into Wikimedia pocket, that's fine.
But the moment a decision that impact so deeply Wikimedia governance and future happen, then maximum transparency must be present, communication must be extensive, and taking into account community feedback is extremely preferable. No one is perfect, myself included, so its all the more important to listen to external feedback. I said earlier that I found the knowledge engine was a good idea, but for what I red it seems that transparency didn't reach expectation of the community.
So, I was wrong my inferences around Denny, good news. Of course I would prefer to have other archived sources to confirm that. No mistrust intended, I think most of us are accustomed to put claims in perspective with sources and think critically.
For completeness, was this discussion online or – to bring bag the earlier stated testimony – around a pizza? If possible, could you provide a list of involved people? Did a single person took the final decision, or was it a show of hands, or some consensus emerged from discussion? Or maybe the community was consulted with a vote, and if yes, where can I find the archive?
Also archives show that lawyers were consulted on the topic, could we have a copy of their report?
At no time did Google or any other company take part in our discussions in the zeroth hour of Wikidata. And why should they? From what I can see on their web page, Google has no problem with all kinds of different license terms in the data they display.
Because they are more and more moving to a business model of providing themselves what people are looking for to keep users in their sphere of tracking and influence, probably with the sole idea of generating more revenue I guess.
Also, I can tell you that we would have reacted in a very allergic way to such attempts, so if any company had approached us, this would quite likely have backfired. But, believe it or not, when we started it was all but clear that this would become a relevant project at all, and no major company even cared to lobby us. It was still mostly a few hackers getting together in varying locations in Berlin. There was a lot of fun, optimism, and excitement in this early phase of Wikidata (well, I guess we are still in this phase).
Please situate that in time so we can place that in a timeline. In March 2012 Wikimedia DE announced the initial funding of 1.3 million Euros by Google, Paul Allen's Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
So please do not start emails with made-up stories around past events that you have not even been close to (calling something "research" is no substitute for methodology and rigour).
But that's all the problem here, no one should have to carry the pain of trying to reconstruct what happened through such a research. Process of this kind of decision should have been documented and should be easily be found in archives. If you have suggestion in methods, please provide them. Just denigrating the work don't help in any way to improve it. If there are additional sources that I missed, please provide them. If there are methodologies that would help improve the work, references are welcome.
Putting unsourced personal attacks against community members before all other arguments is a reckless way of maximising effect, and such rhetoric can damage our movement beyond this thread or topic.
All this is built on references. If the analyze is wrong, for example because it missed crucial undocumented information this must be corrected with additional sources. Wikidata team, as far as I can tell, was perfectly aware of this project for weeks. So if there was some sources that the team considered that it merited my attention to complete my thoughts on the topic, there was plenty of time to provide them before I posted this message.
Our main strength is not our content but our community, and I am glad to see that many have already responded to you in such a measured and polite way.
We completely agree on that. This is a wonderful community. And that's concerns for future of this very community which fueled this project.
I only can reiterate all apologies to anyone that might have felt personally attacked. I can go back to reformulate my message.
I hope you will help me to improve the research, or call it as you like, with more relevant feedback and references.
Peace
Peace,
Markus
On 30.11.2017 09:55, John Erling Blad wrote:
Licensing was discussed in the start of the project, as in start of developing code for the project, and as I recall it the arguments for CC0 was valid and sound. That was long before Danny started
working for
Google.
As I recall it was mention during first week of the project (first
week
of april), and the duscussion reemerged during first week of development. That must have been week 4 or 5 (first week of may),
as the
delivery of the laptoppen was delayed. I was against CC0 as I
expected
problems with reuse og external data. The arguments for CC0
convinced me.
And yes, Denny argued for CC0 AS did Daniel and I believe Jeroen and Jens did too.
[I'm writing in my personal capacity.]
Hi Mathieu,
On Fri, Dec 1, 2017 at 2:45 AM, mathieu stumpf guntz < psychoslave@culture-libre.org> wrote:
Le 01/12/2017 à 09:34, Markus Kroetzsch a écrit :
Dear Mathieu,
You are in an impossible position. Either you want to be an objective researcher who tries to reconstruct past events as they happened, or you are pursuing an agenda to criticise and change some aspects of Wikidata. The way you do it, you are making yourself part of the debate that you claim you want to reconstruct.
Well, I guess this is a dilemma that many sociologists and anthropologists have to deal with. That's a really hard epistemic problem you are raising here, and I don't think this list is the place to discuss it extensively. So to make it short, I fully agree that your concern is legitimate, but if your implied conclusion is that it would be better to do nothing rather than going into a difficult epistemic position, I don't share this conclusion.
You can do both, but these will be two separate efforts and you need to be clear to your audience which hat you have on when you're writing your messages. At the moment, the messages come across with mixed signals which makes it really hard to understand what is your goal. FYI: Here is what I have heard so far on this thread from you: (i) I want to do research to understand how the decision about CC0 was made. (ii) I demand transparency: You need to answer my questions since transparency is important for us and I have the right to ask about any topic and demand more explanation until my satisfaction. (iii) I am pretty skeptical about the way CC0 was chosen as a license for Wikidata, and I'm going to dig deep (casually, and not methodically/systematically) to figure out what's going on. If you're doing (i): We count you as a researcher and you are asked to follow research norms. In this case, I recommend that you open a research page on https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Index , clearly state what the problem is, why it's important to solve it, what methods have been used in the past (literature review) and why they are not enough, what is your methodology, how are you planning to do data collection (for example, will there be interviews? if yes, how are you going to handle the data collected?), results (when they become available), discussion (how you do or don't handle bias in data collection, where you think your study can be improved, ...). Once you have that page up, others may join to help you improve your research methodology and analysis before embarking on the actual research.
If you're doing (ii): Be aware: all of us have to make trade-offs between documentation, spending time on building history, and getting the volunteer/staff work ahead of us done. This is especially true for volunteer projects (which is how Wikidata was initiated). Someone spending time on documentation may mean the project not moving forward, literally. On this front: If you demand transparency and you make documentation a requirement for transparency, you will likely have to work hard to bring more volunteer resources to this community to help us document better/more, and also work with us to create ways for doing documentation without disrupting current workflows as much as possible. This is a long-term discussion, it needs months/years of planning and execution to expand a capacity that is heavily under-resourced in our Movement.
If you're doing (iii): I highly recommend that you start small, even more private, in the future. You are exposing quite a few people. You will hurt them less (or not at all) and still will learn over time. Only if you see strong reasons for opening up things at the level of this mailing list, I suggest you embark on journeys like the one you're on now.
I tend to agree with Markus that you are in a very difficult place now: you have communicated mixed signals, some people are hurt, and you need to spend a lot of time and resources on your end and theirs (if they're willing to), to start from scratch. In practice, you may be better off letting this conversation go and allowing others to pick it up and build it on a clearer base.
Best, Leila
Hi Leila,
First, thank you for your clear analyze and suggestions.
I won't respond extensively on list about this thread anymore for now.
So to your reply, I will just make a single point more clear, and take the rest in consideration off list.
Le 01/12/2017 à 22:49, Leila Zia a écrit :
(ii) I demand transparency: You need to answer my questions since transparency is important for us and I have the right to ask about any topic and demand more explanation until my satisfaction.
Once again, this is not about "I, me and my". Transparency is a core value of *our* Wikimedia movement. So the question is not to reach my satifaction, but the level of transparency which is expected in the Wikimedia movement.
As far as I'm aware, this level is nothing like "a right for any individual to ask full transparency on any topic at whichever level it wants". This is just broad unfair generalization of what I said. I never demanded such an extensive transparency level, and I actually would raise against such a demand more vigorously than what I'm doing here in favor of more transparency on a scoped issue.
My demand is on a scoped topic which, to my mind, is of deep importance for the general governance of the movement and its future as a whole. So if that is asking too much information, then yes it can be stated that I was wrong in my view regarding the expected level of transparency our community is demanding on its governance. Or maybe it's the importance of the topic and its impact that I'm miss-evaluating.
I recognize I'm all but perfect, I do mistakes, and the form of my message was a terrible one. Exaggeratedly generalized interpretation of a transparency demand is however not a proper way to discard the underlying issue.
But once again, this is the single point I wanted to makes things more clear, and the rest of Leila message seems full of good advises. So while I'm not going to make extensive laudatory comments on the reply, I'm not short of complimentary thoughts for the rest of it.
Kind regards, mathieu
[I apologize for the longish response, and I will do what I can to take the rest of this offlist as needed. I just see a couple of places where I need to add more explanation.]
On Fri, Dec 1, 2017 at 10:31 PM, mathieu stumpf guntz < psychoslave@culture-libre.org> wrote:
Hi Leila,
First, thank you for your clear analyze and suggestions.
I won't respond extensively on list about this thread anymore for now.
So to your reply, I will just make a single point more clear, and take the rest in consideration off list.
Le 01/12/2017 à 22:49, Leila Zia a écrit :
(ii) I demand transparency: You need to answer my questions since transparency is important for us and I have the right to ask about any topic and demand more explanation until my satisfaction.
Once again, this is not about "I, me and my". Transparency is a core value of *our* Wikimedia movement. So the question is not to reach my satifaction, but the level of transparency which is expected in the Wikimedia movement.
(Side-note. We should take this part offline but for the record: I couldn't find a place where transparency was listed as an agreed upon and shared value of our movement as a whole. There are subgroups that consider it a core value or one of the guiding principles, and it's of course built in in many of the things we do in Wikimedia, but I'm hesitant to call it /a core value of our movement/ given that it's not listed somewhere as such. btw, for the record, it's high on my personal and professional list of values.)
While I agree that transparency is a value for many of us, it is not very clear, to at least me, how we as a whole define transparency to the level that can be used in practice. In the absence of a shared practical definition for transparency, each of us (or groups of us) define a process as transparent as a function of how big/impactful the result of a process is at each point in time, our backgrounds/cultures/countries-we're-from, how much personal trust we have in the process or the people involved in the process, etc. If this is correct, this means that in practice we as individuals or groups define what transparency means for us and we will demand specific things based on our own definition. So, while in theory you are requesting/demanding something that is likely a shared value for many of us, in practice, you are entering your own checklist (that may be shared with some other people's view on transparency in a specific case) that once met, you will call the process transparent. That's why I interpreted what I heard from you as "I" demand transparency, versus "we, as a movement" demand transparency in this case.
To give you a more specific example: as an Iranian involved in Wikimedia movement who knows Markus through his contributions to Wikidata and at a professional/work level, I trusted Markus' words when he said that those in early stages of the project didn't think of Wikidata as a project that one day becomes as big as it is today. I believe it that this was a fun project that they wanted to see succeed, but they were not sure at all if it gets somewhere, so the natural thing to do for them was to spend time to see if they can help it take off at all as opposed to spending time on documenting decisions in case it takes off and they need to show to people how they have done things. If trust between Markus and I were broken, however, I would likely not be content with that level of response and I would ask/demand for more explanation. In case (ii), and in the absence of a shared practical definition of transparency, my personal priors and understandings of the case would define when I call the process transparent.
As far as I'm aware, this level is nothing like "a right for any individual to ask full transparency on any topic at whichever level it wants". This is just broad unfair generalization of what I said. I never demanded such an extensive transparency level, and I actually would raise against such a demand more vigorously than what I'm doing here in favor of more transparency on a scoped issue.
My demand is on a scoped topic which, to my mind, is of deep importance for the general governance of the movement and its future as a whole. So if that is asking too much information, then yes it can be stated that I was wrong in my view regarding the expected level of transparency our community is demanding on its governance. Or maybe it's the importance of the topic and its impact that I'm miss-evaluating.
I recognize I'm all but perfect, I do mistakes, and the form of my message was a terrible one. Exaggeratedly generalized interpretation of a transparency demand is however not a proper way to discard the underlying issue.
Point taken. Those 3 categories and descriptions are not very carefully crafted, partly because I wanted to share the general signals that I've received from your messages (which btw, also touches on another topic: you may or may not mean certain things when you say them, but your audience, based on their own priors can understand them differently.). They are supposed to signal to you how in a broad sense what you had written had translated in my mind. I acknowledge that this thread is about one specific topic (not "any topic") and "right" to transparency can be much stronger than what you had in mind. The intention was not to exaggerate what you had said. Thanks for calling it out.
Best, Leila
Kind regards, mathieu
Dear Leila
Le 02/12/2017 à 21:48, Leila Zia a écrit :
[I apologize for the longish response, and I will do what I can to take the rest of this offlist as needed. I just see a couple of places where I need to add more explanation.]
Then I feel somewhat bond to respond too. But too make it shorts, I don't think I add in this email says anything that wasn't already said before. So anyone already fed up with this thread can just skip this message with no fear to miss any revelation. And to make it clear, I don't expect any answer to this message on the list, but will diligently reply in private if you are looking for more information from my part.
(Side-note. We should take this part offline but for the record: I couldn't find a place where transparency was listed as an agreed upon and shared value of our movement as a whole. There are subgroups that consider it a core value or one of the guiding principles, and it's of course built in in many of the things we do in Wikimedia, but I'm hesitant to call it /a core value of our movement/ given that it's not listed somewhere as such. btw, for the record, it's high on my personal and professional list of values.)
Here is an official Wikimedia Foundation presentation support of 2017 related to leadership where /being transparent/ is explicitely stated in a silde titled "Staying true to our values": https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AWhat_is_Leadership%3F.pd...
While I agree that transparency is a value for many of us, it is not very clear, to at least me, how we as a whole define transparency to the level that can be used in practice. In the absence of a shared practical definition for transparency, each of us (or groups of us) define a process as transparent as a function of how big/impactful the result of a process is at each point in time, our backgrounds/cultures/countries-we're-from, how much personal trust we have in the process or the people involved in the process, etc. If this is correct, this means that in practice we as individuals or groups define what transparency means for us and we will demand specific things based on our own definition. So, while in theory you are requesting/demanding something that is likely a shared value for many of us, in practice, you are entering your own checklist (that may be shared with some other people's view on transparency in a specific case) that once met, you will call the process transparent. That's why I interpreted what I heard from you as "I" demand transparency, versus "we, as a movement" demand transparency in this case.
I completely agree with you with the lake of clear definition of some crucial core notions we use all the time. This is also a feedback I red in several comments in the 2017 strategy consultation. Staying vague brings both pros and cons of flexibility. An other example is "free license", which is for example used in the foundation bylaws https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Bylaws, but not defined it it. One might argue that "free license" has a clear cultural meaning in the free/libre culture movement, with the four famous freedom inherited from free software. But this is a legal document, what is not clearly explicitly stated is subject to large interpretation variations. But at list the foundation has "free license" in its bylaws, I know that the equivalent is not even mentioned in the French chapter similar document https://www.wikimedia.fr/documents-officiels/statuts-de-lassociation/.
To give you a more specific example: as an Iranian involved in Wikimedia movement who knows Markus through his contributions to Wikidata and at a professional/work level, I trusted Markus' words when he said that those in early stages of the project didn't think of Wikidata as a project that one day becomes as big as it is today. I believe it that this was a fun project that they wanted to see succeed, but they were not sure at all if it gets somewhere, so the natural thing to do for them was to spend time to see if they can help it take off at all as opposed to spending time on documenting decisions in case it takes off and they need to show to people how they have done things. If trust between Markus and I were broken, however, I would likely not be content with that level of response and I would ask/demand for more explanation. In case (ii), and in the absence of a shared practical definition of transparency, my personal priors and understandings of the case would define when I call the process transparent.
The issue has nothing to do with Markus or anyone else being an honest sympathetic person, and just by "assuming good faith" surely we can grant that, even without any testimony, to every contributors unless clear proof of the contrary should make think otherwise. Also the issue is not how Wikidata project debuted in some confidential ways with uncertain results.
One issue remounted here is that publicly available data make apparent that Wikidata official launch, the choice of the CC0 license, and huge funding by three actors related to hegemonic corporations are all very close in time. On the other hand, any reference of a community decision regarding this license policy if it exits was not yet provided. Hopefully, that is a formulation that will be judged factual enough to not be interpreted as a personal attack of anyone while still letting understand how such a concomitance might raise concerns of potential conflict of interest. But actually, this first issue seems rather negligible.
The main issue is "to which future such a license policy is going to lead our community".
One scenario might be that, thanks to Wikidata large visibility, every single stakeholders of the knowledge economy get enlightened by the obviously far more interesting situation of not having any information monopoly at all, and together start heavy lobbying that leads to global abolition of all information monopolies. Also everybody become kind enough to always maintain traceability with references to its sources.
An other scenario is that BraveNewWorld™, which already has a very large user base in the field of digital answering to people requests by redirecting to third party services, imports all Wikidata information along many others data sources and directly generate sufficient relevant informations so that users never need to consult a document that is out of control of BraveNewWorld™. BraveNewWorld™ also includes in its presented answer "improved reality" features. Because, for example, everybody knows that BraveNewWorld™ is your most trusted source of information and some answers could inaccurately state otherwise. But BraveNewWorld™ has made sure that this kind of outrageous reputation damage attempt was enacted illegal with death penalty. Some legislators was not completely convinced with that at first, but in total coincidence most of this objectors lost all credit soon after as people were revealed how evil this elitists were in their private life. And now everybody on earth live happy, in great part because of BraveNewWorld™ existence. At least if you believe the Bravepedia autrogenerated prose article. Some old people venture in pretending that many of Bravepedia statements come from a thing called Wikipedia. But searching for "Wikipedia" in BraveNewWorld™ myReality will reassure everybody as it explains that is just hoaxes and common rambling among old persons with dementia. In any case, you trust Bravepedia articles, don't you? Don't mind answer, your unconscious reactions already gave enough data to BraveNewWorld™ myHappySensors that you wear. It already was computed that everything is going to be fine.
Of course many other scenarios, with obviously plenty of room for far less exaggerated ones, can be depicted.
Point taken. Those 3 categories and descriptions are not very carefully crafted, partly because I wanted to share the general signals that I've received from your messages (which btw, also touches on another topic: you may or may not mean certain things when you say them, but your audience, based on their own priors can understand them differently.). They are supposed to signal to you how in a broad sense what you had written had translated in my mind. I acknowledge that this thread is about one specific topic (not "any topic") and "right" to transparency can be much stronger than what you had in mind. The intention was not to exaggerate what you had said. Thanks for calling it out.
Ok, thank you for your feedback.
Hi,
Any CC license on Wikidata would be like puting a copyright on facts. I obviously strongly object on that, and therefore I also strongly object puting anything other than public domain or CC0 on Wikidata.
The whole database could have a copyright in Europe, but I am also strongly against copyright on databases, that's why Wikidata should be under CC0.
Regards,
Yann
2017-12-03 23:59 GMT+01:00 mathieu stumpf guntz < psychoslave@culture-libre.org>:
Dear Leila
Le 02/12/2017 à 21:48, Leila Zia a écrit :
[I apologize for the longish response, and I will do what I can to take the rest of this offlist as needed. I just see a couple of places where I need to add more explanation.]
Then I feel somewhat bond to respond too. But too make it shorts, I don't think I add in this email says anything that wasn't already said before. So anyone already fed up with this thread can just skip this message with no fear to miss any revelation. And to make it clear, I don't expect any answer to this message on the list, but will diligently reply in private if you are looking for more information from my part.
(Side-note. We should take this part offline but for the record: I couldn't find a place where transparency was listed as an agreed upon and shared value of our movement as a whole. There are subgroups that consider it a core value or one of the guiding principles, and it's of course built in in many of the things we do in Wikimedia, but I'm hesitant to call it /a core value of our movement/ given that it's not listed somewhere as such. btw, for the record, it's high on my personal and professional list of values.)
Here is an official Wikimedia Foundation presentation support of 2017 related to leadership where /being transparent/ is explicitely stated in a silde titled "Staying true to our values": https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/i ndex.php?title=File%3AWhat_is_Leadership%3F.pdf&page=25
While I agree that transparency is a value for many of us, it is not very clear, to at least me, how we as a whole define transparency to the level that can be used in practice. In the absence of a shared practical definition for transparency, each of us (or groups of us) define a process as transparent as a function of how big/impactful the result of a process is at each point in time, our backgrounds/cultures/countries-we're-from, how much personal trust we have in the process or the people involved in the process, etc. If this is correct, this means that in practice we as individuals or groups define what transparency means for us and we will demand specific things based on our own definition. So, while in theory you are requesting/demanding something that is likely a shared value for many of us, in practice, you are entering your own checklist (that may be shared with some other people's view on transparency in a specific case) that once met, you will call the process transparent. That's why I interpreted what I heard from you as "I" demand transparency, versus "we, as a movement" demand transparency in this case.
I completely agree with you with the lake of clear definition of some crucial core notions we use all the time. This is also a feedback I red in several comments in the 2017 strategy consultation. Staying vague brings both pros and cons of flexibility. An other example is "free license", which is for example used in the foundation bylaws < https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Bylaws%3E, but not defined it it. One might argue that "free license" has a clear cultural meaning in the free/libre culture movement, with the four famous freedom inherited from free software. But this is a legal document, what is not clearly explicitly stated is subject to large interpretation variations. But at list the foundation has "free license" in its bylaws, I know that the equivalent is not even mentioned in the French chapter similar document < https://www.wikimedia.fr/documents-officiels/statuts-de-lassociation/%3E.
To give you a more specific example: as an Iranian involved in Wikimedia movement who knows Markus through his contributions to Wikidata and at a professional/work level, I trusted Markus' words when he said that those in early stages of the project didn't think of Wikidata as a project that one day becomes as big as it is today. I believe it that this was a fun project that they wanted to see succeed, but they were not sure at all if it gets somewhere, so the natural thing to do for them was to spend time to see if they can help it take off at all as opposed to spending time on documenting decisions in case it takes off and they need to show to people how they have done things. If trust between Markus and I were broken, however, I would likely not be content with that level of response and I would ask/demand for more explanation. In case (ii), and in the absence of a shared practical definition of transparency, my personal priors and understandings of the case would define when I call the process transparent.
The issue has nothing to do with Markus or anyone else being an honest sympathetic person, and just by "assuming good faith" surely we can grant that, even without any testimony, to every contributors unless clear proof of the contrary should make think otherwise. Also the issue is not how Wikidata project debuted in some confidential ways with uncertain results.
One issue remounted here is that publicly available data make apparent that Wikidata official launch, the choice of the CC0 license, and huge funding by three actors related to hegemonic corporations are all very close in time. On the other hand, any reference of a community decision regarding this license policy if it exits was not yet provided. Hopefully, that is a formulation that will be judged factual enough to not be interpreted as a personal attack of anyone while still letting understand how such a concomitance might raise concerns of potential conflict of interest. But actually, this first issue seems rather negligible.
The main issue is "to which future such a license policy is going to lead our community".
One scenario might be that, thanks to Wikidata large visibility, every single stakeholders of the knowledge economy get enlightened by the obviously far more interesting situation of not having any information monopoly at all, and together start heavy lobbying that leads to global abolition of all information monopolies. Also everybody become kind enough to always maintain traceability with references to its sources.
An other scenario is that BraveNewWorld™, which already has a very large user base in the field of digital answering to people requests by redirecting to third party services, imports all Wikidata information along many others data sources and directly generate sufficient relevant informations so that users never need to consult a document that is out of control of BraveNewWorld™. BraveNewWorld™ also includes in its presented answer "improved reality" features. Because, for example, everybody knows that BraveNewWorld™ is your most trusted source of information and some answers could inaccurately state otherwise. But BraveNewWorld™ has made sure that this kind of outrageous reputation damage attempt was enacted illegal with death penalty. Some legislators was not completely convinced with that at first, but in total coincidence most of this objectors lost all credit soon after as people were revealed how evil this elitists were in their private life. And now everybody on earth live happy, in great part because of BraveNewWorld™ existence. At least if you believe the Bravepedia autrogenerated prose article. Some old people venture in pretending that many of Bravepedia statements come from a thing called Wikipedia. But searching for "Wikipedia" in BraveNewWorld™ myReality will reassure everybody as it explains that is just hoaxes and common rambling among old persons with dementia. In any case, you trust Bravepedia articles, don't you? Don't mind answer, your unconscious reactions already gave enough data to BraveNewWorld™ myHappySensors that you wear. It already was computed that everything is going to be fine.
Of course many other scenarios, with obviously plenty of room for far less exaggerated ones, can be depicted.
Point taken. Those 3 categories and descriptions are not very carefully crafted, partly because I wanted to share the general signals that I've received from your messages (which btw, also touches on another topic: you may or may not mean certain things when you say them, but your audience, based on their own priors can understand them differently.). They are supposed to signal to you how in a broad sense what you had written had translated in my mind. I acknowledge that this thread is about one specific topic (not "any topic") and "right" to transparency can be much stronger than what you had in mind. The intention was not to exaggerate what you had said. Thanks for calling it out.
Ok, thank you for your feedback.
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