http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_10_14.shtml#1098119066
I'll be blogging about this in the morning, but I did want to say that
I think Orin Kerr is right about this particular entry, but wrong
about how wikipedia works and the degree of commitment that the
community has to getting it right.
In particular, I think he's wrong about this part:
>If I understand accurately how Wikipedia works -- a big 'if,' I should
>point out -- my views of what is in the Patriot Act are no more and no
>less valued by Wikipedia than the views of any other Internet user.
About this, I very much think he's wrong. Certainly I am not aware of
any serious support for this kind of wholesale intellectual relativism
in any wikipedia discussions. Instead, there's always an underlying
and thorough commitment to _getting it right_.
I do wonder how, in the long run, we will deal more effectively with
the kind of POV warrioring that leads to entries like this
one... where politically motivated hysteria leads to blatant factual
errors.
--Jimbo
On Thu, 10 Jun 2004, Tim Starling wrote:
> Hi,
>
> This is just a one-off thing at the moment, I haven't set up scripts to
> do it on a regular basis. So if I forget, please remind me. I've made a
> tarball of all the images from the English Wikipedia. See the bottom of:
>
> http://download.wikimedia.org/
>
> I had a quick discussion on IRC about the wording of the legal
> statement, it seems we can't really be sure that it's legal to do
> anything at all with them. It's an unsatisfactory situation, in my
> opinion, but there you have it. So the disclaimer says "use at your own
> risk".
Folks,
Just to keep you up to date, we have had great success with wikipedia
installations in schools in South Africa.
I use these images for the install. I have downloaded more recent
database snapshots to match with it, but for the most part if they
cannot make a difference by reposting changes (which they cannot,
as it is quite isolated in bandwidth-space) I just put a June snapshot
(same date as the pictures) on.
I am excited by the potential of carrying snapshots and image diffs,
probably selected by tar using the file dates. We (Wizzy Digital Courier)
can carry these by UUCP - using dialup connections or physical carrying
on a USB memory stick.
I split them up into 6 CDs, but found that one whole CD was the thumb/
directory , so you can skip that :-)
I would also love to preserve the 'newsy' feel of the front page. I
had a suggestion fron Sj that I grab the front page conventionally and
patch the URLs to point to a local wikipedia installation.
If you could put up a tarball of the whole archive again I can rsync
it this way. Or - put up an rsync server ?
That would also handle deletion of orphaned images.
Cheers, Andy!
http://wizzy.org.za/ (not been updated in a while)
http://www.slug.org.za/ (Shuttleworth Foundation project putting Open Source into schools)
The Anglo-Saxon wiki is up (thanks Tim, Angela!). I was wondering, how do I go about getting it on the statistics pages, and on the other languages' links?
We already have 7 users so far!
Thanks,
James
For those of you that are interested in this subject, here's a report
that has Wikipedia as the 4th-fastest-growing website in the US for the
month of September, in terms of unique visitors.
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/041015/cgf040_1.html
A lot of the growth is driven by students doing school research;
Britannica ranked as the 9th-fastest-growing for the same time period.
We're growing faster than they are, both in percentage terms and in raw
numbers, but they're still ahead overall.
--Michael Snow
> A GNU FDL / cc-by-sa dual licensing scheme could be used for Wikinews...
But
> this would eliminate the option of re-incorporating third party
improvements
> back into Wikinews and would also make it impractical to incorporate
Wikipedia
> content into Wikinews for background content (since in both cases the
third
> party/Wikipedia users would have to agree to dual-license their work). So
what
> we really need is GNU FDL and cc-by-sa compatibility ASAP.
> -- mav
One advantage we have with Wikinews is that the number of authors and edit
history of a typical Wikinews article is likely to be *much* smaller than a
typical Wikipedia article. Perhaps a solution could work where all articles
are GFDL (for the sake of allowing a reuser to use a single license), but
individual articles can be dual (tri-, quad-, ...) licensed as determined by
the initial author.
Alternatively, we could just have some standard for contributors to specify
that their content is dual licensed under <<whatever>>, and let reusers sort
out the edit history. We could specify that edits marked "minor" are
released into the public domain, and if we wanted we could even require
anonymous edits to be public domain.
There's a lot we can do with Wikinews that we can't do with Wikipedia, due
to the nature of the articles as well as historical problems with Wikipedia.
I think we should really think about this before we launch Wikinews.
Hopefully a future version of the GFDL will be much more lenient, but we
can't rely on that.
Anthony
Hi, folks.
I and some friends have been discussing the issue of whether 10 years
from now it will become important for your average corporate manager
not to do anything that might wind up being documented in his company's
Wikipedia entry. A brief look through Wikipedia does show articles
detailing the controversial actions of some corporations, but not enough
to indicate a concerted effort by any corporate history geeks or labor
history geeks.
Said friends reached the conclusion that the addition of many articles
on corporate history and ongoing activities would be a good thing indeed,
but a concerted effort to do so would be obnoxious, since it increases the
chance of Wikipedia facing disruptive efforts (in the form of legal threats
or revert-wars conducted by paid minions). It would be a good thing since
a wiki is not time indexed, like any press article, and cannot just be
"ridden out." But before any effort is made to write articles on
corporate activities, it would be good to come here and ask whether
possibly controversial articles are wellcome in Wikipedia, or whether a
fork of the project would be a better thing to do.
So, what do y'all think?
Thanks for your attention,
Omri Schwarz
I'm skeptical about how well suited a wiki is to original research. But I
think it's extremely well suited to news summaries, a la Slashdot. Since
there isn't really anything out there to do this, I think this will quickly
become a huge success just for the news summaries. Maybe it'll work for
original news reporting too, I think the current proposals on how to run
things are necessary changes to the wiki model which are necessary for it to
have a chance.
I do have a couple comments though.
"These stories will then undergo systematic review for another period of
time, in which the editors try to find consensus."
I'm not sure it's reasonable to require consensus support for publication.
I'd rather see a requirement that two or three accredited editors support an
article, and they can be named somewhere in the article. Then, as long as
there isn't a majority of opposition to the article, the article can stay.
In theory there will be many more news articles in Wikinews than there are
encyclopedia articles in Wikipedia. That's just the nature of news. I
don't think it's reasonable to expect every news article to be a
collaborative work of all editors. That's just not scalable. This is a
fundamental difference between Wikinews and Wikipedia, and it needs to be
addressed.
GFDL
There was talk about the impact Wikinews would have on Wikipedia, and a
comment was made that Wikipedia will naturally copy Wikinews content where
appropriate. But if Wikinews is GFDL, this isn't as simple as using copy
and paste. It would be best if Wikinews contributors were asked to give
permission for this from the beginning. This might take the form of
"contributions made to Wikinews may be included in a derivative GFDL work so
long as that work gives credit to the original author." Even this becomes
problematic when copying news stories with multiple authors, but it's better
than having to adhere to the details of the GFDL regarding history sections
and title pages etc.
Note that the tempting solution of just using a different license altogether
is probably not a good one, because Wikinews stories will likely benefit
greatly from being able to include introductory text from Wikipedia, even if
that does mean they then have to include a byline and history section
mentioning the Wikipedia author(s).
Copies from VOANews and other PD sources?
One thing I'd like to do in Wikinews is copy some stories from PD sources
such as VOANews.com and edit them. This doesn't seem to fall under
"summaries from external sources", but I don't think I should be required to
be an accredited editor to do this. I'd like to see it clarified that this
falls under the types of news stories anonymous editors can create.
Anthony
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> The real issue are data; Only the U.S. has very comprehensive public domin
> spatial data.
The most comprehensive public domain spatial data is probably on the US, but
there is an awful lot of it on the rest of the world too. I've been working
recently with "VMAP Level 0" data, which is a 1.8 gig collection of
worldwide GIS data at a 1:1,000,000 scale. Yes, the scale is poor compared
with US data, but it's a good start. Additionally, if the project was able
to get a little bit of funding, there is a whole bunch more worldwide data
available through the Freedom of Information Act. All you have to do is pay
the FOIA copying fee for the CDs and the data itself is public domain.
> A separate WikiGIS/WikiMaps project (we own the .com and .org for
> both names) would probably be needed to improve those data and create data
for
> the rest of the world (also serve the result to all Wikimedia projects as
a
> part of Wikimedia Commons). *That* would be fairly unique and difficult to
do,
> since I'm not aware of any such similar project based on the Internet.
I'm strongly in favor of this. In fact, I've registered wikiteer.org and
have already begun working on it. I was planning on completing a prototype
before really pushing for support from Wikimedia, but if people are
interested maybe we should get started right away.
> " the whole idea of copyrights on spatial data seem to be absurd to me;
how
> could anybody claim to *own* any exact digital reproduction of the street
> network for Paris or the exact location and shape of the Zaire River? "
While I agree with your sentiment (I don't even think software should be
copyrightable), the digital reproduction is by no means exact. As such, a
large number of choices have to be made, both in terms of selection and in
terms of how to most accurately reproduce the data. In this sense it's no
more absurd than a copyright on a digital photo of a paris street.
Anthony
Daniel Mayer wrote:
> The real issue are data; Only the U.S. has very comprehensive public domin
> spatial data.
The most comprehensive public domain spatial data is probably on the US, but
there is an awful lot of it on the rest of the world too. I've been working
recently with "VMAP Level 0" data, which is a 1.8 gig collection of
worldwide GIS data at a 1:1,000,000 scale. Yes, the scale is poor compared
with US data, but it's a good start. Additionally, if the project was able
to get a little bit of funding, there is a whole bunch more worldwide data
available through the Freedom of Information Act. All you have to do is pay
the FOIA copying fee for the CDs and the data itself is public domain.
> A separate WikiGIS/WikiMaps project (we own the .com and .org for
> both names) would probably be needed to improve those data and create data
for
> the rest of the world (also serve the result to all Wikimedia projects as
a
> part of Wikimedia Commons). *That* would be fairly unique and difficult to
do,
> since I'm not aware of any such similar project based on the Internet.
I'm strongly in favor of this. In fact, I've registered wikiteer.org and
have already begun working on it. I was planning on completing a prototype
before really pushing for support from Wikimedia, but if people are
interested maybe we should get started right away.
> " the whole idea of copyrights on spatial data seem to be absurd to me;
how
> could anybody claim to *own* any exact digital reproduction of the street
> network for Paris or the exact location and shape of the Zaire River? "
While I agree with your sentiment (I don't even think software should be
copyrightable), the digital reproduction is by no means exact. As such, a
large number of choices have to be made, both in terms of selection and in
terms of how to most accurately reproduce the data. In this sense it's no
more absurd than a copyright on a digital photo of a paris street.
Anthony