I think all Wikipedians would enjoy the book The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. The basic premise is that crowds of relatively ignorant individuals make better decisions than small groups of experts. I'm sure everyone here agrees with this as Wikipedia is run this way and Wikipedia is a success, but until reading this book it was a total mystery why Wikipedia worked the way it did. And judging by the press we've gotten, I'm not the only one who feels with way. If you'll remember, the mystery of how Wikipedia works has been compared to sausage, bumble bees, public bathrooms, etc.
Although the coolest part of the book is probably the studies and anecdotal evidence for the above, the big takeaway is that Surowiecki explains how to get the most 'emergence' out of a given system. That is, a given group can either make worse decisions than the dumbest member or make better decisions than the smartest member could, and he gives tips for achieving the latter. Some of these can potentially be applied to this project.
So after finishing this book I have been thinking a lot about emergence in general. Wikipedia displays emergent properties because each article is better than the contribution of each individual. Similarly, ants display emergence because an ant colony can accomplish things that each individual ant cannot even conceive. One commonality between virtually all forms of emergence, whether artificial or natural, is that they have evolved to provide answers and solutions. An interesting experiment would be to see whether questions can also be emergent. The idea being that some people are good at coming up with questions, and others are good at coming up with answers, but currently you need both skills in order to do research; this leaves out all of the people who can ask questions they can't find the answers to, and those who could find the answers if only they knew the questions.
So my thought experiment is, if a wiki project were created with just questions that can be answered non-trivially by science but which haven't bet answered yet, could it improve the efficiency at which science was carried out? Furthermore, could questions be emergent, in that if a bunch of questions are combined then can we think of new questions that no single person could think of on their own? I think it is easy to see how society benefits when every person has access to the sum of all human knowledge, but is there also a benefit to each person having access to the sum of all human ignorance?
Alex "pHatidic" Krupp http://www.alexkrupp.com
Alex Krupp wrote:
So after finishing this book I have been thinking a lot about emergence in general. Wikipedia displays emergent properties because each article is better than the contribution of each individual. Similarly, ants display emergence because an ant colony can accomplish things that each individual ant cannot even conceive.
I haven't read the book so please fill me in. Isn't the Wikipedia an example of collaboration, not emergence? Emergence implies that the large-scale behaviour is qualitatively different than the small-scale behaviour. Wikipedia is composed of many articles, which are all similar to each other. You'd be hard-pressed to tell whether a given article is written by a single dedicated person or by a dozen. Its popularity is proportional to its size, the value of the whole is roughly equal to the sum of the articles. Where is the qualitative difference?
I know complexity theory is in vogue, it's tempting to rebadge an ancient concept such as collaboration in terms of something new. But to call it "emergence" seems to reduce the many intelligent people who knew exactly what they wanted to create and who set out to create it, to a mere colony of ants.
-- Tim Starling
Alex Krupp wrote:
I think all Wikipedians would enjoy the book The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. The basic premise is that crowds of relatively ignorant individuals make better decisions than small groups of experts. I'm sure everyone here agrees with this as Wikipedia is run this way
It's probably interesting to note that a central theme when I give public talks is precisely that Wikipedia is _not_ run this way, and that wikipedia is _not_ an instance of "The Wisdom of Crowds".
That's not to say that there isn't a lot to the notions of how a group collaboration can improve on what an individual can do. My point is just that Wikipedia functions a lot more like a traditional organization than most people realize -- it's a community of thoughtful people who know each other, not a colony of ants.
--Jimbo
On May 2, 2005, at 8:54 AM, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Alex Krupp wrote:
I think all Wikipedians would enjoy the book The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. The basic premise is that crowds of relatively ignorant individuals make better decisions than small groups of experts. I'm sure everyone here agrees with this as Wikipedia is run this way
It's probably interesting to note that a central theme when I give public talks is precisely that Wikipedia is _not_ run this way, and that wikipedia is _not_ an instance of "The Wisdom of Crowds".
Let us hope it stays that way.
On Monday 02 May 2005 08:54, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Alex Krupp wrote:
I think all Wikipedians would enjoy the book The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. The basic premise is that crowds of relatively ignorant individuals make better decisions than small groups of experts. I'm sure everyone here agrees with this as Wikipedia is run this way
It's probably interesting to note that a central theme when I give public talks is precisely that Wikipedia is _not_ run this way, and that wikipedia is _not_ an instance of "The Wisdom of Crowds".
It's important to understand *why* he argues there is wisdom in crowds. I don't know if you've read it and disagree with the fundamentals, but it requires three specific conditions: diversity, independence, and decentralization within the group. This seems very appropriate to WP. Excerpts from my mindmap [1] on this particular note are below:
[[[ The wisdom of crowds * p=Doubleday y=2004 a=USA r=20040921 An argument that groups of people can make very good decisions when there is diversity, independence, and decentralization within the group. This is augmented by case studies in traffic, science, committees, companies, markets and democracy. The wisdom of crowds + 4 In Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, the audience got it right 91 percent of the time, the friend/expert at right 65 percent 10 the stock market identified Morton Thiokol because: the diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, and aggregation 22 bookies, Google, IEM (election's), HSX (box-office), are all successful decision markets Diversity + 30 smaller groups need to actively pursue diversity 31 March: stale groups (without an influx of new naive members) spend too much time exploiting and not enough time exploring 34 experts aren't just wrong; they don't know how wrong they are 36 Irving Janis identified "Group think" in small homogeneous communities 38 Solomon Asch found that people often go with the wrong answer in a group -- but at least one confederate of a dissentor increases their autonomy Independence + 41 Independence isolates errors and garners more information 43 Milgram et al put increasingly large groups of men on the street corner looking up, others did the same, but not because of conformity, but of "social proof" 49 herding: no one ever got fired for buying IBM 53 information cascade: following a leader and with imperfect information, people stop looking to their own local knowledge 64 Hung and Blott performed an experiment with 2 urns, one with 50% more white or black marbles respectively. When an individual correct choice was awarded, people incorrectly cascaded; yet, when collectively rewarded, it was best to reveal one's own marble color Decentralization + 78 the problem with U.S. intelligence was not decentralization, but a bad form which didn't permit good filtration and aggregation 87 Brian Arthur "El Farol" problem: should one go to a bar that might be too crowded or empty? No easy solution , but it demonstrates that we used inductive processes in considering problems.
On May 2, 2005, at 10:01 AM, Joseph Reagle wrote:
On Monday 02 May 2005 08:54, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Alex Krupp wrote:
I think all Wikipedians would enjoy the book The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. The basic premise is that crowds of relatively ignorant individuals make better decisions than small groups of experts. I'm sure everyone here agrees with this as Wikipedia is run this way
It's probably interesting to note that a central theme when I give public talks is precisely that Wikipedia is _not_ run this way, and that wikipedia is _not_ an instance of "The Wisdom of Crowds".
It's important to understand *why* he argues there is wisdom in crowds. I don't know if you've read it and disagree with the fundamentals, but it requires three specific conditions: diversity, independence, and decentralization within the group. This seems very appropriate to WP. Excerpts from my mindmap [1] on this particular note are below:
[[[
I've read it, it is the "Dow 36,000" for the 90s. Some of his specific examples I know, for a fact, are bunkum. He confuses cause and effect consistently. Crowds aren't smart, it is that if a system is set up where most people do the wrong thing, the system breaks. Wikipedia, when and where it works (which is most of it at the moment) works because it is guided towards people making the right, rather than the wrong, decisions.
On Monday 02 May 2005 10:11, Stirling Newberry wrote:
It's important to understand *why* he argues there is wisdom in crowds. I don't know if you've read it and disagree with the fundamentals, but it requires three specific conditions: diversity, independence, and decentralization within the group. This seems very appropriate to WP.
I've read it, it is the "Dow 36,000" for the 90s. Some of his specific examples I know, for a fact, are bunkum. He confuses cause and effect consistently. Crowds aren't smart, it is that if a system is set up where most people do the wrong thing, the system breaks. Wikipedia, when and where it works (which is most of it at the moment) works because it is guided towards people making the right, rather than the wrong, decisions.
I don't feel as if I need to defend Surowiecki, and I don't understand your point, but I think he's made a useful contribution as your own example demonstrates. If the asynchronous and bite-sized character of Open contributions contribute to their success (Benkler "fine-grained", Sproull "microcontributions"), is that all? What *kind* of micro-contributions are necessary? *If* the contributions are crap, if they they aren't coming from diverse participants (e.g., not "group think"), independent (e.g., not "herding"), and decentralized and filtered/aggregated well (e.g., not "US intelligence" ;) ) then they might be useful.
Joseph Reagle wrote:
I don't feel as if I need to defend Surowiecki, and I don't understand your point, but I think he's made a useful contribution as your own example demonstrates.
I should point out that I like Surweicki's thesis just fine, it's just that I'm not convinced that "swarm intelligence" is very helpful in understanding how Wikipedia works -- in fact, it might be an impediment, because it leads us away from thinking about how the community interacts in a process of reasoned discourse.
But it's a very useful way of looking at the world in many cases.
--Jimbo
On 5/3/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Joseph Reagle wrote:
I don't feel as if I need to defend Surowiecki, and I don't understand your point, but I think he's made a useful contribution as your own example demonstrates.
I should point out that I like Surweicki's thesis just fine, it's just that I'm not convinced that "swarm intelligence" is very helpful in understanding how Wikipedia works -- in fact, it might be an impediment, because it leads us away from thinking about how the community interacts in a process of reasoned discourse.
The idea that Wikipedia is basically a core group of dedicated editors collaborating and reasoning together to build an encyclopedia, is very appealing to me. I used to think it was exactly right. And since most feedback I get or give on-wiki (including the bulk of policy and meta-discussions) involve dedicated editors, it is hard to recognize the effect, if any, of "swarm intelligence" on the project's development.
However, thanks to a tool that lets me monitor Recentchanges in the background while doing other work, I have listened to some 100,000 changes over the past few weeks; and paid more attention than usual to new pages and edits by new users or anons. I wonder how other RC-watchers feel about this...
Currently, I imagine Wikipedia as a massive, active swarm intelligence, supplemented by small roving groups of active editors who admire consistency, elegance, and reasoned discourse. (not unlike certain models of how the brain works :)
The swarm does the bulk of the writing, especially finding and providing current facts, starting new articles, and adding neglected POVs. The roving groups are sensitive to dozens of policy pages, and implement them as they rove... they also take on large projects, one at a time, and try to implement certain changes across thousands of pages at once.
The swarm is constantly extending the frontiers of the project, and also making uncoordinated changes to core popular pages; the coordinated groups are more steadily expanding the scope of what they cover, and integrating new content into it. If you look only at popular pages, the coordinated efforts drown out the rest. If you look at leaf pages (2000 new pages each day, half created by anons, 15% more by new users, most of which a week later have only been significantly edited by their creator), the swarm efforts are very noticable.
On Tue, May 03, 2005 at 06:19:59PM -0400, Sj wrote:
On 5/3/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Joseph Reagle wrote:
I don't feel as if I need to defend Surowiecki, and I don't understand your point, but I think he's made a useful contribution as your own example demonstrates.
I should point out that I like Surweicki's thesis just fine, it's just that I'm not convinced that "swarm intelligence" is very helpful in understanding how Wikipedia works -- in fact, it might be an impediment, because it leads us away from thinking about how the community interacts in a process of reasoned discourse.
[snip]
The swarm is constantly extending the frontiers of the project, and also making uncoordinated changes to core popular pages; the coordinated groups are more steadily expanding the scope of what they cover, and integrating new content into it. If you look only at popular pages, the coordinated efforts drown out the rest. If you look at leaf pages (2000 new pages each day, half created by anons, 15% more by new users, most of which a week later have only been significantly edited by their creator), the swarm efforts are very noticable.
I think that by characterizing it as a "swarm" you're missing the central point -- that even when the "regulars" aren't involved, what's going on is actually carefully composed edits by individuals who, though a chaotic sort of collaboration, are building something as a team. These are not insects contributing intelligence to a central thinking process that produces good works. Rather, individual works are created by individual collaborators, and edited by others, producing a collection of good works. What we have here is more of a (finally sane) peer review system than any swarm intelligence.
It's easy to lose sight of the individual contributions and start to attribute advancements to collective phenomena when all you're using to measure results is statistical data. That's not a truly accurate picture, however, of what's going on.
-- Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
On Tuesday 03 May 2005 18:19, Sj wrote:
I should point out that I like Surweicki's thesis just fine, it's just that I'm not convinced that "swarm intelligence" is very helpful in understanding how Wikipedia works -- in fact, it might be an impediment, because it leads us away from thinking about how the community interacts in a process of reasoned discourse.
The idea that Wikipedia is basically a core group of dedicated editors collaborating and reasoning together to build an encyclopedia, is very appealing to me. I used to think it was exactly right. And since most feedback I get or give on-wiki (including the bulk of policy and meta-discussions) involve dedicated editors, it is hard to recognize the effect, if any, of "swarm intelligence" on the project's development.
First, I whole heartedly agree with Jimbo that any posited explanation that fails to account for the dynamics and culture of good-willed interaction has got it wrong. So in that sense, Surowieki is (perhaps) necessary but (certainly) not sufficient.
Second, I'm not familiar with "swarm intelligence", but it is reminiscent of "smart mobs" and while Rheinghold (2003) doesn't have a very strong theory on that point (more of a provocative metaphor), he does make heavy use of the phenomena Sj is speaking of: a pareto principle (80/20) or power law curve of participation.
Power-law curves are all over the real world and net, and specifically, with respect to participation -- rather than links, say, in the Blogosphere -- Adar and Huberman (2000) found 50% of the content on Gnutella is provided by 1% of the users, O'Mahony and Ferraro (2003) found the curve in the Debian dev key ring, Moon and Sproul (2002) on the Linux Kernel list, Briggs et al. (1997) in group support systems, Krogh, Spaeth and Lakhani (2003) in Freenet.
(The latter paper, "Community, joining, and specialization in open source software innovation: a case study" is really very good, as should be Lakhani's forthcoming thesis on the "Primacy of the Periphery." The trick is not to assume that just because a minority does the largest portion of the work, everyone else is unimportant. I like to compare them to the submerged portion of the ice-berg. Periphery members can become core members, they also can impart a momentum.)
Sj wrote:
The swarm does the bulk of the writing, especially finding and providing current facts, starting new articles, and adding neglected POVs. The roving groups are sensitive to dozens of policy pages, and implement them as they rove... they also take on large projects, one at a time, and try to implement certain changes across thousands of pages at once.
"The swarm does the bukl of the writing..." hints at a testable hypothesis.
My own research indicates the opposite, but let me be perfectly NPOV about my own research: it is completely amateurish and driven by my need to make interesting public talks that get the world excited and thinking about wikipedia. :-) I can hardly be considered an unbiased scientific researcher.
My research (conducted in December) showed that half the edits by logged in users belong to just 2.5% of logged in users. It would be extremely interesting to run tests to compare "edit dispersion" for new articles, old articles, heavily edited articles, highly watched articles, heavily trafficked articles, etc.
A deeper understanding of all these issues can have some interesting implications for us in terms of understanding certain policy issues.
--Jimbo
"The swarm does the bukl of the writing..." hints at a testable hypothesis.
My own research indicates the opposite, but let me be perfectly NPOV about my own research: it is completely amateurish and driven by my need to make interesting public talks that get the world excited and thinking about wikipedia. :-) I can hardly be considered an unbiased scientific researcher.
My research (conducted in December) showed that half the edits by logged in users belong to just 2.5% of logged in users. It would be extremely interesting to run tests to compare "edit dispersion" for new articles, old articles, heavily edited articles, highly watched articles, heavily trafficked articles, etc.
A deeper understanding of all these issues can have some interesting implications for us in terms of understanding certain policy issues.
--Jimbo ________________________
A key number to make available is not just the number of edits, but the size of the deltas. This would filter different editing styles - some people are multiple edits in a session, others are one edit and then perhaps a proof. This will also give an indication of who does the bulk of the writing and who does the bulk of the editting and who does the bulk of the proofing - which are separate catagories of contribution. All of which are important - turning raw material into a formatted article is a crucial part of the process - but they are different activities.
Jimmy Wales wrote:
My research (conducted in December) showed that half the edits by logged in users belong to just 2.5% of logged in users. It would be extremely interesting to run tests to compare "edit dispersion" for new articles, old articles, heavily edited articles, highly watched articles, heavily trafficked articles, etc.
Those sound like plausible numbers, but I think your methodology is somewhat overstating the cohesiveness: The "drive-by editors" who are the least associated with an identifiable Wikipedia community are the users who haven't even bothered to go so far as to create a user account, which you explicitly exclude from your count.
-Mark
Delirium wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
My research (conducted in December) showed that half the edits by logged in users belong to just 2.5% of logged in users. It would be extremely interesting to run tests to compare "edit dispersion" for new articles, old articles, heavily edited articles, highly watched articles, heavily trafficked articles, etc.
Those sound like plausible numbers, but I think your methodology is somewhat overstating the cohesiveness: The "drive-by editors" who are the least associated with an identifiable Wikipedia community are the users who haven't even bothered to go so far as to create a user account, which you explicitly exclude from your count.
Users who aren't logged in make only around 18% of all edits. It doesn't change the results materially.
--Jimbo
Jimmy Wales wrote:
Delirium wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
My research (conducted in December) showed that half the edits by logged in users belong to just 2.5% of logged in users. It would be extremely interesting to run tests to compare "edit dispersion" for new articles, old articles, heavily edited articles, highly watched articles, heavily trafficked articles, etc.
Those sound like plausible numbers, but I think your methodology is somewhat overstating the cohesiveness: The "drive-by editors" who are the least associated with an identifiable Wikipedia community are the users who haven't even bothered to go so far as to create a user account, which you explicitly exclude from your count.
Users who aren't logged in make only around 18% of all edits. It doesn't change the results materially.
How about when bots are excluded? Just RamBot is a non-negligible proportion of the total edits on en:, and obviously what bots do isn't really a good measure of the social aspects of how humans edit Wikipedia...
-Mark
On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 05:52:42PM -0400, Delirium wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
Delirium wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
My research (conducted in December) showed that half the edits by logged in users belong to just 2.5% of logged in users. It would be extremely interesting to run tests to compare "edit dispersion" for new articles, old articles, heavily edited articles, highly watched articles, heavily trafficked articles, etc.
Those sound like plausible numbers, but I think your methodology is somewhat overstating the cohesiveness: The "drive-by editors" who are the least associated with an identifiable Wikipedia community are the users who haven't even bothered to go so far as to create a user account, which you explicitly exclude from your count.
Users who aren't logged in make only around 18% of all edits. It doesn't change the results materially.
How about when bots are excluded? Just RamBot is a non-negligible proportion of the total edits on en:, and obviously what bots do isn't really a good measure of the social aspects of how humans edit Wikipedia...
Why not? Bots are part of what humans do. I agree that they need to be counted separately for many metrics when making statistical analyses of the social interactions on Wikipedia, but they are a social phenomena in that they are created, targeted, and enacted by humans as a result of their desires and needs within the larger social circumstances of the Wikipedia project as a whole.
-- Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
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Chad Perrin wrote:
On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 05:52:42PM -0400, Delirium wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
Delirium wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
My research (conducted in December) showed that half the edits by logged in users belong to just 2.5% of logged in users. It would be extremely interesting to run tests to compare "edit dispersion" for new articles, old articles, heavily edited articles, highly watched articles, heavily trafficked articles, etc.
Those sound like plausible numbers, but I think your methodology is somewhat overstating the cohesiveness: The "drive-by editors" who are the least associated with an identifiable Wikipedia community are the users who haven't even bothered to go so far as to create a user account, which you explicitly exclude from your count.
Users who aren't logged in make only around 18% of all edits. It doesn't change the results materially.
How about when bots are excluded? Just RamBot is a non-negligible proportion of the total edits on en:, and obviously what bots do isn't really a good measure of the social aspects of how humans edit Wikipedia...
Why not? Bots are part of what humans do. I agree that they need to be counted separately for many metrics when making statistical analyses of the social interactions on Wikipedia, but they are a social phenomena in that they are created, targeted, and enacted by humans as a result of their desires and needs within the larger social circumstances of the Wikipedia project as a whole.
I think bots *are* important - look at the impact RamBot has had, with the "Free the RamBot articles" project.
(Whoever replies next should snip some of the quoted stuff :))
- -- Alphax GnuPG key: 0xF874C613 - http://tinyurl.com/8mpg9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.' - C. S. Lewis
Jimmy Wales wrote:
My research (conducted in December) showed that half the edits by logged in users belong to just 2.5% of logged in users.
This indicates a concentration at the top, but is this concentration bigger or smaller than any alternative situation?
Book (and record) stores have always sold a bulk of "best sellers", with a "tail" of less common titles. In recent decades, supermarkets are selling books with a higher concentration of best sellers (a shorter tail), while Internet book sellers such as Amazon.com offer a far longer tail than any traditional book store can afford. This was featured in the October 2004 issue of Wired, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html and is the topic of the www.thelongtail.com blog.
I think that Wikipedia also has a very long tail, a large number of contributors who just write a few articles on highly specialized topics. Much more so than any mainstream (printed) encyclopedia. But we don't have their statistics to compare with.
If we just compare the bulk or mainstream part of Wikipedia, I think it is still smaller than Britannica, even though Wikipedia's long tail makes its total number of articles very large. I think it would be interesting if we could measure how far into the tail each article is. Is this the number of page views?
On May 4, 2005, at 8:20 PM, Lars Aronsson wrote:
Jimmy Wales wrote:
My research (conducted in December) showed that half the edits by logged in users belong to just 2.5% of logged in users.
This indicates a concentration at the top, but is this concentration bigger or smaller than any alternative situation?
Book (and record) stores have always sold a bulk of "best sellers", with a "tail" of less common titles. In recent decades, supermarkets are selling books with a higher concentration of best sellers (a shorter tail), while Internet book sellers such as Amazon.com offer a far longer tail than any traditional book store can afford. This was featured in the October 2004 issue of Wired, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html and is the topic of the www.thelongtail.com blog
On 5/4/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
My research (conducted in December) showed that half the edits by logged in users belong to just 2.5% of logged in users. It would be extremely interesting to run tests to compare "edit dispersion" for new articles, old articles, heavily edited articles, highly watched articles, heavily trafficked articles, etc.
Well it's also the case that there are a great number of trivial edits (minor copyediting, vandalism reversion, simple wikification0 that get made by people with the right 'calling' (and in some cases, the right automation tools)...
The nature of these changes (each small and not time consuming, but as a whole tedious and unrewarding to many people) causes a small number of obsessive (in a good way) people to make a great number of edits.
I suspect that if you omit these edits you'd find the distribution of contributions to be somewhat less concentrated.
On 5/4/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Sj wrote:
The swarm does the bulk of the writing, especially finding and providing current facts, starting new articles, and adding neglected POVs. The roving groups are sensitive to dozens of policy pages, and implement them as they rove... they also take on large projects, one at a time, and try to implement certain changes across thousands of pages at once.
"The swarm does the bukl of the writing..." hints at a testable hypothesis.
Definitely. Note that the above is still under the earlier clause "Currently, I imagine Wikipedia as..." and may or may not reflect reality. My guess is that depending on how you classify the 'swarm' and the 'roving groups', you can find the swarm producing more or less than 50% of the encyclopedia content. My personal conceptual swarm/coordination division doesn't break along user lines; most users do some swarm work, and most active users do some coordinated roving.
My research (conducted in December) showed that half the edits by logged in users belong to just 2.5% of logged in users. It would be extremely
What are "logged in users" here? Users who made some kind of edit over the same time period? I would be interested in what percentage of edits in the article namespace are made by anonymous or very-new users, after excluding bot edits. I'm guessing more than a third. (new users: a proper newbie check would work; red usernames is a quick substitute; it misses some newbies, and overcounts some users with a red fetish) Of the remaining edits, I would again guess that over a third will be uncoordinated and 'swarm-like' for some sane definition of swarming.
interesting to run tests to compare "edit dispersion" for new articles, old articles, heavily edited articles, highly watched articles, heavily trafficked articles, etc.
A deeper understanding of all these issues can have some interesting implications for us in terms of understanding certain policy issues.
Good point.
Chad Perrin wrote"
even when the "regulars" aren't involved, what's going on is actually carefully composed edits by individuals who, though a chaotic sort of collaboration, are building something as a team. These are not insects contributing intelligence to a central thinking process that produces good works...
< It's easy to lose sight of the individual contributions
Hmm. I regularly see "regulars" making careless edits, or tossing up new pages in swarming fashion. I do it myself sometimes... other editors in a different mindset inevitably come by, and start to fit the contribution into an appropriate category, style template, etc.
The canonical "swarm" edit is a very individual contribution. Someone who uploads an entire unwikified essay, or a set of references, or a two-paragraph stub about a minor historical figure.
On Thu, May 05, 2005 at 11:20:58PM -0400, Sj wrote:
Good point.
Chad Perrin wrote"
even when the "regulars" aren't involved, what's going on is actually carefully composed edits by individuals who, though a chaotic sort of collaboration, are building something as a team. These are not insects contributing intelligence to a central thinking process that produces good works...
< It's easy to lose sight of the individual contributions
Hmm. I regularly see "regulars" making careless edits, or tossing up new pages in swarming fashion. I do it myself sometimes... other editors in a different mindset inevitably come by, and start to fit the contribution into an appropriate category, style template, etc.
The canonical "swarm" edit is a very individual contribution. Someone who uploads an entire unwikified essay, or a set of references, or a two-paragraph stub about a minor historical figure.
So now individualistic behavior is evidence of communal "swarm" behavior? When defined thusly, it's no wonder you see "swarm" behavior everywhere: apparently, anything that involves the action of large numbers of individuals constitutes a "swarm" if it isn't specifically inwardly contentious. I don't think such a broad definition of "swarm" behavior is particularly valuable, however, so I don't use it.
-- Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
On 5/5/05, Chad Perrin perrin@apotheon.com wrote:
On Thu, May 05, 2005 at 11:20:58PM -0400, Sj wrote:
Good point.
Chad Perrin wrote"
even when the "regulars" aren't involved, what's going on is actually carefully composed edits by individuals who, though a chaotic sort of collaboration, are building something as a team. These are not insects contributing intelligence to a central thinking process that produces good works...
< It's easy to lose sight of the individual contributions
Hmm. I regularly see "regulars" making careless edits, or tossing up new pages in swarming fashion. I do it myself sometimes... other editors in a different mindset inevitably come by, and start to fit the contribution into an appropriate category, style template, etc.
The canonical "swarm" edit is a very individual contribution. Someone who uploads an entire unwikified essay, or a set of references, or a two-paragraph stub about a minor historical figure.
So now individualistic behavior is evidence of communal "swarm" behavior? When defined thusly, it's no wonder you see "swarm" behavior everywhere: apparently, anything that involves the action of large numbers of individuals constitutes a "swarm" if it isn't specifically inwardly contentious. I don't think such a broad definition of "swarm" behavior is particularly valuable, however, so I don't use it.
I just love semantics. There's nothing "communal" about the swarms I'm thinking of. They are defined precisely by being unconnected to other edits by coordination or other signaling (such as policy discussion, elaborate style guides, project definition, use of talk pages...)
And I don't see it everywhere; in a structured office environment, there is almost no such behavior. You rarely do things on a whim or at random, you find work that needs doing on some list of priorities, and either get assigned to do it or volunteer for it.
Finally, this concept doesn't rely on there being a large number of individuals. Would you be happier if I simply said "uncoordinated" and "coordinated" editing?
Sj wrote:
The swarm does the bulk of the writing, especially finding and providing current facts, starting new articles, and adding neglected POVs.
I think this is an interesting aspect, and definitely something I notice in my monitoring of "New Pages". Often there will be a new and fairly low-quality article created by an anon user on a topic I had never heard of. Sometimes I'll do some research on the topic, find out it's really somewhat interesting, and basically scrap the original crappy contribution and completely rewrite the article from scratch into at least a reasonably good stub. So in a sense, I've written 100% of the article as it then exists, but without the original drive-by user, I wouldn't have done so. Meaning that even users who are not much help in actually writing encyclopedia articles are at least occasionally useful in pointing out things that should be written about.
-Mark
On 5/2/05, Joseph Reagle reagle@mit.edu wrote:
It's important to understand *why* he argues there is wisdom in crowds. I don't know if you've read it and disagree with the fundamentals, but it requires three specific conditions: diversity, independence, and decentralization within the group. This seems very appropriate to WP. Excerpts from my mindmap [1] on this particular note are below:
[[[ The wisdom of crowds * p=Doubleday y=2004 a=USA r=20040921 An argument that groups of people can make very good decisions when there is diversity, independence, and decentralization within the group. This is augmented by case studies in traffic, science, committees, companies, markets and democracy. The wisdom of crowds + 4 In Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, the audience got it right 91 percent of the time, the friend/expert at right 65 percent 10 the stock market identified Morton Thiokol because: the diversity of opinion, independence, decentralization, and aggregation 22 bookies, Google, IEM (election's), HSX (box-office), are all successful decision markets
This seems to be very unlike Wikipedia. Wikipedia does not have some kind of weighted vote between the various ideas. It puts on one, and then either keeps it, corrects it, or goes into a revert war. Correction needs 1 person, revert war needs 2. No "wisdom of the crowd" here, just "wisdom of different people".
Andre Engels
Andre Engels wrote:
Wikipedia does not have some kind of weighted vote between the various ideas.
I would argue that every single article is a weighted vote between various ideas.
It puts on one, and then either keeps it, corrects it, or goes into a revert war. Correction needs 1 person, revert war needs 2.
Every single edit has to stand up the scrutiny of every single person (collectively, a crowd) who reads the article for the rest of time
No "wisdom of the crowd" here, just "wisdom of different people".
Isn't a crowd just a group of people? A wise crowd is a group of individuals who make a better decision than the smartest individual could have made on their own. A dumb crowd is one that compromises to the lowest common denominator.
Thinking about it, the title of the book is actually misleading because according to the author the way to get a group of individuals to make wise decisions is to prevent them from being anthropomorphized into a crowd and adopting groupthink. So the "wisdom of the crowd" is really just the "wisdom of different people", as you say. That is why WP has the success it does, because it is just "wisdom of different people."
Alex Krupp http://www.alexkrupp.com
FYI, a related thread from last year:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2004-July/033649.html
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
Jimmy Wales wrote:
Alex Krupp wrote:
I think all Wikipedians would enjoy the book The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. The basic premise is that crowds of relatively ignorant individuals make better decisions than small groups of experts. I'm sure everyone here agrees with this as Wikipedia is run this way
It's probably interesting to note that a central theme when I give public talks is precisely that Wikipedia is _not_ run this way, and that wikipedia is _not_ an instance of "The Wisdom of Crowds".
That's not to say that there isn't a lot to the notions of how a group collaboration can improve on what an individual can do. My point is just that Wikipedia functions a lot more like a traditional organization than most people realize -- it's a community of thoughtful people who know each other, not a colony of ants.
This might be the case in some portions, and on smaller Wikis, but in general I don't think it is. When I edit articles, 90%+ of the time the other editors are people I have never conversed with, and often people I have never seen edit other articles before. We work together in ad-hoc fashion on a single article for maybe 10 minutes, and then never see each other again. When I write an article, it's usually improved in a similar way by people I have never seen, and often never see again after they've made their contributions, often on the order of a single sentence.
That seems a lot more like the "wisdom of crowds" thing... a few people stopping by and adding a sentence, fixing a punctuation mark, etc., and then disappearing. Well, not literally disappearing, but there are enough people editing the en: Wikipedia that it might as well be the same.
In a few areas where there are prolific editors, you run into the same people over and over (a few of the history areas are like this, as is math), but the vast majority of articles don't have any recognizable editors.
-Mark
It's true when you look at the whole wikipedia.
But when you look at a given article, then you can talk about emergence in many cases.
Jean-Baptiste Soufron, Doctorant CERSA - CNRS, Paris 2 http://soufron.free.fr
Le 2 mai 05, à 14:54, Jimmy Wales a écrit :
Alex Krupp wrote:
I think all Wikipedians would enjoy the book The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. The basic premise is that crowds of relatively ignorant individuals make better decisions than small groups of experts. I'm sure everyone here agrees with this as Wikipedia is run this way
It's probably interesting to note that a central theme when I give public talks is precisely that Wikipedia is _not_ run this way, and that wikipedia is _not_ an instance of "The Wisdom of Crowds".
That's not to say that there isn't a lot to the notions of how a group collaboration can improve on what an individual can do. My point is just that Wikipedia functions a lot more like a traditional organization than most people realize -- it's a community of thoughtful people who know each other, not a colony of ants.
--Jimbo _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
On Thu, May 05, 2005 at 04:29:07PM +0200, Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:
It's true when you look at the whole wikipedia.
But when you look at a given article, then you can talk about emergence in many cases.
Jean-Baptiste Soufron, Doctorant CERSA - CNRS, Paris 2 http://soufron.free.fr
That's an awful lot to proclaim without a supporting argument. I'm interested in details of why you think so.
-- Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
That's an awful lot to proclaim without a supporting argument. I'm interested in details of why you think so.
Well, my PhD is on the emergence of Law and I am using wikimedia and wikipedia as demonstrations for my arguments :)
But you're right, I should write something on it !
Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:
That's an awful lot to proclaim without a supporting argument. I'm interested in details of why you think so.
Well, my PhD is on the emergence of Law and I am using wikimedia and wikipedia as demonstrations for my arguments :)
But you're right, I should write something on it !
A simpler response would be to cite the clause in the statute that says this. To me a fundamental principal of law is that anything which is not specifically forbidden is allowed.
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:
That's an awful lot to proclaim without a supporting argument. I'm interested in details of why you think so.
Well, my PhD is on the emergence of Law and I am using wikimedia and wikipedia as demonstrations for my arguments :)
But you're right, I should write something on it !
A simpler response would be to cite the clause in the statute that says this. To me a fundamental principal of law is that anything which is not specifically forbidden is allowed.
Ec
Hoi, It may be a fundamental principal of law. However, I am uncomfortable with it as it leads to all kinds of weasely people do things and argue: "reading the law I can interpretet it in such a way so it should be allowed" while it is totally against what the law is about. It works both ways as this is also used to prevent people from doing things because some people are great in bending the rules.
When it comes to our projects, it must be clear that they have their rules, they invoke an image of what they are to mean. When the language is deemed to be unclear and that is used as an excuse to do what is manifestly against the spirit of our projects, I would not excuse this. The guiding principle of what we do is, we write an encyclopedia, a dictionary, news, training material whatever that is free NPOV and with we do this with respect for our fellow editors. We are not a debating club. We have people active as member of our community in practically all legal entities of this world and therefore there is not only one law and one law's principles that we have to take into account.
Our rules are different from project to project, it is the spirit of the Wikimedia Foundation that binds us all. It must be clear, that rules within a project that are against the spirit of the WMF are not acceptable, neither are practices that violate what the WMF stands for.
Thanks, Sorry for my rant, GerardM
On May 7, 2005, at 7:43 AM, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:
That's an awful lot to proclaim without a supporting argument. I'm interested in details of why you think so.
Well, my PhD is on the emergence of Law and I am using wikimedia and wikipedia as demonstrations for my arguments :)
But you're right, I should write something on it !
A simpler response would be to cite the clause in the statute that says this. To me a fundamental principal of law is that anything which is not specifically forbidden is allowed.
Ec
It isn't a principle of law, the correct principle is "that which is not forbidden is allowed". The specifically changes the meaning entirely.
On Sat, May 07, 2005 at 08:50:48AM -0400, Stirling Newberry wrote:
On May 7, 2005, at 7:43 AM, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:
That's an awful lot to proclaim without a supporting argument. I'm interested in details of why you think so.
Well, my PhD is on the emergence of Law and I am using wikimedia and wikipedia as demonstrations for my arguments :)
But you're right, I should write something on it !
A simpler response would be to cite the clause in the statute that says this. To me a fundamental principal of law is that anything which is not specifically forbidden is allowed.
Ec
It isn't a principle of law, the correct principle is "that which is not forbidden is allowed". The specifically changes the meaning entirely.
Perhaps, then, that should be rephrased "that which is not 'explicitly' forbidden is allowed" rather than "specifically".
-- Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Chad Perrin wrote:
To me a fundamental principal of law is that anything which is not specifically forbidden is allowed.
Ec
It isn't a principle of law, the correct principle is "that which is not forbidden is allowed". The specifically changes the meaning entirely.
Perhaps, then, that should be rephrased "that which is not 'explicitly' forbidden is allowed" rather than "specifically".
I have no problem with that change.
Ec
On May 8, 2005, at 12:14 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Chad Perrin wrote:
To me a fundamental principal of law is that anything which is not specifically forbidden is allowed.
Ec
It isn't a principle of law, the correct principle is "that which is not forbidden is allowed". The specifically changes the meaning entirely.
Perhaps, then, that should be rephrased "that which is not 'explicitly' forbidden is allowed" rather than "specifically".
I have no problem with that change.
Ec
Which is a distinction without a difference.
Perhaps you need to go back over the difference between malum prohibitum and malum in se, and why your formulation doesn't work very well in light of that difference.
On Sun, May 08, 2005 at 02:30:40PM -0400, Stirling Newberry wrote:
On May 8, 2005, at 12:14 PM, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Chad Perrin wrote:
To me a fundamental principal of law is that anything which is not specifically forbidden is allowed.
Ec
It isn't a principle of law, the correct principle is "that which is not forbidden is allowed". The specifically changes the meaning entirely.
Perhaps, then, that should be rephrased "that which is not 'explicitly' forbidden is allowed" rather than "specifically".
I have no problem with that change.
Ec
Which is a distinction without a difference.
Perhaps you're not familiar with the intricacies of the English language.
-- Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Perhaps you're not familiar with the intricacies of the English language.
-- Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
You are clearly an expert on not being familiar with the intricacies of language, so I will defer to your obviously superior ignorance.
Stirling Newberry wrote:
[snip quoted argument]
Which is a distinction without a difference.
Perhaps you need to go back over the difference between malum prohibitum and malum in se, and why your formulation doesn't work very well in light of that difference.
Having encountered Mr. Newberry on several other forums, I would urge that people not waste their time arguing with him. He generally resorts to attacks on his opponents rather than attempts to make coherent points [1]. The unexplained use here of several legal Latin phrases in passing is characteristic of his typical "vocabulary-dropping, but doesn't know what he's talking about" style.
(And yes, this counts as an ad hominem attack as well, but sometimes one must point out the obvious.)
-Mark
[1] See, for example, this representative exchange with kuro5hin.org founder Rusty Foster: http://www.dailykos.com/comments/2004/10/15/212724/90/4#4
On May 8, 2005, at 3:07 PM, Delirium wrote:
Stirling Newberry wrote:
[snip quoted argument]
Which is a distinction without a difference.
Perhaps you need to go back over the difference between malum prohibitum and malum in se, and why your formulation doesn't work very well in light of that difference.
Having encountered Mr. Newberry on several other forums, I would urge that people not waste their time arguing with him. He generally resorts to attacks on his opponents rather than attempts to make coherent points [1]. The unexplained use here of several legal Latin phrases in passing is characteristic of his typical "vocabulary-dropping, but doesn't know what he's talking about" style.
(And yes, this counts as an ad hominem attack as well, but sometimes one must point out the obvious.)
-Mark
My point was that Mark does not understand the language of debate, his clear poisoning the well attack here is an excellent example of it.
Stirling Newberry wrote:
My point was that Mark does not understand the language of debate, his clear poisoning the well attack here is an excellent example of it.
Since I have not been participating in this thread, I'm not sure to what you mean to refer. Your previous argument in this thread was with Ray Saintonge, not with me.
-Mark
On May 8, 2005, at 4:24 PM, Delirium wrote:
Stirling Newberry wrote:
My point was that Mark does not understand the language of debate, his clear poisoning the well attack here is an excellent example of it.
Since I have not been participating in this thread, I'm not sure to what you mean to refer. Your previous argument in this thread was with Ray Saintonge, not with me.
-Mark
You seem to think you are the only person who remembers other people.
Stirling Newberry wrote:
On May 8, 2005, at 4:24 PM, Delirium wrote:
Stirling Newberry wrote:
My point was that Mark does not understand the language of debate, his clear poisoning the well attack here is an excellent example of it.
Since I have not been participating in this thread, I'm not sure to what you mean to refer. Your previous argument in this thread was with Ray Saintonge, not with me.
You seem to think you are the only person who remembers other people.
While an interesting comment, I fail to see how you can sensibly have said "my point was", when in fact you were not engaged in a discussion with me. How could you have been making a point about my understanding of language in a discussion I was not party to?
-Mark
On Sun, May 08, 2005 at 04:58:10PM -0400, Delirium wrote:
Stirling Newberry wrote:
You seem to think you are the only person who remembers other people.
While an interesting comment, I fail to see how you can sensibly have said "my point was", when in fact you were not engaged in a discussion with me. How could you have been making a point about my understanding of language in a discussion I was not party to?
This is an interesting demonstration of an ongoing dynamic of disagreement, but I'd like to point something out, Mark:
You're not taking your own advice. Don't waste your time continuing the "debate" with him.
-- Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Delirium wrote:
Stirling Newberry wrote:
My point was that Mark does not understand the language of debate, his clear poisoning the well attack here is an excellent example of it.
Since I have not been participating in this thread, I'm not sure to what you mean to refer. Your previous argument in this thread was with Ray Saintonge, not with me.
Fantastic! ... and I thought I was arguing with Jean-Baptiste Soufron. I suppose if I worked hard at it I could make a distinction between "explicitly" and "specifically", but the former may indeed be a superior choice.
The question that set us off in this direction was whether someone had the right to put his work into the public domain. I maintain that he does. To put this in terms of the distinction between "malum prohibitum" and "malum in se" is absurd in the absence of a "malum" of any kind in such an act. Is Stirling proposing that someone should be fined for putting his writings in the public domain?
Ec
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Ray Saintonge wrote:
Delirium wrote:
Stirling Newberry wrote:
My point was that Mark does not understand the language of debate, his clear poisoning the well attack here is an excellent example of it.
Since I have not been participating in this thread, I'm not sure to what you mean to refer. Your previous argument in this thread was with Ray Saintonge, not with me.
Fantastic! ... and I thought I was arguing with Jean-Baptiste Soufron. I suppose if I worked hard at it I could make a distinction between "explicitly" and "specifically", but the former may indeed be a superior choice.
The question that set us off in this direction was whether someone had the right to put his work into the public domain. I maintain that he does. To put this in terms of the distinction between "malum prohibitum" and "malum in se" is absurd in the absence of a "malum" of any kind in such an act. Is Stirling proposing that someone should be fined for putting his writings in the public domain?
Ec
Since I seem to kill every thread I post to, I'll end this one.
I used {{MultiLicenseMinorPD}} until about 2 days ago, when I say the following on it's talk page:
Because it's actually legally impossible to grant one's own works into the public domain in the U.S. and U.K., and this creates serious potential legal problems, I will deprecate this tag if there is no dissent for 4 days. Please see [[Wikipedia:You can't grant your work into the public domain]] for a full explanation along with some authoritative sources, including the U.S. Copyright Office. I have created the tags {{TextLicenseMinorFreeUse}}, which reflects the intent of this template. [[User:Dcoetzee|Deco]] 03:34, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
As I read it (IANAL), you can't place your work into the public domain because:
Any work receives copyright by default and copyright law generally doesn't provide any special means to "abandon" copyright so that a work can enter the public domain
and
Some claim that under many jurisdictions, a statement absolving a copyright or "granting" a work into the public domain has no legal effect whatsoever, and that the owner still retains all rights to the work not otherwise released. This person would then have the legal right to prosecute people who use the work under the false impression that it was in the public domain. It is certainly true that under some jurisdictions, it is impossible to release moral rights, though that is not the case in the United States.
(From [[Wikipedia:Granting work into the public domain]] and [[Public domain]])
*However*, you /can/ release things under a free-for-any-use licence, like {{CopyrightedFreeUse}}, {{NoRightsReserved}}, {{cc-sa}}, etc.
(Hopes flame war will end now)
- -- Alphax GnuPG key: 0xF874C613 - http://tinyurl.com/8mpg9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.' - C. S. Lewis
Alphax wrote:
Since I seem to kill every thread I post to, I'll end this one.
That's a bloody arrogant attitude.
I used {{MultiLicenseMinorPD}} until about 2 days ago, when I say the
following on it's talk page:
Because it's actually legally impossible to grant one's own works into the public domain in the U.S. and U.K., and this creates serious potential legal problems, I will deprecate this tag if there is no dissent for 4 days. Please see [[Wikipedia:You can't grant your work into the public domain]] for a full explanation along with some authoritative sources, including the U.S. Copyright Office. I have created the tags {{TextLicenseMinorFreeUse}}, which reflects the intent of this template. [[User:Dcoetzee|Deco]] 03:34, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
As I read it (IANAL), you can't place your work into the public domain because:
Quoting yourself as an authority is a nice trick if you can get away with it.
Your statement that it is impossible to grant one's works into the public domain is patently false. Copyright is an intellectual property right, and it is fundamental to property rights that the owner have the right to dispose of his property in whatever manner he sees fit.
I looked at the page which you mentioned and the only thing that purports to be from the copyright office is a single unverifiable sentence from a letter received by User:Dcoetzee. It is completely out of contest. For that sentence to be credible one would need to see the entire letter, as well as the letter from the user showing the questions that he asked.
Any work receives copyright by default and copyright law generally doesn't provide any special means to "abandon" copyright so that a work can enter the public domain
While it's true that a work receives a copyright by default as a requirement of the Berne Convention, the absence of "special means is not a barrier to putting a work into the public domain.
Some claim that under many jurisdictions, a statement absolving a copyright or "granting" a work into the public domain has no legal effect whatsoever, and that the owner still retains all rights to the work not otherwise released. This person would then have the legal right to prosecute people who use the work under the false impression that it was in the public domain. It is certainly true that under some jurisdictions, it is impossible to release moral rights, though that is not the case in the United States.
Moral rights are another matter, and I realize that they are not a part of the US law on this. For the moment let's stick to US law. Once the situation there is clear it will be easier to consider the matter in the light of the law in other countries.
Please do one of two things: 1. Cite the section of US statute law which explicitly denies the right to abandon all one's rights in a work, or 2. Cite a judicial decision which has clearly denied a person's right to abandon his copyright.
In the absence of this I would conclude that you don't know what you're talking about.
*However*, you /can/ release things under a free-for-any-use licence, like {{CopyrightedFreeUse}}, {{NoRightsReserved}}, {{cc-sa}}, etc.
These are alternative ways of doing things.
(Hopes flame war will end now)
:-D
Ec
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Ray Saintonge wrote:
Alphax wrote:
Since I seem to kill every thread I post to, I'll end this one.
That's a bloody arrogant attitude.
Sorry, I'm sick of how long this has dragged on for, and often my posts are never replied to. I see you have no sense of humour.
I used {{MultiLicenseMinorPD}} until about 2 days ago, when I say the
following on it's talk page:
Because it's actually legally impossible to grant one's own works into the public domain in the U.S. and U.K., and this creates serious potential legal problems, I will deprecate this tag if there is no dissent for 4 days. Please see [[Wikipedia:You can't grant your work into the public domain]] for a full explanation along with some authoritative sources, including the U.S. Copyright Office. I have created the tags {{TextLicenseMinorFreeUse}}, which reflects the intent of this template. [[User:Dcoetzee|Deco]] 03:34, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
As I read it (IANAL), you can't place your work into the public domain because:
Quoting yourself as an authority is a nice trick if you can get away with it.
You missed the tyop then - it should have been clear that /I/ wasn't the one to write that, from the username and the date. Quoting a single sentence out of context is a nice trick too.
Doesn't Wikipedia quote itself as an authority? /And/ get away with it?
Your statement that it is impossible to grant one's works into the public domain is patently false. Copyright is an intellectual property right, and it is fundamental to property rights that the owner have the right to dispose of his property in whatever manner he sees fit. I looked at the page which you mentioned and the only thing that purports to be from the copyright office is a single unverifiable sentence from a letter received by User:Dcoetzee. It is completely out of contest. For that sentence to be credible one would need to see the entire letter, as well as the letter from the user showing the questions that he asked.
I was giving an opinion, and some reasons why I had formed that opinion. Anyway, I /thought/ that public domain was for things which either had no copyrightable aspects (eg. with {{PD-ineligible}}) or the copyright had expired. From what I read, it appeared that you couldn't just relinquish your rights over something. I'm about 99% certain that you will never lose authorship rights (ie. you are always the origanl author), but you only lose royalty etc. rights if you sell them to someone else, or you have been dead for a while. I'll discuss this with an economist friend of mine.
Any work receives copyright by default and copyright law generally doesn't provide any special means to "abandon" copyright so that a work can enter the public domain
While it's true that a work receives a copyright by default as a requirement of the Berne Convention, the absence of "special means is not a barrier to putting a work into the public domain.
Well, I'm not a copyright lawyer, nor did I ever claim to be. In fact, I explicity stated that I wasn't.
Some claim that under many jurisdictions, a statement absolving a copyright or "granting" a work into the public domain has no legal effect whatsoever, and that the owner still retains all rights to the work not otherwise released. This person would then have the legal right to prosecute people who use the work under the false impression that it was in the public domain. It is certainly true that under some jurisdictions, it is impossible to release moral rights, though that is not the case in the United States.
Moral rights are another matter, and I realize that they are not a part of the US law on this. For the moment let's stick to US law. Once the situation there is clear it will be easier to consider the matter in the light of the law in other countries.
Well, maybe we should just leave it to the lawyers, and stop wasting our time arguing about things we don't know enough about to reach a proper conclusion.
Please do one of two things:
- Cite the section of US statute law which explicitly denies the
right to abandon all one's rights in a work, or 2. Cite a judicial decision which has clearly denied a person's right to abandon his copyright.
In the absence of this I would conclude that you don't know what you're talking about.
1. I can't, because I don't have ready access to the US statutes, nor the legal knowledge to understand them. The small amount of *accurate* (not from TV) legal knowledge I have is not about the US anyway. English is spoken in many other places than the US, like the places the original speakers of English went to apart from North America.
2. There probably haven't been any, and see 1.
3. I never said that I did. Thankyou for making it oh-so-clear as what the actual legal situation is.
*However*, you /can/ release things under a free-for-any-use licence, like {{CopyrightedFreeUse}}, {{NoRightsReserved}}, {{cc-sa}}, etc.
These are alternative ways of doing things.
I hope so. That's why I've only attempted to release *minor edits* (which are most likely not copyrightable anyway, due to the /extremely/ minor nature of them) into the public domain, IF this is indeed possible.
(Hopes flame war will end now)
:-D
Are we there yet? :-P
- -- Alphax GnuPG key: 0xF874C613 - http://tinyurl.com/8mpg9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.' - C. S. Lewis
On Mon, May 09, 2005 at 03:27:56AM -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Alphax wrote:
[snip]
As I read it (IANAL), you can't place your work into the public domain because:
Quoting yourself as an authority is a nice trick if you can get away with it.
Your statement that it is impossible to grant one's works into the public domain is patently false. Copyright is an intellectual property right, and it is fundamental to property rights that the owner have the right to dispose of his property in whatever manner he sees fit.
Copyright isn't a property right. The term "intellectual property" is a form of colloquial shorthand rather than a legal term indicating actual status as a form of "property". I don't know whether this affects one's ability (or inability) to pass something willfully into the public domain, but it does affect the relevance of your statement to the discussion at hand.
-- Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Stirling Newberry wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:
That's an awful lot to proclaim without a supporting argument. I'm interested in details of why you think so.
Well, my PhD is on the emergence of Law and I am using wikimedia and wikipedia as demonstrations for my arguments :)
But you're right, I should write something on it !
A simpler response would be to cite the clause in the statute that says this. To me a fundamental principal of law is that anything which is not specifically forbidden is allowed.
Ec
It isn't a principle of law, the correct principle is "that which is not forbidden is allowed". The specifically changes the meaning entirely.
I can live without the word "specifically". To me it tended to sharpen the meaning. It's omission give the concept a broader application, and that only strenghtens my view on the matter.
Ec
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:
That's an awful lot to proclaim without a supporting argument. I'm interested in details of why you think so.
Well, my PhD is on the emergence of Law and I am using wikimedia and wikipedia as demonstrations for my arguments :)
But you're right, I should write something on it !
A simpler response would be to cite the clause in the statute that says this. To me a fundamental principal of law is that anything which is not specifically forbidden is allowed.
Ec
Hoi, It may be a fundamental principal of law. However, I am uncomfortable with it as it leads to all kinds of weasely people do things and argue: "reading the law I can interpretet it in such a way so it should be allowed" while it is totally against what the law is about. It works both ways as this is also used to prevent people from doing things because some people are great in bending the rules.
Without fundamental principles the law is meaningless. Reading the law in a way that doing something should be allowed is perfectly fine; it is neither weasely nor against what the law is about. Bending rules is a part of the normal legal game. Big companies like Microsoft will do whatever they can to have the law work the way they want it to work. If it's right for them it's right for the little guy, and until the little guy learns that he will forever be a loser. The principle as I expressed it does not prevent people from doing anything. If something is not mentioned in the law then doing it is not a violation of the law. The converse principle, that what is not specifically allowed is forbidden, would lead to the absurdity that any kind of innovation is illegal.
When it comes to our projects, it must be clear that they have their rules, they invoke an image of what they are to mean.
The fewer rules the better. To me an image or vision of what the project is about determines what rules are necessary.
When the language is deemed to be unclear and that is used as an excuse to do what is manifestly against the spirit of our projects, I would not excuse this.
Who does the deeming? If the rules are contrary to the spirit of the project I would change the rules.
The guiding principle of what we do is, we write an encyclopedia, a dictionary, news, training material whatever that is free[,] NPOV and with we do this with respect for our fellow editors.
There's nothing wrong with this, but then it has nothing to do with the topic.
We are not a debating club.
Who said that we are?
We have people active as member of our community in practically all legal entities of this world and therefore there is not only one law and one law's principles that we have to take into account.
So a balance is required, and this only proves my point. If something is clearly allowed in one country, but requires a slight "bending" of the rules in another country we go ahead and bend those rules. This is not the same as an outright violation of the rules. We do not need to strive for the lowest common legal denominator. If we did that we would be bowing to the whims of a government like the one in China which might shut the project down for anything that it felt was an insult to their government.
Our rules are different from project to project, it is the spirit of the Wikimedia Foundation that binds us all. It must be clear, that rules within a project that are against the spirit of the WMF are not acceptable, neither are practices that violate what the WMF stands for.
The separate rules of different projects are not an issue here.
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:
That's an awful lot to proclaim without a supporting argument. I'm interested in details of why you think so.
Well, my PhD is on the emergence of Law and I am using wikimedia and wikipedia as demonstrations for my arguments :)
But you're right, I should write something on it !
A simpler response would be to cite the clause in the statute that says this. To me a fundamental principal of law is that anything which is not specifically forbidden is allowed.
Ec
Hoi, It may be a fundamental principal of law. However, I am uncomfortable with it as it leads to all kinds of weasely people do things and argue: "reading the law I can interpretet it in such a way so it should be allowed" while it is totally against what the law is about. It works both ways as this is also used to prevent people from doing things because some people are great in bending the rules.
Without fundamental principles the law is meaningless. Reading the law in a way that doing something should be allowed is perfectly fine; it is neither weasely nor against what the law is about. Bending rules is a part of the normal legal game. Big companies like Microsoft will do whatever they can to have the law work the way they want it to work. If it's right for them it's right for the little guy, and until the little guy learns that he will forever be a loser. The principle as I expressed it does not prevent people from doing anything. If something is not mentioned in the law then doing it is not a violation of the law. The converse principle, that what is not specifically allowed is forbidden, would lead to the absurdity that any kind of innovation is illegal.
When it comes to our projects, it must be clear that they have their rules, they invoke an image of what they are to mean.
The fewer rules the better. To me an image or vision of what the project is about determines what rules are necessary.
When the language is deemed to be unclear and that is used as an excuse to do what is manifestly against the spirit of our projects, I would not excuse this.
Who does the deeming? If the rules are contrary to the spirit of the project I would change the rules.
The guiding principle of what we do is, we write an encyclopedia, a dictionary, news, training material whatever that is free[,] NPOV and with we do this with respect for our fellow editors.
There's nothing wrong with this, but then it has nothing to do with the topic.
We are not a debating club.
Who said that we are?
We have people active as member of our community in practically all legal entities of this world and therefore there is not only one law and one law's principles that we have to take into account.
So a balance is required, and this only proves my point. If something is clearly allowed in one country, but requires a slight "bending" of the rules in another country we go ahead and bend those rules. This is not the same as an outright violation of the rules. We do not need to strive for the lowest common legal denominator. If we did that we would be bowing to the whims of a government like the one in China which might shut the project down for anything that it felt was an insult to their government.
Our rules are different from project to project, it is the spirit of the Wikimedia Foundation that binds us all. It must be clear, that rules within a project that are against the spirit of the WMF are not acceptable, neither are practices that violate what the WMF stands for.
The separate rules of different projects are not an issue here.
Ec
Hoi, Commenting on each line in isolation, you have lost what is meant. If we were a debating club you would have scored a point but as we are not, it is a pity. You lose sight of the fact that I wrote that I and many with me, are disgusted by the way the interpretation of the law in order to make a position "acceptable". It being a practise held by some does not make this any less true. This was intended as an introduction to what followed. As you may have missed this and then continue commenting line by line I miss the added value of what you try to say. You come to a conclusion that baffles me; as you think it important to talk about principles of law. I concluded with stating a principle; that the spirit of the WMF charter binds us all, a principle that in my opinion should rule all projects and as such is an issue. It is, as I bring it to the attention of us all.
Thanks, Gerard
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:
That's an awful lot to proclaim without a supporting argument. I'm interested in details of why you think so.
Well, my PhD is on the emergence of Law and I am using wikimedia and wikipedia as demonstrations for my arguments :)
But you're right, I should write something on it !
A simpler response would be to cite the clause in the statute that says this. To me a fundamental principal of law is that anything which is not specifically forbidden is allowed.
Ec
Hoi, It may be a fundamental principal of law. However, I am uncomfortable with it as it leads to all kinds of weasely people do things and argue: "reading the law I can interpretet it in such a way so it should be allowed" while it is totally against what the law is about. It works both ways as this is also used to prevent people from doing things because some people are great in bending the rules.
Without fundamental principles the law is meaningless. Reading the law in a way that doing something should be allowed is perfectly fine; it is neither weasely nor against what the law is about. Bending rules is a part of the normal legal game. Big companies like Microsoft will do whatever they can to have the law work the way they want it to work. If it's right for them it's right for the little guy, and until the little guy learns that he will forever be a loser. The principle as I expressed it does not prevent people from doing anything. If something is not mentioned in the law then doing it is not a violation of the law. The converse principle, that what is not specifically allowed is forbidden, would lead to the absurdity that any kind of innovation is illegal.
When it comes to our projects, it must be clear that they have their rules, they invoke an image of what they are to mean.
The fewer rules the better. To me an image or vision of what the project is about determines what rules are necessary.
When the language is deemed to be unclear and that is used as an excuse to do what is manifestly against the spirit of our projects, I would not excuse this.
Who does the deeming? If the rules are contrary to the spirit of the project I would change the rules.
The guiding principle of what we do is, we write an encyclopedia, a dictionary, news, training material whatever that is free[,] NPOV and with we do this with respect for our fellow editors.
There's nothing wrong with this, but then it has nothing to do with the topic.
We are not a debating club.
Who said that we are?
We have people active as member of our community in practically all legal entities of this world and therefore there is not only one law and one law's principles that we have to take into account.
So a balance is required, and this only proves my point. If something is clearly allowed in one country, but requires a slight "bending" of the rules in another country we go ahead and bend those rules. This is not the same as an outright violation of the rules. We do not need to strive for the lowest common legal denominator. If we did that we would be bowing to the whims of a government like the one in China which might shut the project down for anything that it felt was an insult to their government.
Our rules are different from project to project, it is the spirit of the Wikimedia Foundation that binds us all. It must be clear, that rules within a project that are against the spirit of the WMF are not acceptable, neither are practices that violate what the WMF stands for.
The separate rules of different projects are not an issue here.
Ec
Hoi, Commenting on each line in isolation, you have lost what is meant. If we were a debating club you would have scored a point but as we are not, it is a pity. You lose sight of the fact that I wrote that I and many with me, are disgusted by the way the interpretation of the law in order to make a position "acceptable". It being a practise held by some does not make this any less true. This was intended as an introduction to what followed. As you may have missed this and then continue commenting line by line I miss the added value of what you try to say. You come to a conclusion that baffles me; as you think it important to talk about principles of law. I concluded with stating a principle; that the spirit of the WMF charter binds us all, a principle that in my opinion should rule all projects and as such is an issue. It is, as I bring it to the attention of us all.
I have no problem with the concept that there are common ideas that bind the WMF projects. My comments could have as easily been about any project or all of them. Your conclusion was a non sequitur. The thread was about legal issues.
Ec
That's an awful lot to proclaim without a supporting argument. I'm interested in details of why you think so.
Well, my PhD is on the emergence of Law and I am using wikimedia and wikipedia as demonstrations for my arguments :)
But you're right, I should write something on it !
A simpler response would be to cite the clause in the statute that says this. To me a fundamental principal of law is that anything which is not specifically forbidden is allowed.
We're talking about emergence here... what do you mean ? ? ?
Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:
That's an awful lot to proclaim without a supporting argument. I'm interested in details of why you think so.
Well, my PhD is on the emergence of Law and I am using wikimedia and wikipedia as demonstrations for my arguments :)
But you're right, I should write something on it !
A simpler response would be to cite the clause in the statute that says this. To me a fundamental principal of law is that anything which is not specifically forbidden is allowed.
We're talking about emergence here... what do you mean ? ? ?
The statement (which was cut off at some point) was about your guess that French law did not allow a work to be put into the public domain. Citing a specific passage in the French statutes would be much more effective than speculating about the law.
Ec
A simpler response would be to cite the clause in the statute that says this. To me a fundamental principal of law is that anything which is not specifically forbidden is allowed.
We're talking about emergence here... what do you mean ? ? ?
The statement (which was cut off at some point) was about your guess that French law did not allow a work to be put into the public domain. Citing a specific passage in the French statutes would be much more effective than speculating about the law.
Here it is:
The article L-121-1 explains that moral rights are : "perpétuel, inaliénable et imprescriptible", it lasts forever, they can't renounce to it and they can sue even years after a copyvio.
And when talking about patrimonial rights, there are various provisions implying that the author cannot contribute his work to PD : L-122-7 precises very strong formalities for any release of his representation or reproduction rights, L-122-8 precises that authors possess a forever right to get 3% of any auction of their work and that they can't renounce to it.
But more importantly, L-131-2 states that : "Les contrats de représentation, d'édition et de production audiovisuelle définis au présent titre doivent être constatés par écrit. Il en est de même des autorisations gratuites d'exécution" which means that any contract to sell their representation/edition rights must be a written one, even when they authorizes free use of their work !
Article L-131-5 even precises that if the author released his rights but that he got more than 7/12 less than what he should have been normally awarded, he can sue to get it.
etc. etc. etc.
Wow...
That is totally... strange.
On 10/05/05, Jean-Baptiste Soufron jbsoufron@gmail.com wrote:
A simpler response would be to cite the clause in the statute that says this. To me a fundamental principal of law is that anything which is not specifically forbidden is allowed.
We're talking about emergence here... what do you mean ? ? ?
The statement (which was cut off at some point) was about your guess that French law did not allow a work to be put into the public domain. Citing a specific passage in the French statutes would be much more effective than speculating about the law.
Here it is:
The article L-121-1 explains that moral rights are : "perpétuel, inaliénable et imprescriptible", it lasts forever, they can't renounce to it and they can sue even years after a copyvio.
And when talking about patrimonial rights, there are various provisions implying that the author cannot contribute his work to PD : L-122-7 precises very strong formalities for any release of his representation or reproduction rights, L-122-8 precises that authors possess a forever right to get 3% of any auction of their work and that they can't renounce to it.
But more importantly, L-131-2 states that : "Les contrats de représentation, d'édition et de production audiovisuelle définis au présent titre doivent être constatés par écrit. Il en est de même des autorisations gratuites d'exécution" which means that any contract to sell their representation/edition rights must be a written one, even when they authorizes free use of their work !
Article L-131-5 even precises that if the author released his rights but that he got more than 7/12 less than what he should have been normally awarded, he can sue to get it.
etc. etc. etc.
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
On 5/10/05, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
That is totally... strange.
Well, not really, I believe similar provisions are in many other law systems. E.g. in Czechia, our Copyright Act reads:
Article 11: (4) The author may not waive his personal rights; these rights are non-transferable and become extinct on death of the author. The provision of paragraph (5) shall not be affected.
(5) After the death of the author no other person may claim authorship of the work; the work may be used only in a manner which does not depreciate its value and, unless the work is an anonymous work, the name of the author, if known, must be indicated. Protection may be claimed by any of the author's kin 1); they shall maintain this authorisation even after the passage of the term of economic rights to copyright. Such protection may at any time be claimed also by the legal entity associating authors or by the relevant collective administrator of rights in accordance with this Act (Art. 97).
Article 26: (1) Economic rights may not be waived by the author; such rights are not transferable and are not subject to the execution of a ruling; this provision shall not apply to claims arising from such economic rights.
Article 46: (2) The author may not grant authorisation to exercise the right to use the work in a manner which has not been known at the time of the conclusion of the agreement.
...etc. The point is IMHO (IANAL) to protect the author from being coerced into an unprofitable agreement -- you know, you meet that Hollywood agent, he offers you a "generic EULA" containing fifty pages of petite text...etc. Not that I would think the law is correct; especially from the viewpoint of free software/free content, it is definitely close-minded.
-- [[cs:User:Mormegil | Petr Kadlec]]
Clearly, it is not strange, it is the french vision of copyright : author's rights... meant to protect authors from pressure of their editors, etc.
It is not specially better or worse :) But it is different and it is important to know it if you want to set up a good policy.
Le 10 mai 05, à 21:48, Petr Kadlec a écrit :
On 5/10/05, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
That is totally... strange.
Well, not really, I believe similar provisions are in many other law systems. E.g. in Czechia, our Copyright Act reads:
Article 11: (4) The author may not waive his personal rights; these rights are non-transferable and become extinct on death of the author. The provision of paragraph (5) shall not be affected.
(5) After the death of the author no other person may claim authorship of the work; the work may be used only in a manner which does not depreciate its value and, unless the work is an anonymous work, the name of the author, if known, must be indicated. Protection may be claimed by any of the author's kin 1); they shall maintain this authorisation even after the passage of the term of economic rights to copyright. Such protection may at any time be claimed also by the legal entity associating authors or by the relevant collective administrator of rights in accordance with this Act (Art. 97).
Article 26: (1) Economic rights may not be waived by the author; such rights are not transferable and are not subject to the execution of a ruling; this provision shall not apply to claims arising from such economic rights.
Article 46: (2) The author may not grant authorisation to exercise the right to use the work in a manner which has not been known at the time of the conclusion of the agreement.
...etc. The point is IMHO (IANAL) to protect the author from being coerced into an unprofitable agreement -- you know, you meet that Hollywood agent, he offers you a "generic EULA" containing fifty pages of petite text...etc. Not that I would think the law is correct; especially from the viewpoint of free software/free content, it is definitely close-minded.
-- [[cs:User:Mormegil | Petr Kadlec]] _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Petr Kadlec wrote:
...etc. The point is IMHO (IANAL) to protect the author from being coerced into an unprofitable agreement -- you know, you meet that Hollywood agent, he offers you a "generic EULA" containing fifty pages of petite text...etc. Not that I would think the law is correct; especially from the viewpoint of free software/free content, it is definitely close-minded.
Those laws were indeed written with in mind the individual author being coerced by publishers into signing leonine agreements (see for instance the push in the US to make musicians' work considered "work for hire").
I agree that the use of authors' right law for software is problematic (afaik, in France at least, there are specific conditions for software - for instance, software authors cannot exerce the withdrawal clauses that authors of novels can).
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . till we *) . . .
Hi,
how do the CC people handle this?
Till
Here it is:
The article L-121-1 explains that moral rights are : "perpétuel, inaliénable et imprescriptible", it lasts forever, they can't renounce to it and they can sue even years after a copyvio.
And when talking about patrimonial rights, there are various provisions implying that the author cannot contribute his work to PD : L-122-7 precises very strong formalities for any release of his representation or reproduction rights, L-122-8 precises that authors possess a forever right to get 3% of any auction of their work and that they can't renounce to it.
But more importantly, L-131-2 states that : "Les contrats de représentation, d'édition et de production audiovisuelle définis au présent titre doivent être constatés par écrit. Il en est de même des autorisations gratuites d'exécution" which means that any contract to sell their representation/edition rights must be a written one, even when they authorizes free use of their work !
Article L-131-5 even precises that if the author released his rights but that he got more than 7/12 less than what he should have been normally awarded, he can sue to get it.
etc. etc. etc.
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
__ . / / / / ... Till Westermayer - till we *) . . . mailto:till@tillwe.de . www.westermayer.de/till/ . icq 320393072 . Hirschstraße 5. 79100 Freiburg . 0761 55697152 . 0160 96619179 . . . . .
Well, I was part of the translation team of CC for France, and I translated Lessig's "The Future of Ideas" in french...
and in fact it was quite easy to deal with CC since these contracts do not require the author to renounce to its right, they propose him to authorize a few uses in advance...
it's a completely different approach from releasing a work in PD
CC is now translated in french and adapted to french law... and it works well :D
Jean-Baptiste Soufron, Doctorant CERSA - CNRS, Paris 2 http://soufron.free.fr
Le 10 mai 05, à 21:05, Till Westermayer a écrit :
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . till we *) . . .
Hi,
how do the CC people handle this?
Till
Here it is:
The article L-121-1 explains that moral rights are : "perpétuel, inaliénable et imprescriptible", it lasts forever, they can't renounce to it and they can sue even years after a copyvio.
And when talking about patrimonial rights, there are various provisions implying that the author cannot contribute his work to PD : L-122-7 precises very strong formalities for any release of his representation or reproduction rights, L-122-8 precises that authors possess a forever right to get 3% of any auction of their work and that they can't renounce to it.
But more importantly, L-131-2 states that : "Les contrats de représentation, d'édition et de production audiovisuelle définis au présent titre doivent être constatés par écrit. Il en est de même des autorisations gratuites d'exécution" which means that any contract to sell their representation/edition rights must be a written one, even when they authorizes free use of their work !
Article L-131-5 even precises that if the author released his rights but that he got more than 7/12 less than what he should have been normally awarded, he can sue to get it.
etc. etc. etc.
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
__ . / / / / ... Till Westermayer - till we *) . . . mailto:till@tillwe.de . www.westermayer.de/till/ . icq 320393072 . Hirschstraße 5. 79100 Freiburg . 0761 55697152 . 0160 96619179 . . . . . _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:
Article L-131-5 even precises that if the author released his rights but that he got more than 7/12 less than what he should have been normally awarded, he can sue to get it.
Does this mean that a French author can sue us for using work that he voluntarily contributed to Wikipedia? Assuming the author's work has monetary value more than zero, then the zero we are paying him is by necessity more than 7/12 less than what it is really worth. Are we legally different in this case than a commercial publisher who convinces someone to sign away his rights for much less than they're worth?
Very odd...
-Mark
It seems so. Our exploitive techniques of forcing contributors to sign away their rights are void in France, apparently.
Fred
From: Delirium delirium@hackish.org Reply-To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Date: Tue, 10 May 2005 18:32:16 -0400 To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Subject: [Wikipedia-l] Re: no PD in France
Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:
Article L-131-5 even precises that if the author released his rights but that he got more than 7/12 less than what he should have been normally awarded, he can sue to get it.
Does this mean that a French author can sue us for using work that he voluntarily contributed to Wikipedia? Assuming the author's work has monetary value more than zero, then the zero we are paying him is by necessity more than 7/12 less than what it is really worth. Are we legally different in this case than a commercial publisher who convinces someone to sign away his rights for much less than they're worth?
Very odd...
-Mark
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Does this mean that a French author can sue us for using work that he voluntarily contributed to Wikipedia? Assuming the author's work has monetary value more than zero, then the zero we are paying him is by necessity more than 7/12 less than what it is really worth. Are we legally different in this case than a commercial publisher who convinces someone to sign away his rights for much less than they're worth?
Well, at least he could try to sue. I am not sure he would get remedies for a non-commercial use, but he could certainly obtain to forbid you to us his work any longer.
Ok, that relates to an actual case we had in arbitration, Irismeister, who I understand is a Romanian practitioner with a Iridology practice in Paris. Should he sue, in a Paris court, he would presumably win, and with a French affiliate have someone he could get his "legal" hands on. How exposed are we? If he requested removal of all his contributions, could we easily comply technically? That is, do we have software which would easily allow removal of all of someone's edits?
Actually I see little harm in removing every article he ever edited, as we have a capacity to regenerate, like a lizard who has lost his tail.
Fred
From: Jean-Baptiste Soufron jbsoufron@gmail.com Reply-To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 13:08:41 +0200 To: wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] Re: no PD in France
Does this mean that a French author can sue us for using work that he voluntarily contributed to Wikipedia? Assuming the author's work has monetary value more than zero, then the zero we are paying him is by necessity more than 7/12 less than what it is really worth. Are we legally different in this case than a commercial publisher who convinces someone to sign away his rights for much less than they're worth?
Well, at least he could try to sue. I am not sure he would get remedies for a non-commercial use, but he could certainly obtain to forbid you to us his work any longer.
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Fred Bauder wrote:
Ok, that relates to an actual case we had in arbitration, Irismeister, who I understand is a Romanian practitioner with a Iridology practice in Paris. Should he sue, in a Paris court, he would presumably win, and with a French affiliate have someone he could get his "legal" hands on. How exposed are we? If he requested removal of all his contributions, could we easily comply technically? That is, do we have software which would easily allow removal of all of someone's edits?
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.
The right of withdrawal (CPI L121-4) can only be exerced if the author indemnifies the publisher for the losses incurred by this withdrawal, as very clearly stated in the law. My understanding is that Irismeister would have to refund us the developer or employee time needed to sort out his contributions...
Furthermore, Wikipedia is clearly a "collaborative work" (CPI L113-2). In that circumstance, the rights may only be exerced by common agreement of the authors, and if there is disagreement, a court would have to step in. To me his means Irismeister would have to get a court to decide that he can exerce his right of withdrawal from this common work.
Thus my analysis is that: - it would cost him an arm and a leg - the court could very likely just rule that he cannot ask for withdrawal from this collaborative work.
-- DM
On Mon, May 02, 2005 at 03:06:36AM -0400, Alex Krupp wrote:
I think all Wikipedians would enjoy the book The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. The basic premise is that crowds of relatively ignorant individuals make better decisions than small groups of experts. I'm sure everyone here agrees with this as Wikipedia is run this way and Wikipedia is a success, but until reading this book it was a total mystery why Wikipedia worked the way it did. And judging by the press we've gotten, I'm not the only one who feels with way. If you'll remember, the mystery of how Wikipedia works has been compared to sausage, bumble bees, public bathrooms, etc.
I think you'll find that making assumptions on what everyone can agree will only get you in trouble, particularly when you haven't asked anyone what they think on the matter. I, for one, disagree with the "Wisdom of Crowds" concepts as they are presented, and find most of the reasoning therein to be flawed. Granted, I have my information on it only from secondary sources, but these sources include both agreement and disagreement, and include some fairly intelligent treatments of the subject.
In short, though, you'll probably find pretty quickly that "everyone here" does NOT in fact agree with that, or that Wikipedia is run that way, as several responses to your email have already illustrated.
If you really want to know why Wikipedia works, you should probably start reading some of the more scholarly treatments of why open source software development works -- and yes, they're written by "experts".
In truth, it seems to me that what makes Wikipedia work is exactly what the book you mention claims is invalid: the input of experts. We are all experts in some things, and we all know where to find the words of experts online. Within our realms of knowledge, and within realms of the knowledge we can find that is contributed to public circulation by others, we contribute to the aggregate that is Wikipedia. There's nothing "emergent" about that aside from the simple fact that when a lot of time and effort is put into collecting expert data a nice collection of expert data emerges. Meanwhile, there's nothing distributed about the intelligence involved -- only about the way work is accomplished.
-- Chad Perrin [ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]
Chad Perrin wrote:
In short, though, you'll probably find pretty quickly that "everyone here" does NOT in fact agree with that, or that Wikipedia is run that way, as several responses to your email have already illustrated.
Good point. Looks like I was a bit overambitious in my initial email.
In truth, it seems to me that what makes Wikipedia work is exactly what the book you mention claims is invalid: the input of experts.
The book does not claim that the input of experts is invalid, nor am I claiming the advice of experts is invalid. The book argues that under the right circumstances groups of both experts and non-experts can make better decisions than just experts. Whether this is true or not I don't know, but I'm not claiming that it is gospel truth, only that I think Wikipedians would enjoy the book. I did make the claim that people reading this would agree with the claim, but apparently I was wrong on that one.
I also disagree that the input of experts is what makes Wikipedia work. I would make an educated guess that the majority of edits that the top contributors make make are in topics they know nothing about: fixing grammar, improving the flow, wikifying, placing articles in categories, removing POV, reverting vandalism, etc. But is it true that the facts of the article were originally added by domain experts? Not necessarily, a lot of my favorite articles were written largely a sentence at a time, where each person knew one fact or only a handful of facts about the subject. Each of these contributors was most likely ignorant about the topic as a whole, yet because each added a fact or two relatively good articles have eventually been created. A good example of this is [[Tea]] on en.
We are all experts in some things, and we all know where to find the words of experts online. Within our realms of knowledge, and within realms of the knowledge we can find that is contributed to public circulation by others, we contribute to the aggregate that is Wikipedia.
I don't disagree with this...
There's nothing "emergent" about that aside from the simple fact that when a lot of time and effort is put into collecting expert data a nice collection of expert data emerges.
I agree that there is no emergence at the project level; we are all trying to create an encyclopedia that is composed of a collection of articles. But at the same time, Wikipedia isn't supposed to be the sum of all human data, but rather the sum of all human knowledge. At the article level it is possible for many people to each add a single fact, that when combined allow conclusions to be drawn by readers that were not known by any individual contributor. I would consider this to be emergence, though if others want to say that this is only a collaboration and is not emergent then I won't argue because I don't think it particularly matters.
Meanwhile, there's nothing distributed about the intelligence involved -- only about the way work is accomplished.
I don't know enough about what qualifies and what does not qualify as distributed intelligence (outside of the mostly black and white definitions used by computer science) to pass judgement on this, but I'll take your word for it.
In another reply, Stirling Newberry says, "I've read it, it is the "Dow 36,000" for the 90s." I had never heard of this book so I looked it up in Amazon, and the first review says that the main problem with the book is that it is written by people who think they are smarter than the market. This is interesting, considering the Wisdom of Crowds is about how individuals aren't consistently smarter than the market and about how to use the intelligence of markets to make good decisions. As a practical example of how Surowiecki's ideas could be applied by individuals in WP, consider the process for voting on which articles should become featured. The task at hand is to separate the excellent articles from the merely good. According to Surowiecki, when one has to make a decision through a group then the best decisions are made by groups which have diversity, independence, and decentralization (to borrow from Joseph's mindmap).
This means that, according to Surowiecki, the quality of judging of articles will increase the more diverse the group is in terms of what they know, their values and beliefs, levels of intelligence, etc. The takeaway would be that we should get as many people to participate in choosing articles to go into WP 1.0 in order to make the best decisions about what stays and goes.
Secondly, each individual should act independently. That means that s/he should read the article and write down their reaction to it BEFORE reading other people's comments. If their comment is completely redundant then they should possibly delete it, but individuals should not read other people's comments before reading the article.
Thirdly, the process should be decentralized. WP does an excellent job of this already: there is no one telling people what to do, and everyone just works on what they are interested in when they feel like it. Going back to our example about choosing FA/WP 1.0 articles, our decentralization is an asset because if there were someone giving orders for people to vote on a certain number of articles per week or else have their account banned, one could easily imagine a situation of people voting and commenting without really reading the articles first.
Anyway, I didn't mean for my post to be offensive by putting words in the mouths of othhers, nor did I mean to imply that I believe all of what Surowiecki says is gospel truth. However, I did enjoy the book, I do think that it relates to Wikipedia (even though Jimbo disagrees), and it got me thinking more about the social dynamics of this project. On that basis I still recommend the book.
Alex "pHatidic" Krupp http://www.alexkrupp.com
Alex Krupp wrote:
Good point. Looks like I was a bit overambitious in my initial email.
A little but I think your main point, stated more cautiously, was that the book is interesting and may relate to Wikipedia's development in some interesting ways.
Anyway, I didn't mean for my post to be offensive by putting words in the mouths of othhers, nor did I mean to imply that I believe all of what Surowiecki says is gospel truth. However, I did enjoy the book, I do think that it relates to Wikipedia (even though Jimbo disagrees), and it got me thinking more about the social dynamics of this project. On that basis I still recommend the book.
I should add that I also recommend the book, on the same basis.
I also recommend Friedrich Hayek's 1945 piece in the American Economic Review titled "The Use of Knowledge in Society". It has for a long time been a cornerstone of my way of thinking about the world, and it has significant relevance for my advocacy of openness and individual initiative in our work on Wikipedia.
"Which of these systems is likely to be more efficient depends mainly on the question under which of them we can expect that fuller use will be made of the existing knowledge. This, in turn, depends on whether we are more likely to succeeding putting at the disposal of a single central authority all the knowledge which ought to be used but which is initially dispersed among many different individuals, or in conveying to the individuals such additional knowledge as they need in order to enable them to dovetail their plans with those of others."
--Jimbo
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