[Foundation-l] Wikistandards (was Requests for new Wiki projects)

[Robert Scott Horning]

kylelutze wrote:

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> I'm not sure wikibooks is the best place to start, but a wikistandards
> site is definitely something I'm interested in. There's only a couple of
> problems I see with it. As it is a wiki, and some of these standards are
> rather important, if somebody puts some false info into a standard, and
> people start using it while most others are using the correct one, this
> could lead to problems. The other is copyright infringements being made
> easily because some fool decides to post standards to a closed source
> project(I don't know if there is an easy legal way around this).
>
> Kyle
>
I don't think that this is nearly so much of a problem.  There would 
eventually have to be some way to "freeze" a standard so only admins or 
trusted individuals would be able to make minor changes to the standard. 
 This would happen when a standard is considered "complete" by the group 
putting the standard out, and would be a community decision.  The point 
there is precisely that you don't want people inserting something into 
the standard after people are trying to implement it.  

The "new" version (2.0 or whatever) certainly should be modifyable, and 
that would be no different than any other wikimedia project... subject 
to vandalism like any other wiki page.  Trust me, most parts of a 
standard are going to have some extreame scrutiny in it, and it is more 
likely that people are going to be inserting "false" history into 
mainline wikipedia entries, and getting away with it, than somebody 
inserting false specifications into a standard.  Page history will also 
be a good tool to find out just who did what, and would be used quite 
often in the process of standards development.  I think editing wars 
where two groups of people keep putting their "changes" into the 
standard would be more of a headache, and trying to "lock out" the other 
group.

As far as copyright violations, again this is just like copyright 
violations for any other part of all of the Wikimedia projects.  Indeed, 
I think it would be much easier for community members involved with 
something like Wikistandards to be able to identify copyright violations 
than would be the case for multimedia items like images or sound clips. 
 Those who work regularly with these standards would be able to identify 
immediately when something has been copied illegally and it would be 
fairly easy and straight forward to delete that content.  It would be 
important, however, to remind new users to Wikistandards that they 
should avoid copyright violations, particularly existing standards that 
have clear copyright like ISO standards.

One potential legal hassle that would be unique to Wikistandards would 
be a group trying to reverse-engineer an existing standard.  Clearly the 
copyright would be under the GFDL (or whatever is reasonable.... this 
isn't a huge issue in this case), but there would be some other legal 
minefields like the DCMA or the Patriot Act (in the USA) that might come 
into play and kill the project, with possible arrest of participants in 
the reverse engineering process.  Of secondary concern would be people 
who have been "contaminated" by seeing the original specification 
(closed, propritary, and subject to Non-disclosure agreements) and then 
putting some of that original copyrighted specification into the reverse 
engineering effort.  Or worse yet, the company(ies) involved with the 
original spec deliberately contaminating the reverse engineering spec 
and through that killing the spec.  I'm not even sure what policies 
should be reasonable to try and avoid these issues.  I do think groups 
like the EFF and Groklaw would get heavily involved if legal issues did 
come up, particularly if individuals arrested were otherwise innocent 
participants in the process.  Indeed, such arrests would make major 
headlines, particularly among "geek" news sources like Slashdot or Wired.

The only reason I'm suggesting to start through Wikibooks is only 
because these are already book-like projects, and it is a good way to 
bootstrap the whole thing to see if it can be a viable project on its 
own.  Even if Wikistandards die and doesn't do too well, the content can 
be maintained by the existing Wikibooks community, even if it is an ugly 
step child.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning
218 Sunstone Circle
Logan, UT 84321
(435) 753-3330
robert_horning at netzero.net