[Foundation-l] foundation-l Digest, Vol 48, Issue 62

Wed Mar 12 12:05:17 UTC 2008

I would like to visit question forum where I can answer some questions

foundation-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org wrote:  Send foundation-l mailing list submissions to
foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org

To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to
foundation-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org

You can reach the person managing the list at
foundation-l-owner at lists.wikimedia.org

When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
than "Re: Contents of foundation-l digest..."

Today's Topics:

1. Re: [Fwd: About Alexandria] (Florence Devouard)
2. Re: [Fwd: About Alexandria] (Mark Ryan)
3. Re: Jimmy Wales in the news (Anthony)
4. Re: Jimmy Wales in the news (David Gerard)
5. Re: [Fwd: About Alexandria] (Florence Devouard)
6. Re: Jimmy Wales in the news (Florence Devouard)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Sat, 08 Mar 2008 13:00:55 +0100
From: Florence Devouard 
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [Fwd: About Alexandria]
To: foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Message-ID: 
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"

And again... Why does it not get through ???

------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2008 21:33:25 +0900
From: "Mark Ryan" 
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [Fwd: About Alexandria]
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"

Message-ID:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

I'm pretty sure our mailing lists are set up to strip all
non-plain-text attachments from posts automatically. You might have to
copy it into the body of your email or upload it somewhere and link to
that.

~Mark Ryan

------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2008 07:43:54 -0500
From: Anthony 
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Jimmy Wales in the news
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"

Message-ID:
<71cd4dd90803080443k2360ab5eyf5d8e7dedd6b4de at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 4:16 PM, SlimVirgin wrote:
> Antony said earlier that, as a Randian, [a Randian] would act only out of
> self-interest and not altruism, but this is a false dichotomy. People
> who act altruistically want to do so at some level, or else they
> wouldn't. As philosophers put it, all reasons for action are internal
> reasons, meaning they are based on the actor's desires, needs, and
> interests, the argument being that a reason for action that has no
> emotional resonance for you will fail to be magnetic enough to move
> you to act. According to that argument, we are all psychological
> Randians, at least a little. :)
>
Taking out the names, because they're irrelevant...

I think there is a distinction between a rational act of kindness and
an altruistic act. It's not a quantitative distinction, but it's a
qualitative one.

If I spend 5 minutes on a weekend helping an old lady cross the
street, that's one thing. If I donate to the world what I believe I
could turn into a billion dollar company, just for the warm fuzzies, I
think that's clearly another. I'd consider the latter to be an
irrational act of altruism. Were I a true Randian, I guess I'd even
call it evil.

[I'm going to snip out an example I put here which is closer to what I
think actually happened, because apparently some people find the idea
extremely offensive.]

And to answer your point that "all reasons for action are internal
reasons, meaning they are based on the actor's desires, needs, and
interests", I can't agree. For example, I can't say qualitatively
that an anorexic's decision to starve him/herself is an example of
acting based on his/her "desires, needs, and interests". Maybe
they're doing it for an internal reason, but I think there's a
qualitative line to be drawn where some acts of self-destruction can
be deemed irrational. You could say, by definition, that anything
someone does do is something s/he "needs" to do, but then your
statement is circular and meaningless.

------------------------------

Message: 4
Date: Sat, 8 Mar 2008 12:55:35 +0000
From: "David Gerard" 
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Jimmy Wales in the news
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"

Message-ID:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

On 07/03/2008, SlimVirgin wrote:

> I agree. I had no idea when I started who owned what, and I didn't
> care. The social and moral value of the project exists independently
> of the money angle. And if it had been run with almost all the profits
> going to good causes, it would still have been a very attractive
> project to volunteer for.

I always assumed (2004) it was Jimbo's wiki, he just let us edit it -
I was unaware this had already changed as of 2003, at least on paper.

For a direct comparison, lots of people (including me) contribute to
Wikia wikis, because the content can be taken off it and set up
elsewhere, even though that's much more a case of "It's Jimbo and
Angela's wiki farm, they just let us edit it".

> Antony said earlier that, as a Randian, Jimbo would act only out of
> self-interest and not altruism, but this is a false dichotomy. People
> who act altruistically want to do so at some level, or else they
> wouldn't.
[...]

Speaking as someone whose political ideas formed in the '80s, lifelong
Labor/Labour voter who speaks Ideologically Sound as a second
language, I have no trouble seeing altruism and community effort
entirely in terms of game theory and being fairly obviously
advantageous in terms of creating a nicer environment to do everything
else in.

- d.

------------------------------

Message: 5
Date: Sat, 08 Mar 2008 14:48:20 +0100
From: Florence Devouard 
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] [Fwd: About Alexandria]
To: foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Message-ID: 
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed

Mark Ryan wrote:
> I'm pretty sure our mailing lists are set up to strip all
> non-plain-text attachments from posts automatically. You might have to
> copy it into the body of your email or upload it somewhere and link to
> that.
> 
> ~Mark Ryan
> 
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
> 

Gnnnnn, a very plain and non threatening .odt...

Okay, please find below a copy and paste then

---------------

Cultural Accumulation and Modern Reading

By

Ismail Serageldin
Librarian of Alexandria
Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina

The ICT Revolution:
We live in the age of the internet. The digital age, where the 
traditional boundaries between voice, text, image and data have blurred 
and are on the verge of disappearing. The traditional view of writing as 
the supreme means of communication has already for a century been 
gradually displaced by the role of the image in transferring knowledge 
and interconnecting generations? But that does not mean that the word 
will be abolished or that the book will disappear. Rather, our children 
will have many more options to choose from and an infinitely richer 
cultural environment to live in.
Indeed we can see this today: Television is very pervasive, mobile 
telephony is ubiquitous and never have more people been connected to the 
new media. The internet is everywhere, and youth seem particularly adept 
at navigating the new fads and fashions, even creating entire new worlds 
in virtual reality in the realm of cyberspace. But never before in the 
history of humanity have we had as many print newspapers, magazines and 
books as we have today. And that is true in terms of titles or of 
individual copies. So the two trends - electronic, wireless digital data 
and old-fashioned print media - can grow hand in hand as it were.
But the explosion of technology that we have witnessed in the last 
century is nothing compared to the explosion that is about to come in 
this new century. This is truly the third global revolution that we are 
living through. I believe that the new information age is transformative 
on the scale of the two global revolutions of humanity: the agricultural 
revolution that allowed the emergence of civilizations and the 
industrial revolution that changed the relationship of worker to product 
and brought about a major explosion of goods and services. The new 
information and communication revolution will also bring about real 
qualitative changes.
In addition, ICT technology is now moving from computer-centric to 
communication-centric platforms (mobile phones and PDAs) which are much 
more user friendly. With substantial expansion of broadband wireless, 
the poor can move to communications-centric platforms immediately. That 
is significant because massive connectivity is here: There are billions 
of Mobile phones in the world, with over 400 million in China alone. 
They can access the Internet, with its enormous positive impacts, 
despite the variable quality of the information it provides. And 
storage: is becoming easier and cheaper. Technology makes information 
more portable, more search-able and more accessible. Imagine, one Ipod 
can store millions of scientific articles. All in all, the density and 
accessibility of information is increasing dramatically.
Scenarios for the future:
But how will we interact with all this material? Will be living in a 
fast-paced world of disposable cultural artifacts, jumping from one 
fashion to the next, dropping hula hoops and pet rocks for Rubik's cubes 
and video games? Or will we still be able to relate to the more profound 
aspects our cultural heritage and build on the cultural accumulation 
that created this legacy?
I see before us two scenarios:
In one instance, we become nations of dilettantes, with short attention 
spans and superficial acquaintance with a lot of things. Consumers of 
technology as well as of goods and services, people who, thanks to the 
internet, know the price of everything, but the value of nothing. 
Education has been confused with entertainment in the ever-intensifying 
search for means to capture the fickle attention span of youngsters.
In that scenario, the libraries and museums of the world are abandoned 
"antiques" of a bygone era, as people would rather sit in their homes 
and see the cyber-image (no-doubt in virtual reality) of an object or 
artifact, rather than see the real thing in a museum or evening its 
country of origin, and books are there for those who wish to actually 
plow through all the words rather than just "see the film version" or 
enjoy an abstract on line.
But I do not believe that scenario. I believe in another scenario:
The enormous resources of the revolution in Information and 
Communication Technologies (ICT) will be mobilized to make available to 
future generations the most easily accessible and broadest coverage of 
the accumulated wisdom of the ages. It will be a select part of the vast 
array of information available to all. The new resources will be 
mediated by the libraries and museums and other institutions of cultural 
conservation and expression.
Contrary to the general view that the internet based future of 
ICT-driven wonders will see the end of the book as we know it, and that 
there will be no libraries in the future, I believe that libraries and 
museums in the future will remain as essential mediators of the 
accumulated cultural heritage of humanity. They will enable new 
generations to "read" it, although the act of reading will be somewhat 
different than it is today.
New ways of presenting material, new ways of reading:
This enormous richness of material will require different ways of 
organization and presentation and will match new ways of reading that 
will have developed in the population. We already see some of the early 
examples of these transformations.
For example, we increasingly present information differently. We do not 
write long treatises. We write a home page and hyperlink words that each 
lead to other pages and other materials. Publishing materials 
increasingly combines picture, sound and movement in addition to text 
and data.
Also, the way we prepare material has changed. Wikipedia showed how 
thousands of people from all over the world could collaborate to produce 
an enormous collective work that would have been impossible without the 
new ICT technology. Likewise, a lot of individuals can now publish 
directly on the net without the mediation of traditional publishers or 
producers by posting directly to the web. The success of such sites as 
Utube and facebook are early precursors of an important trend.
Finally, the new search engines from Alta-Vista to Google have shown how 
the vast amounts of information on the net could be indexed and 
retrieved in ways that can be incredibly efficient.
But the Internet is like the street. Anyone can put anything in the web. 
Only an expert can tell the difference between good quality information 
and bad. And with the enormous increase in information that is being 
added every day, the need for means to mediate the organization of this 
vast information into a usable structure becomes acute. It is here that 
the libraries of the future come in.
Already a century ago a poet remarked
????Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
??? Falls from the sky a meteoric shower
????Of facts...they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
????Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
????Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
????To weave it into fabric...
???????? --Edna St. Vincent Millay, Huntsman, What Quarry

We devoted ourselves to building that loom. Libraries will continue to 
build that loom in the new century using the new technologies just as 
fast as the new technologies are becoming available. For in the end, it 
is our vocation. How to sift and organize data so that it becomes 
information, how to link and interpret it so that we gain knowledge, 
which hopefully, when refined in the crucible of experience, with 
insight and reflection, may lead us to wisdom. The wisdom to create that 
better world to which we are all committed.
Remembering the poor:
So far, we have been talking about the high-end of users on this planet. 
We have not addressed how the new technologies will be able to reach the 
poorer parts of the world. And reach they will, as the inexorable march 
of technology and economic development make their way. Within and 
between societies these technologies will tend to favor the rich, the 
powerful, the educated and the nimble. Thus they have the potential to 
aggravate the digital divide and increase the gap between the rich and 
the poor.
But the new technologies also hold the potential to enable the poorer 
people in the south to "leapfrog" the development patterns experienced 
in the north. While it is not a silver bullet, connecting all the 
schools is both desirable and feasible. Although it would not replace 
conventional schooling, it would revolutionize the possibilities 
available to both teachers and students. Thoughtfully deployed, the new 
technologies can strengthen deprived communities and empower the poor. 
For example, Vietnam is using digital libraries for rural development. 
These become hubs of villages turning them into knowledge communities, 
each having a multimedia computer, printers, camera and 200 digitized 
movie titles.
But the costs of the hardware and of proprietary software to the south 
are enormous. Brazil was spending more on licensing proprietary software 
than it does on fighting hunger, so now it is moving to open source 
systems. That raises the questions of standards and interoperability.
Standards and Interoperability:
The full impact of the ICT revolution will not be fully realized until 
inter-operability is achieved. Consider, for example, the goal of "50 by 
15" to connect 50% of the world by 2015.
This kind of goal cannot be achieved without setting standards that will 
ensure interoperability.

Standards drive down barrier to entry, and more entrants means better 
products. Many would prefer open industry standards rather than 
proprietary solutions. However, even proprietary systems have seeded the 
landscape with competitors and innovators.
Who sets the standards? Those who have that power often abuse it for 
national or commercial reasons, at the expense of the consumer, the user.
These are complex issues, but central to our theme. I believe that even 
if standards should be market driven, governments have to provide 
frameworks for anti-trust and for public goods. Standards should also 
avoid the stultifying effect of blocking new technologies. What if there 
is a new and better music compression technology than MP3?
Future Libraries and the management of our heritage:
The digital libraries of tomorrow have the potential of archiving an 
enormous amount of data. Not only will books be available in digital 
formats, but films, images, video, music and much more. We have a dual 
responsibility to record and protect our heritage, including the 
folklore and traditional customs and oral traditions, and to make it 
available to all.
This will not be the work of one institution. Collaboration and exchange 
is essential, but will it be on open source formats? How will we deal 
with technical and physical obsolescence of the material and the 
formats? Will we keep rerecording this enormous material every few years?
Information and ideas are central for the development of humanity. But 
there are intermediaries between authors and readers: Libraries have a 
central role to play. Large digital collections of text, images, voice, 
music and video open amazing possibilities. Hypertext links, even fluid 
hyperwords, object repositories, and new search engines and gateways 
that add coherence and credibility. We can find origins, or do 
associative semantic searching, all unthinkable in the non-digital world.
Specialized collections can add enormous impact. The 
Brazil-Chile-Argentina initiative of digitizing their journals made 
available specialized literature on health and agriculture.
In short, the library of the future will not just digitize the old books 
and articles. It will give birth to the new, so much of which resides in 
the links between the old knowledge. It will give a home to materials 
that are born digital! The library of the future will truly be the place 
to find the lasting and the lost.
It will keep pace with the public. The form of consultation and reading 
will be different, but the book will remain as well as the new 
electronic media. Some things will be consulted in one way, others in 
other ways. Skeptics who believe in the imminent demise of the book 
should be reminded as to how ICT was to produce the paperless office. 
Today we use more paper with more technology than ever before.

Finally: A call for new thinking:

More useable real-time data than ever before is now available to the 
average person, and this is going to increase in both quantity and 
quality. For example Google earth, is soon going to come to 30 cm 
resolution. Can we bring into the public domain information and data 
that can be used for public purpose, but respecting the privacy of 
individuals? Help establish baselines for understanding our enormously 
complex societies?

To tackle these questions we will need new ways of thinking, 
trans-disciplinary research, and a great deal of imagination. Thinking 
of the multiplicative effect of the new technologies and how they impact 
on the environment, and how the very nature of human interaction in our 
societies will change remains a daunting and very exciting challenge.

New ways of thinking will help us ensure that the emerging world of the 
knowledge based society and the technology driven economy, will open 
avenues for talented people everywhere to harness the new knowledge to 

=== message truncated ===

Pradnya Morje only

---------------------------------
Never miss a thing.   Make Yahoo your homepage.