Citizendium Goes CC-BY-SA

Good news:

In a much-awaited move, the non-profit Citizendium (http://www.citizendium.org/) encyclopedia project announced that it has adopted the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-by-sa) as the license for its own original collaborative content. The license permits anyone to copy and redevelop the thousands of articles that the Citizendium has created within its successful first year.

The license allows the Citizendium to join the large informal club of free resources associated especially with Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation. Wikipedia uses the FSF’s GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), which is expected to be made fully compatible with CC-by-sa in coming months. Therefore, Wikipedia and the Citizendium will be able to exchange content easily. A minority of Citizendium articles started life on Wikipedia and so have been available under the GFDL.

Avoiding a Balkanisation of the digital content commons through incompatible licences is critically important.

Wikimedia, Der Blog

The Wikimedia Foundation has a blog - or, rather, ein blog.

Wikipedia Goes Open...

OpenDocument, that is:

The third stage, planned for mid-2008, will be the addition of the OpenDocument format for word processors to the list of export formats. "Imagine that you want to use a set of wiki articles in the classroom. By supporting the OpenDocument format, we will make it easy for educators to customize and remix content before printing and distributing it from any desktop computer," Sue Gardner explained.

The first stage, in case you were wondering,

is a public beta test running on WikiEducator.org of functionality for remixing collections of wiki pages and downloading them in the PDF format.

while the second stage is

the deployment of the technology on the projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, including Wikipedia. At this point, users will also be given the option to order printed copies of wiki content directly from PediaPress.com. "The integration into Wikipedia will be a milestone for print-on-demand technology. Users will literally be empowered to print their own encyclopedias", according to Heiko Hees, product manager at PediaPress.com.

Hmm, well, maybe: I think the amount of work involved might make buying an encyclopaedia rather more attractive.... (Via Open Access News.)

Google Knol: Another Rival to Wikipedia

After Citizendium, now Knol:

A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read. The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions. Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content. All editorial responsibilities and control will rest with the authors. We hope that knols will include the opinions and points of view of the authors who will put their reputation on the line. Anyone will be free to write. For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing.

Knols will include strong community tools. People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it. Knols will also include references and links to additional information. At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.

Once testing is completed, participation in knols will be completely open, and we cannot expect that all of them will be of high quality. Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge. We are very excited by the potential to substantially increase the dissemination of knowledge.

Wikipedia, Terrorism and the Sunlight of Openness

If this is all true, things are obviously going from bad to worse at Wikipedia:

Controversy has erupted among the encyclopedia's core contributors, after a rogue editor revealed that the site's top administrators are using a secret insider mailing list to crackdown on perceived threats to their power.

Many suspected that such a list was in use, as the Wikipedia "ruling clique" grew increasingly concerned with banning editors for the most petty of reasons. But now that the list's existence is confirmed, the rank and file are on the verge of revolt.

Revealed after an uber-admin called "Durova" used it in an attempt to enforce the quixotic ban of a longtime contributor, this secret mailing list seems to undermine the site's famously egalitarian ethos. At the very least, the list allows the ruling clique to push its agenda without scrutiny from the community at large. But clearly, it has also been used to silence the voice of at least one person who was merely trying to improve the encyclopedia's content.

What struck me particularly was the following passage:

Durova then posted a notice to the site's public forum, insisting the ban was too important for discussion outside the purview of the Arbitration Committee, Wikipedia's Supreme Court. "Due to the nature of this investigation, our normal open discussion isn't really feasible," she said. "Please take to arbitration if you disagree with this decision."

Now, where have I heard that before? "This person is guilty: we can prove it, but doing so would reveal terrible states secrets, so you'll just have to trust us" - oh yes, I remember: it's the standard trope used to justify internment in Guantanamo, "extraordinary rendition" or simple kidnapping; it's the same trick that has been used by totalitarian governments the world over to justify repressive "anti-terror" laws that cannot be questioned, because doing so would aid the "enemy".

Not very good company for Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit", to be keeping. The sunlight of openness would do a world of good here - and anywhere else power that claims to be democratic refuses to explain its actions to the people.

Wikipedia Pays the Price

News that Wikipedia is to start paying illustrators might come as a shock to some:

The foundation that runs Wikipedia has finally agreed to pay contributors to the online encyclopedia a modest fee for their work. But it won’t pay the thousands of people who participate in creating the wiki pages — just artists who create “key illustrations” for the site.

The payments are made possible by a $20,000 donation from Philip Greenspun, who said he was moved to give the money because of his experience seeing technical books he had originally published online appear in print.

“In comparing the Web versions to the print versions, I noticed that the publishers’ main contribution to the quality of the books was in adding professionally drawn illustrations,” he wrote in an e-mail message. “It occurred to me that when the dust settled on the Wikipedia versus Britannica question, the likely conclusion would be ‘Wikipedia is more up to date; Britannica has better illustrations.’”

In fact, this is entirely in keeping with the open source model, where it is well established that hackers do the big, interesting bits for love, but you must pay for the tiny boring bits if you want the job finished. Indeed, this forms an important part of the service offered by open source companies, whose job is essentially rounding out the free offerings.

Closing the Open Content Schism

Nowadays we are used to content being released under a Creative Commons licence, which has become the kind of de facto free licence for content. So it's rather curious that the biggest free content project of them all - Wikipedia - does not use such licences, but one from the FSF. The explanation is simple: at the time that Wikipedia got going, the only licence that was practical was the GNU Free Documentation Licence.

Hitherto, it's been impossible to reconcile these two, but that looks like it might finally be changing:

It is hereby resolved that:

* The [Wikimedia] Foundation requests that the GNU Free Documentation License be modified in the fashion proposed by the FSF to allow migration by mass collaborative projects to the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA license;
* Upon the announcement of that relicensing, the Foundation will initiate a process of community discussion and voting before making a final decision on relicensing.

Is Debatepedia a Good Idea? Well, Yes and No....

It's always interesting to see how the basic wiki/Wikipedia idea can be extended. Here's one I'd not come across before, the more or less self-explanatory Debatepedia:

Debatepedia is a wiki project of the International Debate Education Association (IDEA) with the mission to act as the "Wikipedia of debate and reasoning". On it, debaters, students, experts, and citizens can all openly edit and co-create an encyclopedia of debates, pro and con arguments, bodies of supporting evidence (quotes, articles, studies...), and the stances of relevant actors. We encourage you to create an account (above), become an editor, and join this important social movement and community. Imagine the difference that this resource could make in improving reasoning globally.

Well, I think that's debatable.... (Via Joho the Blog.)

What's Wikipedia Got Against Open Source?

This is curious:

In case you didn't notice, Openbravo does not have an entry in the English edition of the Wikipedia, the fine community driven encyclopedia.

For some reason, the word Openbravo has been "blacklisted" and any attempt to create an entry about Openbravo gets automatically deleted.

Given the open source-y nature of Wikipedia, you would have thought it would have had a natural tendency to look favourably on open source companies like Openbravo. So what gives, Jimmy?

Beyond the gPhone: the gPC

On Thursday, WalMart begins selling the Everex Green gPC TC2502, a $198, low-power, Linux-based PC designed primarily for running Web 2.0 applications.

When users first fire up their gPC, they'll get a Mac-like desktop with a series of program icons "docked" across the bottom. The icons are bookmarks to popular and useful Web 2.0 services from Google and other vendors. There are icons for Google Docs, Gmail, Google Maps, and YouTube, for example, as well as Meebo, Facebook, and Wikipedia. Sprinkled into the lineup are some non-Web-based apps, like Skype and Gimp, but the novice user won't know, initially, which are local applications and which are Web services.

There are two really interesting things here.

One, of course is the price, which would be impossible with Microsoft Windows. The second is the way the manufacturer is trying to create a machine whose software is based around Web apps. One important aspect of this approach is that it decouples user software from the underlying operating system. So the fact that this machine is running GNU/Linux is almost at the level of what BIOS it uses.

As Google fills out its SaaS vision, so we can expect more of these extremely lean machines, for equally lean prices - and increasingly lean times for Microsoft.

Update: Apparently, this is on older Windows machine, but with a leaner OS. Why?

“Windows Vista has its own market, but it’s not on the $200 end. Those experiences aren’t good. Our Vista Basic units were selling well at $498, but it was the highest return rate ever, because the client was so heavy” and overwhelmed the hardware capabilities. To Kim, the message is Windows needs the power of a premium machine.

And as The Innovator's Dilemma teaches us, the premium market is *always* cannabalised by the cheaper models as they gain more capabilities for the same cost.

wikiHow Shows How

Although the fashinable wiki turns up all over the place, it's rare to come across really good uses of the idea. One fine example is wikiHow:

wikiHow is a collaborative writing project aiming to build the world's largest how-to manual. Our mission is to provide free and useful instructions to help people solve the problems of everyday life. As of this minute, wikiHow contains 25,548 articles. New articles are created every day and the existing articles are gradually improved by volunteer contributors. In time we envision this huge how to manual providing free, unbiased, accurate instructions on almost every topic imaginable. Please join us by contributing a new page or editing a page that someone else started.

As this points out, wikiHow has now passed 25,000 articles - a small number compared to Wikipedia's millions, but nonetheless a good start. (Via Creative Commons.)

Why Openness Matters - Doubly

Here's a great demonstration of why openness is so important.

Wikipedia is famously open, so in general anyone can edit stuff. But this editing is also done in the open, in that all changes are tracked. Now, some people edit anonymously, but their IP addresses are logged. This information too is freely available, so here's an idea that some bright chap had:

Griffith thus downloaded the entire encyclopedia, isolating the XML-based records of anonymous changes and IP addresses. He then correlated those IP addresses with public net-address lookup services such as ARIN, as well as private domain-name data provided by IP2Location.com.

The result: A database of 5.3 million edits, performed by 2.6 million organizations or individuals ranging from the CIA to Microsoft to Congressional offices, now linked to the edits they or someone at their organization's net address has made.

As a result, dedicated crowd-sourcers are poring over Wikipedia, digging out those embarrassing self-edits. For example:

On Christmas Eve 2004, a Disney user deleted a citation on the "digital rights management" page to DRM critic Cory Doctorow along with a link to a speech he gave to Microsoft's Research Group on the subject. Later, a Disney user altered the "opponents" discussion of the entry, arguing that consumers embrace DRM: "In general, consumers knowingly enter into the arrangement where they are granted limited use of the content."

or:

"Removed ECHELON link, irrelevant to article," reads the comment explaining this cut. The contributor's IP address belongs to the National Security Agency.

or even:

Microsoft's MSN Search is now "a major competitor to Google". Take it from this anonymous contributor, whose IP address belongs to Waggener Edstrom, Microsoft's PR firm.

Now that's what I call openness.

Academics Waking Up to Wikipedia

Many people have a strangely ambivalent attitude to Wikipedia. On the one hand, they recognise that it's a tremendous resource; but on the other, they point out it's uneven and flawed in places. Academics in particular seem afflicted with this ambivalence.

So I think that this move by a group of academics to roll up their digital sleeves and get stuck into Wikipedia is important:

Some of our colleagues have determined to improve it with their own contributions. Here are some instances in which they have assumed significant responsibility for their fields:

# History of Science: Sage Ross and 80 other specialists in the field are contributing.
# Military History: Over 600 amateur and professional specialists in many sub-fields are contributing.
# Russian History: Marshall Poe and over 50 other specialists in the field are contributing.

Clearly, the more people that take part in such schemes, the better Wikipedia will get - and the more people will improve it further. (Via Open Access News.)

Offiziell: de.wikipedia.org ist Offiziell

Here's an interesting precedent being set:

For the first time, the German edition of the open Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia will be receiving state funding. Germany will be setting aside part of its budget to improve information about renewable resources in Wikipedia. Over the next few years, several hundred articles will be written on this issue.

"A number of key words already have excellent entries in the German Wikipedia" within the field of renewable resources, explains Andreas Schütte. Schütte is the executive director of the Renewable Resources Agency (FNR), which receives funding from the German Ministry of Nutrition, Agriculture, and Consumer Protection to conduct research on renewable resources with an eye to launching products on the market. At the same time, Schütte says that a number of key words in the German Wikipedia have very short descriptions, are not up to date, or are missing entirely.

Entries on this topic are to be improved under the direction of the private-sector Nova Institute. The Institute plans to get external experts to write entries on renewable resources for Wikipedia. These experts will first receive training for Wikipedia because collaboration in the community project has its pitfalls. The Institute is therefore looking for someone well versed in Wikipedia to handle project coordination. The project partners have issued a call for tenders for that position. Wikipedia experts can send in their applications immediately.

The benefits of expanding this approach are great. The state gets to distribute useful information, highly efficiently, and helps to ensure its reliability. The users, of course, gain enormously from this new influx of quality contributions.

Even the Wikipedians gain, since in the future there might be the prospect that they could be commissioned by governments to write high-quality articles on particular subjects (but with editorial independence).

And if other governments start following suit, the long-term viability of the entire Wikipedia project - still rather uncertain, at present - will be transformed completely.

All-in-all, this move by the German ministry represents a small but important step towards making Wikipedia into an all-encompassing reference, subsuming both official and unofficial information.

Do Your SELF a Favour

Interesting:

The SELF Platform aims to be the central platform with high quality educational and training materials about Free Software and Open Standards. It is based on world-class Free Software technologies that permit both reading and publishing free materials, and is driven by a worldwide community.

The SELF Platform will have two main functions. It will be simultaneously a knowledge base and a collaborative production facility: On the one hand, it will provide information, educational and training materials that can be presented in different languages and forms: from course texts, presentations, e-learning programmes and platforms to tutor software, e-books, instructional and educational videos and manuals. On the other hand, it will offer a platform for the evaluation, adaptation, creation and translation of these materials. The production process of such materials will be based on the organisational model of Wikipedia.

(Via Creative Commons.)

Citizendium Update

Larry Sanger's Citizendium project was an interesting experiment in forking Wikipedia, which has now evolved into something else. Here's his full update on where it stands, together with a nice polemic on the "new politics of knowledge."

What Open Access Can Do for Open Content

One of the central ideas behind openness is re-use - the ability to build on what has gone before, rather than re-inventing the wheel. And yet, as this fascinating article demonstrates, there is sometimes surprisingly little sharing and re-use between the various opens:

This study demonstrates among a sample of 100 Wikipedia entries, which included 168 sources or references, only two percent of the entries provided links to open access research and scholarship. However, it proved possible to locate, using Google Scholar and other search engines, relevant examples of open access work for 60 percent of a sub-set of 20 Wikipedia entries. The results suggest that much more can be done to enrich and enhance this encyclopedia’s representation of the current state of knowledge. To assist in this process, the study provides a guide to help Wikipedia contributors locate and utilize open access research and scholarship in creating and editing encyclopedia entries.

I can't help feeling that there is a larger lesson here, and that all the various opens should be doing more to build on each other's strengths as well as their own. After all, it's partly what all this openness is about. Perhaps we need a meta-open movement?

Opening up the Patent Process

Here's a mildly hopeful development:

The government is about to start opening up the process of reviewing patents to the modern font of wisdom: the Internet.

The Patent and Trademark Office is starting a pilot project that will not only post patent applications on the Web and invite comments but also use a community rating system designed to push the most respected comments to the top of the file, for serious consideration by the agency's examiners. A first for the federal government, the system resembles the one used by Wikipedia, the popular user-created online encyclopedia.

Whether it improves the quality of patents awarded remains to be seen, but at least they're trying. It also shows how the idea of openness is spreading into even the bastions of the knowledge establishment.

WTF is WTF?

Dave Sifry has always been one of the do-ers in the world of computing. And as someone who has been at the heart of open source for over a decade, he can be counted on to be plugged into hot trends.

His latest wheeze, Where's The Fire? or WTF? - a play on the acronym WTF? - ought, by rights, to be really sizzling, and not just because of it's name:

On January 31, 2007 Technorati released a new feature to help people to get explanations on things they see popping up in the blogosphere.

...

You can also write a WTF on any topic that someone would search for, and provide information and resources to them about that topic or subject. So, you might want to write a WTF about yourself or your friends names, or your company (or maybe even your competition!)

If you think that you've got a better explanation than the one that shows up on top of Technorati search results for a term, no worries, just go and write your own, and get your friends to vote for it. WTF uses a special time weighted voting system that means that the most popular recent WTFs will show up on top of the page.

As this indicates, WTF? hopes to tap into the power of both Digg and Wikipedia: user-generated, explanatory content that is voted up or down by peer review. At the moment there's not much there, and it seems to me that there's a crucial piece missing from the WTF idea.

The "blurb", as the basic unit of WTF is called, resides on Technorati's servers, not the blurber's: this means that blurb authors receive no compensation other than "glory". Unless there is some Technorati-juice being dispensed in the form of built-in links to the blurber's blog (and not just ones added gratuitously), I fear that most of the better bloggers will just say: "WTF?".

Shut Out from Citizendium

I've written a number of times about Citizendium, Larry Sanger's fascinating project to create a new kind of user-generated online repository of knowledge. Well, it's now officially open to the public - sort of. As the press release puts it:

For the first time, anyone can visit the website (www.citizendium.org), create a user account and get to work within minutes. The project, started by a founder of Wikipedia, aims to improve on the Wikipedia model by adding "gentle expert oversight" and requiring contributors to use their real names.

The catch is that you not only need to create a user account to "get to work", but even to view what's already there, as far as I can see. I can't help feeling that the best way to get people to join this worthy venture is to let them see what's going on. To lock out casual visitors from anything but the home page seems counterproductive.