[Foundation-l] Project Proposal: Wikicat

Sun Jul 30 04:53:06 UTC 2006

On 7/30/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:

> Citations and verifiability are absolutely essential to the credibility
> of Wikipedia and its sister projects.  Nevertheless, a person
> undertaking to substantiate his contributions should not need a
> professional librarianship background to do so.  Any manner of clearly
> identifying the source should be acceptable.

Absolutely. However, we should also make the tools of professional
referencing as easy to use as possible. You're right on that freely
available (not necessarily freely licensed) content will be the first
to be referenced. Thus, it is likely that Wikimedia will become both a
primary beneficiary and driving force of the open access movement.

What is saddening to me is that even better referencing tools and
systematic source checking processes will likely not be sufficient to
deal adequately with the vast amounts of knowledge that is _not_ free
or not even digital. Indeed, already today, I've seen quite a lot of
cases where Wikipedians have reacted with intense frustration to the
citation of sources that they could not verify simply by following a
link.

One of my great hopes is that a broad international coalition of NGOs
will eventually emerge to call for harmonization of copyright terms to
a reasonable length. Perhaps Wikimedia could be part of such a
coalition. If I look at the fantastic work Project Gutenberg is doing
on even the most obscure publications, I cannot begin to imagine the
profound effects on our culture it would have if copyright would last,
say, 14 years, with the option to renew for another 14:
http://creativecommons.org/projects/founderscopyright/

Erik