[Foundation-l] Project Proposal: Wikicat

Mon Jul 31 06:20:38 UTC 2006

Erik Moeller wrote:

>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.
>
I can be patient.

>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.
>
That's not just sad; it's scary.  It's on a par with saying,  "If it's 
on the internet it must be true."  It reflects a series of tendencies in 
the developed world with profound societal effects.  When the most 
important factor for gaining knowledge is convenience it puts us on 
track for a Fahrenheit-451 kind of world.  And I'm sure there is a 
certain segment of society that will be quite happy to encourage the 
people to take their new form of opium.

>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/
>
Reducing the terms of copyright back to a reasonable level will be an 
uphill fight, and the way some of our collegues bend over to prevent the 
least suggestion of a copyright violation and stay law abiding does not 
give me a lot of hope.

Ec