Re: [Foundation-l] ASCAP comes out against copyleft
Cary Bass wrote: On 06/30/2010 05:44 PM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: I shouldn't use the work luck however in this case, since it implies you didn't bring it upon yourself. How about this counter-offensive. Threaten to repeal copyright to the point, where any holder *only* gets ten years. That's it. Ten years to make your money then it's public domain. We can call it the Knock it off or else proposal. Ten years is an awfully short time[1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posthumous_fame_of_Vincent_van_Gogh What good would even ten years have done for Van Gogh? Without a lot of promotion by Theo's wife, Vincent could very well have sunk into obscurity like so many artists habituating the streets of Montmartre. Vincent also had no children of his own. What needs to be revisited is the long term of copyright beyond a person's death. Who should really benefit at this point. I would support a use-it-or-lose-it after the initial ten year period. If the owner doesn't make a previously published work available to the public at a reasonable price he should lose the copyright. Ray ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] Reconsidering the policy one language - one Wikipedia
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 Just my 2c thoughts exploring the idea. I don't know if wikipedia should have a chapter specific to children because it would be culturally biased by our views about education. I think it would be better to aim for a specific psychological profile and skills, ie: - - for the non-semantic persons (who don't rely much on words), more direct images (or photos) and animations (or videos). For example explaining the size of the sun and of planets showing their relative size works better than sheer numbers for most of people, or at least is a necessary intermediate step for understanding the numbers. - - for people not fluent with vocabulary, use only the 500 (200? 1000?) most common english words (a bot could signal rare words) - - for people with few abstracting skills, use concrete objects and familiar analogies to explain (like explaining the curve of 3d space with a sheet of paper) - - replace complex equations with qualitative explanations - - Etc. Also, for illiterate persons, it would be great to include a play button that would automatically read the article out loud. It should be included so that illiterate persons don't have to install their own text-to-speech software. What would really be interesting would be to study people with internet access who *don't* use wikipedia because they feel uneasy or find it unadapted or too difficult. Find the main psychological categories of these people and understand how to interact with them and transmit them information, and define the kind of chapter that they'd need. Eventually, check if several of those special chapter could be merged (for example, visual.wikipedia with analogous.wikipedia). Then check if there are voluntaries for this work and the sum of work required. On 28/06/2010 20:40, Ting Chen wrote: Hello Ziko, speaking for myself. I am for such an approach. But I would also like to see such a project, because it is so important, to be prepared carefully. The suggestions is not made the first time, and last time when the suggetion was on meta, it was discussed until no one can give it a chance anymore. I also don't see such a project really as a compititor to the adult Wikipedia. I think both projects can benefit from each other alot. Now one step back. Encyclopedia for kids is not new. A lot of classic encyclopedia has their kid version. This shows that a kid encyclopedia is not just an encyclopedia in dumn language. Contrarily, I think a kid encyclopedia is far more challenging to write, because you need more pedagogic skills. And building up such skills by our contributors can again benefit Wikipedia. There are also other online kid encyclopedia from which we can learn from their experiences. I definitively would like to see what Robert would find out in this respect and how his research can encourage us or help us in this new endeavor. Greetings Ting Ziko van Dijk wrote: Hello, It seems to me doubtless that there is a substantial number of active Wikimedians who see the need in a simple or children-encyclopedia and would like to invest some of their own sweat, blood and tears. Others, who disagree, may stand on the side line and comment if they like. There are a lot of single questions when defining the exact scope etc., but the main question remains: Would WMF accept such a project, or would it reject it for being just another Wikipedia in already existing languages. So, how different the new project must be from Wikipedia. The original fear is that a linguistic group is split into two communities whereas the forces usually should be concentrated in one Wikipedia. A Wikipedia in simple English, we were told, is essentially a Wikipedia in English. But if a project, for example, directs itself to a relativeley limited group of readers (children), with consequences for the content (limited length of articles, no explicit images), usage of language (no hard words), wouldn't it be different enough from a usual Wikipedia? Kind regards Ziko 2010/6/27 Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de: Hello Milos, reading your mail below I am wondering why your reaction on my first mail was so aggressive. It looks to me as if your consideration is not that far away from mine. Especially I wrote in my suggestion that first of all the project must have a very clearly defined scope and audiance, second that it should have a more rigid editorial and anti-vandal mechanism and third that we need more research. Greetings Ting Milos Rancic wrote: On Sat, Jun 26, 2010 at 2:09 AM, Mark Williamson node...@gmail.com wrote: The difference was that Wikipedia was not made for young people. If I run a social group for adults and there are issues with children who visit, I can blame it on their parents and say they should control them better. If I run a social group for children, I'm now a childcare provider and have a greater
Re: [Foundation-l] Self-determination of language versions in questions of skin?
2010/6/28 Tim Starling tstarl...@wikimedia.org: In this case, I would recommend a process of negotiation. Detail your concerns in Bugzilla, and give the developers time to respond to them. This is good advice. I want to add that there's something very unusual about the work that's been done over the last year, relative to many other software changes we've made over the years. Its primary audience is not in fact the community of individuals who may participate in polls or file bugs in BugZilla -- its primary audience are the readers of Wikimedia Foundation projects who have knowledge to share, but who may find our user interface and user experience too daunting to do so. The changes we've made have therefore not been directed at experienced editors at all, and insofar as we've considered their needs and interests, our primary intent has been not to cause significant impediments or inconveniences except where such inconveniences were deemed necessary trade-offs to accomplish a better experience for new users. Our motivations for engaging in such a project are rooted in the well-established trend of stagnation and, in some cases, decline of key participation metrics in the largest Wikimedia projects. Those trends can be seen clearly in the numbers of active contributors, and the numbers of new editors joining the projects: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediansNew.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediansEditsGt5.htm German Wikipedia, by the way, is no exception from this trend, and indeed, shows a significant decline in the number of new editors joining, and a less dramatic but still pronounced decline in the number of active editors from its peak levels. User experience, by its very nature, is habitual. Don Norman, in The Design of Everyday Things, describes many examples of idiotic design decisions for everyday objects like doors, projectors, or stove top controls. After initial irritation, we accept those design decisions, get used to them, and will suffer another brief irritation when someone tries to fix them. The same is true for user interfaces in software. A degree of temporary inconvenience when changing user interfaces is unavoidable, and thus, any such change tends to be accompanied by voices of frustration and irritation by established users who have learned the habits the software forced them to learn. In no way is such frustration or irritation alone evidence that the change was wrong: it is entirely to be expected. Agile user testing in small groups is a well-established methodology for engineering a better user experience and surfacing key impediments for new users of a given interface. The improvements we've made have been grounded in real impediments people with no prior editing experience have encountered when navigating Monobok's cluttered and tiny tabs, utilizing the mystery toolbar (a trumpet? really?) [*], finding the tiny search box in the sidebar, etc. Thus, we are in favor of continued conversations about the best user experience for Wikipedia, but we're not going to roll back the user interface only because a self-selected majority of active editors vote to decide to make it so. Let's have focused conversations about whether the changes we've made serve the established need (creating a better participation experience for new users) without unintended side effects and unacceptable trade-offs. Surfacing normal change resistance is not particularly helpful; surfacing facts and thoughtful arguments certainly is, and we've tried to respond to those. As many of you have seen, we've continued to make changes and apply fixes to the new UX at a fast pace (see http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?path=/trunk/extensions/UsabilityInitiativetitle=Special:Code/MediaWiki/path ) ; that pace will slow down in July due to Wikimania, but will resume at full swing thereafter. We are also incrementally improving our analytics (using open source tools) so we can better measure the actual impact of everything we do. All best, Erik [*] I'm personally responsible for the initial design of the edit toolbar, and deeply appreciate the work that's been done by the team to identify what people actually click on, come up with sensible icons, and remove clutter. The toolbar was always conceptualized with new editors in mind, and the new design serves that audience much better. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] ASCAP comes out against copyleft
Yann Forget wrote: Hello, 2010/7/2 wiki-l...@phizz.demon.co.uk: wjhon...@aol.com wrote: If a way of halting the gross infringements can't be done. Then go back to hitting the seeders with $22,000 fines per infringed work. The economic costs of simply walking away and not stopping the piracy are too much. They know perfectly well how to do it, they've been doing it. If you can't actually get 85 million dollars out of a 13-year-old girl, well then that's your tough luck, welcome to jurisprudence U.S. style. The loss to the economy is staggering. Yet you'd do nothing, apply no sanctions, bitch about rights management, and let $billions each year be filtch from the creative industries. That 13 yo is as much a thief as the person that smashes the jewelers window and throws the contents into the street. Maybe we should have her MySpace and Facebook page branded with THIEF. Sorry, but this is complete bullshit. There is no loss, because most of the music which is freely downloaded would never be bought. These $billions never existed, and there will never exist. I even think that the opposite is sometime true. That by making a work freely available online, you create an incentive for buying it. Since the cost of the online publishing is marginal, there is an opportunity for profit. Online publishing is NOT the cost vector here. The actual material costs are negligible. If supermarkets can fly apples across the globe, sell them for pennies and still make a profit then transport and storage costs aren't an issue either. The cost are for paying the session musicians, the sound engineer, hire of the recording equipment, the mikes, amplifiers, all that sort of stuff. If you skimp on that your song sounds like shit. Then there is all the additional costs involved in getting it to market. That aside if I invest a bunch of money in some stocks that gives me a share in the profits of that companies I've invested in. No one says that in 10 years time my rights to a share in those profits are forfeit, and the rights devolved to some general class of whiners and moaners with an inflated sense of entitlement. You cannot blame others if you invest money in the wrong place. EH! There is protection for someone who invests in an oil rig their investment is protected for life and beyond, or until the well runs dry. But those that invest in creating something that advances science and the arts etc, those that are successful at it, those ones they get their investment taken away. Wow that's fair. The point is that the publishing industry _has_ to review its economic model with the new technical situation which is the Internet, and whether it publishes music, video or text. I have the impression that back in the C15 you'd have been there arguing Hey those peasants need to review their economic model of growing crops for market, now that there is this new technical situation which is the gun. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] ASCAP comes out against copyleft
wjhon...@aol.com wrote: In a message dated 7/2/2010 3:20:37 PM Pacific Daylight Time, wiki-l...@phizz.demon.co.uk writes: Nothing competes with free, why would you pay for an album when your mates just download it for nothing? Gee I don't know. Why are people still renting videos from Netflix when you can watch 500 free movies on YouTube? I think you're being specious. Why did you snip the context? Perhaps they haven't quite got the idea of BitTorrents, eDonkey or whatever. Perhaps they are slightly scared that they might get caught, perhaps they are fundamentally honest, perhaps they like to pretend they are Cosimo de' Medici dispensing their largess on the arts? Back in the late 80s a computer club I used to go to turned from a hackers showcase sort of place, to a pirate club. By the time I stopped going there there were 50 computers every month spending 2 hours copying games discs. I don't recall ever seeing an original disc. Someone somewhere must have bought one but it wasn't anyone at that particular club and those that I kept some form of contact with never paid for games. They don't pay for music or films either. Except as presents for xmas and birthdays cos it looks a bit cheap giving someone a DVD you've got off eMule. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
