Slashdot Log In
Knol, the Wikipedia Maybe-Fork?
from the hey-baby-just-say-maybe dept.
I've been suggesting for some time that Wikipedia, or some fork of Wikipedia, should allow users to "sign off" on a version of an article, and then lock that article against future edits until the signer had approved them. The signing off would allow people to cite a Wikipedia article as a source that had been vetted by at least one person (with confidence in the source depending on that person's credentials). The signer's identity (and sometimes, their credentials) could be confirmed using several methods, such as verifying an .edu e-mail address. Users could still submit edits, but they would have to be approved by the article verifier. Different users could sign off on different versions of the same article, and readers would still have the option of viewing the latest version of an article, with all of its unmoderated edits (which is what you're looking at on Wikipedia most of the time).
Knol, which allows users to submit articles on any topic they want, has incorporated all of the above features (adding, for example, the ability to verify authors' real names using credit cards), and gone one step further by allowing users to place AdSense ads in their articles. However, there's one stumbling block to Knol incorporating all of Wikipedia's content and blessing it with the verification of credentialed experts: Currently, although you have to dig a bit deep to find this out, Knol's Terms of Service do not allow content to be copied from Wikipedia.
Content on Wikipedia is published under the GNU Free Documentation License -- when you click any of the "edit" links in a Wikipedia article and begin typing in new content, you're agreeing to submit your content under the terms of the GFDL. When you publish on Knol, on the other hand, your options are to publish under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (CC-BY), a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License (CC-BY-NC), or a traditional "All Rights Reserved" copyright model. Both the GFDL and the Creative Commons Attribution licenses are popular with content creators who want to give content altruistically "to the world" -- these licenses all allow content to be redistributed freely without modification. The main difference is in the rights that they grant to people who want to create derivative works (modifying or expanding on the original work).
The GFDL is intended as a "viral" license -- if you take a work that is published under the GFDL, and publish a derivative work created from that, your derivative work must also be published under the terms of the GFDL -- that is, also allowing other users to redistribute your work freely and create derivative works from it as well. If a site mirrors Wikipedia articles without including the terms of the GFDL, Wikipedia encourages users to send notifications to those sites pointing out that they're violating Wikipedia's copyright, and if necessary to escalate the matter to their Web hosting provider for noncompliance. You can mirror Wikipedia all you want, and even put put ads all over your mirror site, but you cannot change the terms.
Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licenses, on the other hand, allow users to create derivative works and publish them under almost any terms they want, including an "All rights reserved" model, provided that they give attribution to the author of the original work. If Susan publishes an article under CC-BY, you can create a derivative work by expanding on her article, and -- assuming your contributions are substantial enough to be copyrightable in themselves -- you can prohibit other users from redistributing your article or creating derivative works from it, something that would not be possible if Susan had published her article under the GFDL. (Obviously, you cannot prohibit others from redistributing Susan's article or creating their own derivative works from it, but you can restrict these rights as applied to your own derivative work.)
Russell Potter, a Professor of English at Rhode Island College and a Citizendium contributor who explained this difference to me, points out that CC-BY licenses are more friendly to academics who want to reuse content in a published book or in a conference presentation. "Say an academic (me) contributes a long article on London's Crystal Palace," he wrote. "Others edit it in modest ways, but the article is still about 90% my own work. Perhaps I want to give a paper at a conference based on this entry, or use large bits of it in a book I'm writing. GFDL would have made either impossible." (Impossible, that is, unless the book publisher released the book under the GFDL, but most book publishing companies are reluctant to do that.)
And therein lies the logical incompatibility between the GFDL and the CC-BY publishing options currently allowed by Knol. If you copy GFDL-licensed content from Wikipedia, you are agreeing that for any copies or derivative works that you create, you will not only permit other users to remix them, but that you will require those other users to agree to the same terms for the remixed works that they publish. If you published such content on Knol under the CC-BY option, you would be granting the reader permission to incorporate the work into their own derivative work which they could then publish under an All Rights Reserved license. And the GFDL doesn't allow you to grant that permission to the reader. Section 5.5 of Knol's Terms of Service explicitly states that GFDL content cannot be re-published under a CC-BY license, and Mike Linksvayer makes this point on the Creative Commons blog as well. Some authors have begun copying Wikipedia content to Knol anyway, and even though that particular article included a link to the GFDL, users have pointed out in the comments that it's still a TOS violation anyway. Google appears to be lax about policing these violations for now, but in the right-hand column, the links to "Similar Content on the Web" show that Google can trivially detect if content is copied from other sites, and may be planning to remove such content or demote it in search results if it's copied from a site like Wikipedia that doesn't allow copying under Knol's terms.
However, the Creative Commons family of licenses also includes the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License (CC-BY-SA), which is written in the same spirit as the GFDL -- if a work is released under CC-BY-SA, any published derivative works created from that work must also be released under the same license. In fact the Free Software Foundation, which writes new versions of the GFDL, announced in December 2007 their intention to make the next version of the GFDL explicitly compatible with CC-BY-SA, so that any work published under the GFDL can be incorporated into a work published under CC-BY-SA, and vice versa. This new version of the GFDL has not been released yet, but the FSF replied by e-mail to say they're working on it.
(Perhaps you might be wondering, as I did, how already-existing content on Wikipedia can be said to be "licensed" under a new version of the GFDL when it comes out. How can past Wikipedia contributors have agreed to a future version of the license that didn't exist yet? The answer is that when you submit edits on Wikipedia, you're agreeing to submit your edits under the "GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version", and it's the "or any later version" that means contributors are deemed to have agreed to the next version of the GFDL, which will presumably be CC-BY-SA-compatible.)
If Google Knol adds the ability to publish under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, and the FSF releases a new version of the GFDL that is compatible with this license, then I think we will finally see what I hoped for in February 2008 -- a "gold rush" of users copying content from Wikipedia to Knol, where it can be verified by credentialed users and protected against vandalism. Some users' verifications will be more valuable than others -- a physics article verified by a physics professor is more trustworthy than the same article verified by an anonymous user, and even an article about The X-Files may be more trustworthy when it's verified by a physics professor, not because it's the professor's area of expertise, but because a professor with a valued reputation would be less likely to sign their name to unverified garbage.
Will Knol add the Share Alike option? Perhaps they may be nervous about what would happen if they allowed unlimited copying from Wikipedia, especially with financial incentives. At the moment, Knol seems to be downplaying the fact that you can make money from writing articles, even as everyone else buzzes about it. On their front page, under "Learn More", Knol lists the reasons you should contribute: "Visibility - We value and promote authorship. Great content will be visible on any search engine. Community - You can connect with other experts in your area of interest to share and grow knowledge," etc. Really? That's all? AdSense isn't mentioned in the FAQ, and only briefly at the end of a posting about "Knol bugs and workarounds". And officially the site never mentions Wikipedia at all, except in the knols about it.
But many of the articles on Wikipedia -- especially the kind of articles that academics would be willing to sign their names to -- would probably enhance the Knol site, not drag it down. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales correctly predicted that Knol would generate a lot of articles about Viagra. If Knol can tolerate that garbage (and under their own policies, there is little grounds for removing those articles, unless the authors lifted the content from some other site), they should welcome the addition of articles about stochiometry, Shakespeare, and Serbia, even if they were copied from Wikipedia and then vetted by a university professor or journalist. (None of those topics have their own Knol yet, although there was room for Knols about Simon Cowell, Superman, and sex addiction.)
After all, the incentives that AdSense creates for Knol writers are roughly the same as the incentives for Web publishers in general -- you can try to turn a quick buck, or you can invest in your site's reputation for the long run -- and while there is a new "made-for-AdSense" site born every minute, few would disagree that the rise of AdSense has been good for content on the Web in general.
While copying from Wikipedia to Knol is against the rules right now, there's no reason in principle to be against creating a Wikipedia sub-fork on Knol, if Google allows Knol writers to select the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike publishing option. One user, responding to the unauthorized use of Wikipedia articles, posted in the Knol users' group on Google Groups: "What I REALLY want to see Google do is crack down on these clowns who are copying and pasting articles from Wikipedia." I say, just change the rules and send in the clowns.
Slashdot welcomes original submissions; many thanks to Bennett for this one.
Fork? (Score:2, Redundant)
Its barely gotton started, I don't see any fork succeeding for long.
Besides, Google have mainly done it to generate more content for their searches. Not that I think its a bad thing. I like knol, a lot. I find it much easier to use then Wikipedia, and the fact that I can be sure some prat won't re-write my article with dubious info, or vandalise it, is a big reassurance.
Sure, some articles are shit, but so what? Don't read them. Some are extremely interesting, and there's none of that 'not notable' crap.
Re:Fork? (Score:4, Interesting)
I like knol, a lot. I find it much easier to use then Wikipedia, and the fact that I can be sure some prat won't re-write my article with dubious info, or vandalise it, is a big reassurance.
I like Knol, too.
While in school I wrote a few essays in my field (Elizabethan literature) which I always wanted to do something with. Because I didn't pursue a career in academics, I could never trouble myself to try to get them published in academic journals.
I recently published them on Knol which, unlike Wikipedia, accepts original research. The process was quite easy -- little more than cut-and-paste with footnotes being properly hyperlinked.
Will they ever be noticed? We'll see. But Knol strikes me as a good venue for this sort of thing. Perhaps it could end up as a kind of arXiv for the humanities and other disciplines that, to my knowledge, don't have that kind of archive set up yet.
Reply to This
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
> I could never trouble myself to try to get them published in academic journals.
Couldn't you have posted them on your personal site for the World to see?
After all the Web is intended to be an everyman publishing system and there is a lot of content out there less meritorious than your essays.
Get them out there, get them indexed and share with the World.
Re: (Score:2)
Any search usually generates a wikipedia result in the top 10. This is, of course, because wikipedia has an inflated pagerank for the site as a whole. In fact many individual pages are very, very poor quality, and if were considered out of context would merit a page rank lower by several orders of magnitude.
Succinctly, wikipedia's search results are effectively no more than pagerank spam, just as much as any SEO black hat attempt to skew search results
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I wouldn't normally respond to grammar correctors online, but I will this time.
My spelling is crap, I realise this, I'm dyspraxic. I also hold a Ph.D in Computer Science, do you?
My examiners didn't give a rats arse about my inability to spell when they examined my Thesis. I got a list of words to re-type, and they left it at that.
I find that its quite common for spelling to be really low on the list of priorities in academia. The simple fact is that a lot of highly intelligent people are also dyslexic. No-o
Multiple branches of Wikipedia (Score:5, Insightful)
The current model of Wikipedia is a simple monotonically increasing version. You can commit changes, diff between versions and even revert changes, but you can't make separate branches or merge changes from one branch to another.
Isn't this the same as the distributed version control model used by the Linux kernel and many other software projects? Put all of Wikipedia into a DVCS, and anyone can clone it and publish their own changes; someone who maintains a 'signed-off' copy of an article can choose whether or not to pull changes from someone else's repository.
Reply to This
Re: (Score:2)
People make branches all the time, they just aren't branches of all of wikipedia (eegad, who wants to host that on their own?) but rather individual articles. It's not uncommon for someone to copy an article into a user space page to perform edits and refinements, get the page looking how they want it, and then push it back into the 'trunk' or main wikipedia space.
There is, unfortunately, no automated way for users to do this. "Copy page to ____ space," be that user space, wikipedia's main, or any other.
Re: (Score:2)
There are other kinds of wikipedia branches. At DocForge [docforge.com] we've branched many programming related wikipedia articles and made revisions. But they're not required to stand up to wikipedia's rules of being encyclopedic, fully referenced, or being neutral point of view. So it wouldn't be appropriate for most edits to also go back into wikipedia.
Waste (Score:2)
Is a copy needed? (Score:3, Interesting)
users copying content from Wikipedia to Knol, where it can be verified by credentialed users and protected against vandalism.
But why is copying the content to another site even needed? Wikipedia maintains an edit history, and you can link specifically to previous versions of an article. So, you just have a third-party site that maintains a database of "trusted people" and "wikipedia entries" and "trust relations" between those two sets.
The third-party site doesn't need to host any Wikipedia content at all. It just does the work of vetting people and maintaining the database. You then search on this site for some content, and it gives you a link to the version of the Wikipedia article that was vetted and signed as being trustworthy.
If the expert needs to fix the article before vetting it, he can make those changes to the Wikipedia version, and then sign-off on that version. Basically, I don't see the need to create a Wikipedia fork in order to get the advantages of "expert vetting." Keep everything combined on Wikipedia, rather than duplicating effort.
Reply to This
Wikipedia Open Source Cleansing (Score:5, Interesting)
Reply to This
Re: (Score:2)
That's not overzealous practices - that's one of the most basic rules of writing for Wikipedia.
Re: (Score:2)
Opposite problem (Score:5, Informative)
I've suffered from the opposite problem, having content removed from Wikipeda because the reference cites were to a physical books so could not be readily verified and not an online source.
The real problem is the Wikipedia cabal's Groupthink; Cite your source or not, if you're not part of that cabal you may as well give up.
Reply to This
Parent
Citizendium still kicks (Score:2)
Larry Sanger's Citizendium project still kicks, still gaining momentum without the association from Google.
http://www.citizendium.org/ [citizendium.org]
no (Score:5, Insightful)
This is wrong for so many reasons that it's hard to know where to begin.
Okay, let's start with this quote:
This makes absolutely no sense. First off, if you're planning on publishing something as a book, the last thing on earth you want to do is put it on wikipedia, get it mixed promiscuously with writing by a hundred other people, and then cut and paste the result and send it to a publisher under your own name. That would be stupid -- so stupid that I assume it's not what Potter had in mind. I can only imagine that what he really had in mind was something more like this. He writes version A. He posts it on WP. On WP, it morphs into version B via other people's edits. Meanwhile, he decides he wants to write a book on it. He takes version A, edits it into a form that will work in the book, making version C. Now he's talking as if there's a licensing issue, but there's no licensing issue. He's the sole author and copyright holder of versions A and C. Licensing version B to WP under the GFDL doesn't even put him as the author under any obligations; licenses like the GPL and GFDL only impose obligations on other people, if they want to redistribute the material.
The idea about signing WP articles is pointless. First off, the whole culture of WP has always been based on the adrenaline rush of knowing that whatever edits you did, they'd immediately be visible to the whole world. That's why WP succeeded where Nupedia failed: instant gratification. Second, there is absolutely nothing stopping people from endorsing WP articles right now. Here you go, I, Ben Crowell, hereby endorse this [wikipedia.org] version of the WP article on Robert Heinlein. (I think the current version is worse than that one.) What's that, you say? You say nobody cares that I endorsed that particular version, and the whole idea is boring and pointless? Well, yeah, I agree.
He hopes for "a 'gold rush' of users copying content from Wikipedia to Knol, where it can be verified by credentialed users and protected against vandalism." If he wants an encyclopedia where articles can be verified by credentialed users and protected against vandalism, it already exists: Citizendium. Citizendium's license is compatible with Wikipedia's. Why Knol? The only difference I can see is that Knol lets authors make money from ads placed next to their articles. But anyone who wants to make money from placing ads next to cut-and-pasted WP articles can already do that. It's perfectly legal, as long as they show the license.
Reply to This
Re:no (Score:5, Insightful)
Licensing version B to WP under the GFDL doesn't even put him as the author under any obligations; licenses like the GPL and GFDL only impose obligations on other people, if they want to redistribute the material.
Right. People misunderstand the "viral" nature of the GPL. If you're really still the sole author of a work, you can release it under the GPL, and still retain the rights to license it under a non-GPL license. The GPL does not revoke your copyright to the work, but on the contrary relies on you retaining the copyright of your work. As the copyright owner, you can license your work under any number of non-exclusive licenses. (IANAL, so if I'm at all wrong here, correct me. But I'm pretty sure I'm right.)
Further, this idea of "if you've ever wanted to cite a Wikipedia article as a source". No. No one should be citing the Wikipedia as a primary source, unless people start posting original work there, in which case it could become a valid primary source. But even if an "expert" were doing fact-checking on the Wikipedia, you still shouldn't cite it any more than you should cite text books or encyclopedias.
Reply to This
Parent
Wikipedia already has this (Score:2, Informative)
It is entirely possible to link to a specific flagged and confirmed version of your favorite page by selecting the current version in the version history, then using that link instead of the more generic wikipedia.org/wiki/Bla.
This doesn't prevent further editing of your uploaded content, but you will be able to quote the article you want, not the article it might have become.
The problem with "experts" (Score:3, Insightful)
I respect experts in the physical sciences like physics, chemistry, mathematics and so forth. Especially since most of them are ready to drop everything they know if a better theory comes along (relativity, natural selection and common descent etc.)
However, the social scientists are filled with people who are often just part of a propaganda system. Would you trust an Iranian college professor who taught the modern history of the United States and Europe? Then why would you trust an American college professor teaching the modern history of Iran? The experts on God and Jesus are priests and theologians - do you trust their expertise on Jesus's supposed miraculous powers? Who is an expert on abortion?
One of the big problems with Wikipedia as I see it is there is a portion of Wikipedia that expertise works (natural sciences - with the exception of people like Gene "TimeCube guy" Ray and other cranks). Then there is a portion where expertise does not work (articles about the West Bank, Sarah Palin, abortion etc.) Magazines doing a retrospective on something sometimes have a left-wing and right-wing person write a page on the topic. With Wikipedia, and Knol, you have one source, an "expert". Bakunin said it best over a century ago -
"Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognise no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others."
Reply to This
Licenses (Score:2)
Interesting enough, Wikipedia changing to a later license would still leave everything published prior to that still licensed under the old license as well. Knol could chose to use it under the updated license and others under the old one.
Uh, where to start here? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm a sysop in the German Wikipedia and I'm telling you: It won't work.
The German Wikipedia was the first Wikimedia Wiki to test an Extension called "Flagged Revisions". We first activated Sigthed version [wikipedia.org], where every user with >200 edits can validate a version as vandalism-free. Other users can still edit, but their edits must be reviewed first. Now, look at the statistics [toolserver.org], the last image. Note that this kind of quality control only covers checks of obvious vandalism, the actual information is not verified. (Note that I am a supporter of Sighted versions. But even though they are great, they do not solve every problem Wikipedia has)
Regarding the other statements in your quote: If you want to have a permalink, you can click on "Permanent link", if you want to cite it, click on "Cite this page". Note however, that citing Wikipedia is not always appropriate [wikipedia.org].
Reply to This
Er, you can already do this (Score:3, Informative)
Whenever you link to a Wikipedia page as a referenced source you should link to the specific revision number, not the genral page. This protects you from any and all rogue edits.
I don't see any problem here.
Reply to This
"It's the readers, stupid" (Score:5, Insightful)
http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2008/08/27/forget-the-writers/ [davidgerard.co.uk]
There's hardly a "Wikipedia replacement" that hasn't started from trying to make a welcoming environment for authors. Wikipedia, however, is popular because it's what readers want. Writers are important, but way less so than the readers.
If readers wanted ten articles on one topic, they'd just click the first ten Google hits. It's like meta-search engines in the 1990s that gave you results from ten bad pre-Google search engines in the hope you might find a damn thing, when the real answer was one search engine that didn't suck.
Many people bitch and moan about Wikipedia, usually those who couldn't work well enough with others. But it's a top 10 site not because it lifted a finger to be, but because it actually works well enough to produce a good-enough first port of call.
Reply to This
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
TL;DR
Don't worry, that's normal for Slashdot.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)