Google Knol and the future of Wikipedia and Wikimedia

Google Knol is finally available for the public. I tested some basic features and the concept is a good one, as well as it is obvious that it will be developed more: it may include the most of useful wiki features in the future, like, for example, templates are.

There are two main differences between Wikipedia and Knol, introduced by Knol:

• Author is the owner of the article. Of course, in the sense of having control over the content and if they choose so.
• Author may make money from writing the articles.

I am fully aware about differences of two approaches: Orthodox wiki approach and the commercial one. Basically, those differences are in a long term the most important, while in a short term we may see that other characteristics of two projects are more important.

Orthodox wiki approach is saying that no one is the owner of the article. Formally, I am, as well as anyone else is, the “owner” of one Wikipedia article, like the authors of the article are. The consequence of this approach is collectivization of the knowledge, as well as more knowledge at one place.

Commercial wiki approach, which Google Knol introduced at the wider scale (while I am sure that similar projects existed or aimed to exist), individualize the knowledge output and motivates authors to work there by giving them a possibility to make some money.

I may see a perfect coexistence between those two concepts. If you want just to be introduced into some matter (no matter how deep!), you will go to Wikipedia. But, if you want to see some specific information from some field, you will go to the Knol and search for reliable authors. Of course, I may imagine a lot of cross-linking between Wikipedia and Knol.

But, this is about a perfect world from the not so certain future. In the sense of “now and here”, Wikipedia and Knol are rivals in the battle which Wikipedia will loose in any case, but it matters how much. Simply, Wikipedia is at the top and any serious competitor will get a part of the time which people are spending in reading and writing articles. And Knol is a serious competitor.

Wikipedia has a couple of main advantages over Knol:

1) It is not so easy to find a person who is using Internet and who doesn’t know for Wikipedia, while Knol has to make its own place under the Sun — even it is one more Google application and Google is known as well as Wikipedia is (somewhat better, but it is not so important in this case).

2) Wikipedia has well known software, MediaWiki (as well as well developed user-side Pywikipediabot), and, from the technical side, it is much better known than Google’s API, as well as it is possible to add hundreds of thousands of (good small) articles into Wikipedia automatically, while it is (still) not possible with Knol.

3) Wikipedia is “collectively owned” and, as such, it has significant economical advantage: One person is able to care about small set of articles, but even two persons are able to take care about bigger set of articles than two persons separately. Besides the fact that in the current stage people will mostly create “their own” articles at Knol, as well as it is not so expectable that a lot of volunteers will work on others’ articles without being payed. But, I am sure that Google is analyzing the concept of creating payed role of “administrators”.

4) Wikipedia is a multilingual project. It has more than 280 language editions. Making a commercially machinery for supporting such number of languages may be possible, but not in the near future. Because of that, while Knol may become popular soon as a source of knowledge in English, maybe a decade will pass until I would be able to suggest to some high school student from Belgrade to search for knowledge there, too. Until that, Wikipedia will be the most important non-English knowledge base.

But, Knol has some significant advantages over Wikipedia, too:

1) You may share your knowledge, for money or without it, in a much less hostile environment than Wikipedia is. Eh, “Imagine a world where every human being is able to contribute to the sum of human knowledge without being frustrated!”

2) I am still thinking about usage of Knol in my work: I have some wikis out of Wikipedia for organizing group works of students, but I am really thinking about a possibility that one student may be stimulated with money for sharing their knowledge. Of course, it applies not only for students. And this may be the biggest Google’s contribution to the human knowledge. What Wikipedia didn’t do, Google did.

3) Knol is, at last, a Google product, so Wikipedia articles will get significant competitors in Google search results.

4) Again, Knol is a Google product. Technical infrastructure of Wikimedia is a silly one in comparison with Google’s one.

So, what should we do?

As I said, it is very predictable that a number of Wikipedia contributors will start to decline. Or, at least, number of edits will start do decline. And it will not be a seasonal fluctuation, but a permanent one. A good fraction of, which is the worst, good editors will fly to Knol; or, at least, a good fraction of good editors will start to spend significant amount of their time at Knol, instead at Wikipedia. In other words, the question is not would we loose some editors, but how much editors we will loose? The question is not anymore what should we do to make Wikipedia better, but what should we do to keep Wikipedia alive until the better times.

I may list a good amount of mistakes made in past. But, it seems to me as something without a lot of sense. Instead of that, I will try to list a number of possible solutions for making Wikipedia more competitive:

• First of all, WMF Board and staff have to talk with Google and make a common PR: Wikipedia is about a general knowledge, Knol is about specific; original research is not acceptable at Wikipedia, while it may be very useful at Knol; authors should keep their own articles at Knol, but they should be encouraged to participate in common knowledge repository at Wikipedia; and so on.
• Flagged Revisions should be carefully, but as soon as possible, turned on: Only highly reliable contributors, as well as contributors with scholar background should get that tool. It doesn’t have a lot in common with being an admin or a bureaucrat at some project.
• WMF should make extensive contacts with universities and it has to find a way how to deal with contacts which it gets from the volunteers. Public manual which describes how to handle university contacts and what are the benefits for one student, one professor and one educational institution — has to be made. Note that institutions like to communicate with other institutions and that at some point WMF (or chapters) has to be that institution for communication.
• Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects have to become social networking place, too. Keeping volunteers around one passion, passion to collaborate in creation of the sum of human knowledge, may work up to the some point. But, relying on past time communication systems, like mailing lists or IRC are, is a good way how to loose a strong initial advantage. From looking into friends’ interests (but, not through always disputable and not so user friendly user templates), via integrated XMPP/Jabber client into MediaWiki interface, up to making an API for making free software games connected to MediaWiki interface. Yes, it is a non-encyclopedic content, but it is still impossible to build human knowledge without humans and humans have some more needs than writing the articles.
• Build one community. The strongest side of Wikipedia is its diverse community. However, one thing is a diverse community, the other is a lot of different communities which don’t have a lot in common. Having a number of communities which treat Wikipedia as a hosting provider is a good way for educating contributors for others. If contributors treat Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects as hosting providers, they will fly to the better one when better one starts to exist. And, in some aspects, Knol is the better provider.
• Brianna wrote a couple of days ago about a problem with deletionism. If you didn’t, read it.
• Make Wikipedia not so hostile environment. How? I don’t know. Maybe someone else has some idea…
• And, the most important: This is maybe the last chance to start to think realistically; especially, to start to think. Stories about “the sum of human knowledge”, “being a part of free culture movement”, about “changing the world” and so on — are very nice. But, we are living here and now. And we have some problems here and now.

Finally, FCKeditor as a pure extension for MediaWiki!

At the most visited post of my blog (of course, it is about FCKeditor ), I’ve got the next message from one of the FCKeditor developers:

FCKeditor is now a pure extension, no patches required.
The latest version can be downloaded here: http://mediawiki.fckeditor.net/.
Compatible with 1.10+ (up to 1.12 currently).
A couple of important bugs has been fixed recently so I strongly encourage you to download the latest release

Have fun using FCKeditor!

BTW. If you find some free time and will be willing to improve the extension, feel free to join the project

The most important notes about FCKeditor extension for MediaWiki are:

• It produces wikitext, not HTML!
• Don’t use it at large sites yet, but as a couple of important bugs are fixed, it may be used in controlled conditions (smaller sites with an admin-enthusiast should be OK).

Note, also, that I didn’t test it. However, I trust more to PHP programmers from FCKeditor team than to myself (while I know to program in PHP, I am not a PHP programmer).

Here are my few notes about what FCKeditor needs (according to my last test from a few months ago):

• Paste HTML (copy is working), like I may do, for example, here, at WordPress.
• Paste images (copy is working; of course, with possibility to define [and change] a default upload site, like Wikimedia Commons is).
• Supporting Subversion version of MediaWiki (currently 1.13), so it may be used on Wikimedia projects and other projects which are keeping MediaWiki up to date.
• (I know that I wanted to say here one more important thing, but I forgot it… I’ll update this post when I remember.)

Stewards and Vogons

This is not another story, but an analysis of some of Wikimedian problems. If you didn’t read a satire “A not so ordinary night of one Steward“, you may read it firstly, and then to continue to read this analysis. However, it is not necessary for understanding of this post.

The day before yesterday I really felt like a Vogon. Maybe, it was a feeling between a being a Vogon and being a British lord-lawyer with a good will, but, let’s approximate it to Vogons. Because, unlike Vogons, British lord-lawyers don’t have real weapons. But, it is true that both species are horrible.

Yesterday I started to write this post, but I realized that I may make a satire. Satire is the next level of describing problems in a community, after a reasonable talk. Of course, while satires are not forbidden or satirists don’t suffer heavy consequences, the situation is still under the borders of regular. However, it is true that satire had to be used because reasonable talk didn’t succeed.

I used a real situation to make a satire, so if people from Turkish and Azerbaijani Wikipedias have bad feelings, I have to say sorry. The main targets are stewards and regulations around stewards and checkusers.

* * *

From time to time I start to feel a light form of panic when I realize that rules are directly opposite to the projects’ needs. The same was happen the day before yesterday.

An admin from Turkish Wikipedia called stewards at #wikimedia-stewards channel by typing “@stewards”. This is a keyword for calling stewards for non-urgent asks, unlike “!stewards” — which is a keyword for calling stewards for urgent asks.

* * *

Before I continue to talk about his reasons why he used non-urgent keyword, I want to explain differences between those two keywords.

Before a couple of weeks the topic on the #wikimedia-stewards channel was like: Type !steward in case of emergency | Non-urgent requests here: <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/RFP> | Send en.wikipedia oversight requests to oversight-l@lists.wikimedia.org

I think that demanding from contributors to call stewards only in a case of emergency is very very arrogant. Actually, when I realized that the topic is working, I started to think twice before I say anything to a contributor who asked for help. I don’t want to frustrate them more than the topic is frustrating them. Such topic repulsed people from talking with stewards. Such topic explains that “stewards are very important persons who shouldn’t be disturbed while working on much more important tasks”. Yes, I may work on some important task (privately, professionally or for Wikimedia), but I decided to be a steward not because of my vanity, but because those privileges are giving to me a possibility to help to Wikimedians. If someone has “much more important tasks”, then they should give back their steward rights.

So, a couple of weeks ago I started a discussion about the channel’s topic at the steward’s list. I thought that the solution is to make two channels, but Lodewijk gave a more reasonable solution: to make two keywords, one for urgent requests, one for non-urgent requests.

I was positively surprised when I realized that not only I when I got a general support for that, but when I saw that Dungodung made a technical solution very quickly. However, it was the end of the positive tendencies.

Today, the topic of the channel is: Type !steward in case of emergency; type @steward to discuss non-urgent matters | Non-urgent requests here: <http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/RFP> | Send en.wikipedia oversight requests to oversight-l@lists.wikimedia.org

If you type “!steward” (for emergency cases), bot will call around 40 names. But, if you type “@steward”, bot will call only three of us: Lar, DerHexer and me. Adding people to the second list is opt-in and, after the initial configuration (DerHexer and I were present on the channel and we explicitly opted-in, while Lar said earlier on the list that he wants to talk with contributors) nobody else opted-in. This was happened something like between two and four weeks ago.

But, this kind of arrogance is not only a stewards’ characteristics. Wikipedia became known not only because it is the biggest encyclopedia ever, but also because it has a lot of arrogant admins. And I am sure that all stewards was/are admins on some of the projects. I don’t want to say that stewards are a product of a negative selection (because, in that case, I would be a product of a negative selection, too ), but I want to say that it isn’t complex to trace the roots of that arrogance.

Yes, I know that we are humans, even we are stewards…

* * *

One contributor called us by typing “@steward”. So, his opinion was that it was not an emergency situation, but he wanted a help from stewards. Unfortunately, I was in the office and I had to go home. I asked him was it urgent or it have might to wait for an hour.

* * *

There is a good reason why I don’t want to refuse to help to contributors, or at least to talk with them. After Florence and Angela stopped to be active stewards, I remember that it was a really frustrating task to ask stewards for anything.

As time was passing, Wikimedian bureaucracy were started to be more and more Kafkian. While it is obvious that no one is willing to be marked as a bureaucrat, it is obvious that accessibility of Wikimedian community managers is lower and lower as time is passing. And it is dangerously closely to the point when a management is becoming a bureaucracy. A number of “no one’s business” is one of the key factors in establishing if something is a management or a bureaucracy. And stewards are here to handle “no one’s business” (of course, in a reasonable amount). If stewards say that something is not their business, then we have a problem: it is definitely no one’s business.

* * *

One hour later. When I was at home and turned on IRC client, he started to talk with me again. And, of course, if someone remembered that for an hour, it is important to them.

He is an admin from Turkish Wikipedia and he asked me for cross-wiki checkuser action on Turkish and Azerbaijani Wikipedia. But then my bureaucratic coprocessor started to scream… While I was sure that Azerbaijani Wikipedia didn’t have checkusers, I was not sure if the Turkish one had them or not.

And when I realized that they have checkusers, I started my bureaucratic talk: May he connect me with their checkuser? I may do checkuser only for Azerbaijani Wikipedia. Only if it is urgent or he had a really good reason, I am able to use my privileges…

I think that it is more than obvious that we had a couple of misunderstandings. He didn’t think that it is urgent, while it was urgent according to the checkuser procedure on Turkish Wikipedia: Possible sockpuppet was a candidate for adminship. If they started a checkuser procedure, it would have taken much more time than it is needed for one person to become an admin.

A lot of our talk was spent in my tries to understand what was the problem. Obviously, he is not a native speaker of English, as well as I am not. But, he is not a steward, too. He doesn’t know our bureaucratic jargon and it is not his job to know that. However, I am a steward and I know that I have to get formally expressed statements before I do any of the steward actions.

I asked for another checkuser, too. But, the other checkuser is not active. My next bureaucratic statement had to be: “Less than two active checkusers — no checkusers at all!” — Of course, this is highly unreasonable. One admin came to me for help and instead of help, I would have punish his project because it didn’t fit to our standards.

* * *

The other question is about standards. I am sure that the most of meta-involved Wikimedians know how painful is to choose a checkuser. And I’ll give to you a little comparison: Imagine two projects: one with 5000 very active contributors and one with 500 very active contributors. I am not sure that English Wikipedia (a project with 5000 very active contributors) has more than 50 persons which are able to pass voting for checkuser rights. Consequently, a project with 500 very active contributors may have maybe 5 persons who are able to pass voting for checkuser rights. Turkish Wikipedia had 86 very active contributors in January 2008. They should be happy if two users are able to pass voting for checkuser.

And one of them is inactive, which, according to The Rules, means that they shouldn’t have checkuser at all. I think that this is one of a number of unreasonable rules. Instead of allowing situations when a trusting contributor may ask a steward for a checkuser action (if the procedure is too long, if a contributor doesn’t trust to one of checkusers, if…) and allowing projects to have a natural development — rules are forcing them to shrink from asking stewards for help.

* * *

When I saw that we are going nowhere, I decided to call another steward, Thogo, to be a witness of my action.

For two and half months of my stewardship, I already made a couple of “non-orthodox” actions. This time I decided to make one more, but I really wanted to have a witness.

After another set of talk and my final understanding of possible duration of the formal checkuser process on Turkish Wikipedia and possibility that suspected sockpuppet may be elected as admin, Thogo did the right thing: He checked public logs and realized that there is enough supporting material for checkuser action.

That was enough for me. I asked Thogo is he against the action. As he said that “he may not decide”, I understood that, at least, he is not against the action. Decision was mine and I did it. As I said there, helping to the projects is above any of the prescribed rules; at least for me.

* * *

If anyone would make an in depth manual for stewards, this may be a classic example of sockpuppetry: In two days three examples of editing from two accounts and the same IP address in intervals of 1 hour, 2 minutes and 4 minutes.

I have to tell that this is not even a question of reaction. In coordination with a checkuser from Turkish Wikipedia, we would need a lot of talk while looking separately in different logs. It is a technical question, too. There are two options: to give to a local checkuser right to check the other project, too — or to give such permission to a steward.

* * *

I have to say that it is a really good feeling when you realize that you helped to some project.

* * *

And after all those things, there is one very important question: What is the purpose of our rules when they are not so rarely directly against the purpose of stewardship, adminship, checkusership…? I understand that rules shouldn’t be followed only in extraordinary circumstances. But, if I count “ordinary” and “extraordinary” moments in my stewardship, I would conclude that they are far from statistical error: maybe 10%, maybe 20%.

So, do we want to change something?

For the end, one nice quote from Wikipedia:

“…far back in prehistory, when the first primeval Vogons crawled out of the sea, the forces of evolution were so disgusted with them that they never allowed them to evolve again.” (Wikipedia contributors, “Races and species in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy“, Wikipedia, free encyclopedia, retrived at March 20th, 200

A not so ordinary night of one Steward

This is the story. For reasons why did I write it, look at my analysis of some problems related to stewards.

Let me explain a couple of things: The Stewards are a species which is dedicated to the holly goal of The Rules of The Stewardship. All other things and species are subordinate to The Stewards. I am one of The Stewards!

Some species think that there are no The Rules of Stewardship and that The Stewards should serve to them. There is no sense to explain anything to those mortals because they are not able to understand all things written in The Rules. They are maybe able to read, to understand some parts of The Rules, but their genetic system is not allowing to them to understand The Core written in The Rules.

Wikipedians are especially arrogant species. They think that everything is wandering around their confederation of civilizations, Wikipedia. Very often they are coming for our help. Hey, they are not only coming, but they are asking for help! What an impudence! They are trying to use our feelings… And we are humans, even we are The Stewards. So, very often we are taken in the cobweb of those emotions and because of that we are helping them.

Hard times came for us, The Stewards. Small number of the species understand The Rules of The Stewardship. Actually, only The Stewards understand The Rules. I remember better times, when all of the species lived in harmony with us and The Rules. But, those times are now a very distant past.

And, yesterday around 22:03:58 one Wikipedian called me. He was asking for help. Eh, how impudent he was… He thought that I would have helped him immediately. If I didn’t say “Please, contact me for one hour.” — almost for sure a mob of Wikipedians would have been gathered and started to ask me for help.

One hour later. Of course, he didn’t forget to ask me for help, AGAIN! OK, OK… Wikipedians are really a special species. If you don’t help them, they will ask again and again.

- So, how can I help you? Be aware that you may get Our Help only if the situation is urgent! In all other cases you should fill the right form and submit it at the appropriate place.

- May you do a simultaneous CheckUser action on Turkish and Azerbaijani Wikipedias? — What are the limits of Wikipedian arrogance? He didn’t even make an excuse for interrupting me in much more important jobs of The Implementation of The Rules of The Stewardship! He didn’t even consider usage of the right form at the right place! Those Wikipedians…

- Of course, not! I don’t have a possibility for parallel processing! I may do that only subsequently.

So, he asked me to do that subsequently. This is one of The Steward’s rights and I definitely have that right. It is written in The Rules and The Software supports The Rules.

But, at that moment my bureaucratic coprocessor started to scream: “ATTENTION! ATTENTION! DO THAY HAVE CHECKUSER? DO THEY HAVE CHECKUSER? ATTENTION! ATTENTION! …”. According to The Rules I am not able to do a CheckUser action if someone of the CheckUser species exists on that Wikipedia.

Eh, my hart is always at the side of the CheckUser species. It is a relatively young species and, with Oversight species they are the most advanced of all other species. Of course, except The Stewards. Maybe, they will even evolve into The Stewards some day! They almost understand The Rules! But, it is too early for them now…

I am sure that Azerbaijani Wikipedia doesn’t have a CheckUser. This is written in the supporting documents of The Rules and I know well those documents.

But, Turkish Wikipedia… I don’t know for that civilization. Maybe they have, maybe they don’t have.

- Do you have someone of the CheckUser species in your civilization?

- Yes.

- And you are a CheckUser? — I have to say that I was very positively surprised. If he is a CheckUser, then everything is much different! Maybe I would be the first person who helped to one CheckUser to evolve into a Steward? Who knows…

- No, I am just an admin. — How arrogant is this greeny?! He gave me a hope to think that he is a CheckUser!!! But, he is only an admin. Admin? Bwahahahaha! This species is derived from a genetically degraded CheckUser species. They may become CheckUsers only with a lot of genetic engineering.

- May you connect me with your CheckUser? — I really didn’t want to spend more time with such arrogant species anymore.

Silence.

- We may start The Process, but it may take a lot of time… — Finally, he started to talk much more reasonable. The Process is the right thing. And all things which take a lot of time are good things. Nothing was built quickly!

- According to The Rules of Stewardship I may help you, but you have to state that this is urgent or that you have some other good reason. — I tried to be a little bit softer because he started to think reasonably. Also, being softer is a good marketing for our species and good marketing may give to us more power to achieve our ultimate goal: Living Accroding to The Rules of The Stewardship.

Silence, again.

- So, you told me that your civilization has members of the CheckUser species. According to The Rules, there must be at least two of them. May you connect me with the second one?

- The second one is not active. — So, here we are! One CheckUser killed the other! It is relatively often event between CheckUsers. Not all of them may become The Stewards and from time to time one CheckUser kills another to make a space for their own development. However, this is strictly forbidden by The Rules and a CheckUser which survived will have to be genetically degraded to a poor admin.

As I realized that we have a violation of The Rules, I called another Steward to consult him about steps which we will have to make.

Eh, from time to time, it is really useful to offer a help to Wikipedians. From time to time we may find that The Rules of The Stewardship are violated. What a nice end of a day! Only a couple of hours ago, I thought that I will really have to help to one Wikipedian!

Verifiability, inclusionism, deletionism and POV

Andrew Lih posted on Facebook a link to an interesting article published in The Economist with name “The battle for Wikipedia’s soul” (no, it is not about Danny-Jimmy events). Finally, one journalist expressed a deep knowledge of Wikipedian community.

However, his deep knowledge has some limits…

First: Even there are some real inclusionists and deletionists, keep-delete game is usually a war between POV pushers.

Second: A popular approach to Wikipedia is a dilema between keep and delete. Encyclopedic approach is about verifiability. Usually, a lot of prejudices and emotional positions are crucial for the decision to keep or to delete some article: “relevance” is the strongest bias on Wikipedia. And such biases are changing through the time. For example, a description of one small dialect wouldn’t pass even it has relevant references and even it is a regular scientific field — if there is no description about its own super-dialect. But, when “time comes”, when a super-dialect is described, article about that small dialect would be kept. Implication is that a lot of knowledge is constantly removed from Wikipedia because “time doesn’t come”.

So, what’s the point?

I didn’t read Planet Wikimedia and Open Wiki Blog Planet for a couple of days. And when I had started to read it 10 minutes ago, I realized that instead of blogs, I read soaplogs.

I really don’t understand such need to talk about someone’s personal life.

Instead of rational criticizing Jimmy’s work, positions related to free knowledge and his political relations, I saw only stories about with whom he slept and how much money he got when he sold his house while moving from Florida to California.

So, here are a couple of advices:

• If you want to have a sex with him, ask him. Maybe he is willing to have a sex with you.
• If you want to be popular as he is, make a project relevant as Wikipedia is.
• If you want to know something more about his political position, search Internet; something like “jimmy wales politics” may give to you a lot of results.
• If you want to have amount of money which he has, make it in the capitalist system or make a revolution.
• And if you want to criticize his political position or position related to free knowledge, say it.

But, please, don’t contaminate common communication channels with soap opera blogs.

Affero General Public License

Eh, I am not so well informed. GNU AGPLv3 was published in late 2007 and, finally, it may be used without thinking about compatibility with GPL. MediaWiki and other Wikimedia software (as they deal with Web) should be licensed under this license. And, of course, I’ll use this license for my software.

Here is the quote from the Software Freedom Law Center’s document “A Legal Issues Primer for Open Source and Free Software Projects” (thanks to Slashdot for publishing an article about this document):

The GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 (AGPL), is a variant of GPLv3 published by the FSF in late 2007.⁶ The AGPL contains an additional requirement regarding network deployments of modified versions.

In general, the GPL’s source code provision requirements apply only when software is directly distributed in object code form to a user. If you do not distribute the software, you have no obligation to distribute source code. Therefore, if people interact with your software in a way that does not require them to have a copy of it, most of the GPL’s source-code provision requirement’s do not apply

The most common example of such interactions is online or networked applications in a client/server environment. For example, when a browser sends a request to a website to perform an operation (such as database entry that occurs by way of a CGI script), the web server performs the operation on the client’s behalf. The client does not require a copy of the software to perform the operation.⁷. The GPL imposes no requirement to provide users who visit your website with a copy of the software that runs on your server, even if your server software is GPL-licensed software that you have modified.

In a lot of cases, this makes sense. Servers and clients interact in a lot of circumstances, and offering source code to every client that interacts with every server would be cumbersome. In many instances, it would be impossible.

In some cases, though, offering source code would be trivial, and yet significant improvements are made to server-side software that never get contributed back to the community. For example, because the GPL does not require it, people rarely make the code behind their websites available to users of the site. It is in these cases that the Affero GPL can help.

The AGPL requires that you offer corresponding source code to users who interact with your modified version of AGPL-licensed software over a network. Therefore, if you build a server based on improvements to AGPL-licensed software, those improvements must be made available to all who use the software via the network.

Some copyleft advocates regard the AGPL as the next logical step toward software freedom. As more and more software is delivered as a service instead of as copies of software packages, the Affero GPL can ensure that freedom endures even as distribution dwindles.

The Affero GPL is not right for everybody. Some communities do not want the added burden of packaging their code for release to network clients. The Affero GPL creates code distribution requirements for a class of people the FOSS world has traditionally treated more as end-users than developers. Even though some end-users are now sophisticated enough to customize their installations of open source server software, your project might not want to require them to publish those custom changes. Moreover, there are many individual developers as well as corporate commercial users who believe that AGPL takes the idea of copyleft too far.

If you think the Affero GPL is the license for your project, visit the FSF website for a copy of the license and some instructions on how to use it.

Non-free images on Wikimedian projects

Before you continue to read this post, consider:

1. If I don’t know something new related to this issue and you know, please let me know that.
2. I don’t support non-free content, but at least a significant minority of Wikimedians support it.
3. I was thinking to write this to foundation-l, but I am tired of long and usually useless discussions there about some important issues. So, if anyone is willing to read this, it is visible enough to the community.

A year ago WMF Board decided that non-free images shouldn’t be used on Wikimedia projects by default. If some project is willing to maintain non-free images, it should organize some kind of logistic support for that (I think that this includes a lawyer who would work on particular issues).

In practice, maybe a couple of Wikipedias (so, only Wikipedias, not all projects in a particular language) would be able to do so. AFAIK, community on English Wikipedia decided to keep non-free images (of course, in a rational amount), community on German Wikipedia (maybe all projects in German, too?) decided before the Board’s decision not to keep non-free images and I really don’t know what other projects did. (I would like to know what is going on French and Japanese Wikipedias.)

So, we are here, a year after. I may guarantee that not more then 10 of more then 700 projects made any kind of decision. And I am almost sure that only English Wikipedia is fulfilling necessary conditions.

Communities smaller then English or German are rarely able to make some important decision for themselves. For a lot of decisions 80% (consensus-like majority) is necessary. And if it is not of interest of people who are able to be loud and to do a hard work for getting what they are willing — decision will never be happened.

This means that Board’s decision was de jure fine (”leaving an option to a particular communities”), but de facto it was a nice worded decision to remove non-free images from all projects except English Wikipedia.

And is this fair?

Instead of that, it is possible to make carefully managed non-free.wikimedia.org (like Debian’s non-free packages were selected: if some software has free option, it will not be included; if some weird license, almost free, is used and software is useful, it will be included there etc.). And, personally, I think that this is a Borad’s responsibility.

The main problem with not doing anything is making a lot of space for problems inside of smaller communities. At least one community was hardly affected by indirect consequences of the Board’s decision a year ago. But, it was only because people from that community read foundation-l emails.

After the March, a lot of smaller communities will be faced with deletion of their non-free images. And only after that we would be able to see a real consequences of this decision and poorly driven issue from the beginning to the end.

…

I could talk about that more, but… If there is a will for changing anything, thing will be changed. If there is not, I may talk much more without any result.

How *not* to build mutual trust between ethnicities

A couple of weeks ago, I wouldn’t tag posts like this one as Wikimedian. But, English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee decided to make a Working group on ethnic and cultural edit wars and I am now a member of that work group. So, while the next story is not closely related to Wikimedia, it is related to ethnic conflicts and it may be useful for the work group.

Yesterday evening some artists from Pristina had an exhibition in the downtown of Belgrade. It is a contemporary art of young artists from Kosovo. They are dealing with their own problems, globally the same as problems everywhere, but particularly with a very different point of view from the most people from Serbia. People on Kosovo have their own new myths, new national heroes etc. and their young artists are criticizing those things in their own society.

However, their new myths are anti-myths in Serbia and their new national heroes are anti-heroes in Serbia. It is, also, possible that those young artists were not aware of those facts.

People who were aware are organizers of those events in Serbia.

And, instead of presenting parts of the Albanian culture which are closely related to the Serbian culture (and there are a lot of such parts) and really work on building mutual trust between, they had chosen to provoke reaction of extreme right-wingers from Serbia.

So, if we really want to build mutual trust between ethnicities and cultures, this is the wrong way.

You may see images from Novi Sad (a couple of days ago; extremists were not organized) and images from Belgrade (yesterday evening; extremists were organized).

Community development and POV stages (2)

Founding (cont.)

Out of very developed language areas, usually with a lot of speakers (like German, but cf. Dutch), if community is founded by anyone else but national founder(s), it may be considered as an accident. Even it was founded by someone else, it will be under heavy influence of incoming contributors who see Wikipedia much more as a place of national interest and much less as a place for spreading free knowledge. However, if founder(s) are really interested in Wikipedia, their influence will be significant.

But, usually, people who came from free software milieu are expecting a free software-like project, which Wikipedia is not. While the primary goal of Wikipedia is very similar to the primary goals of free software projects, Wikimedians don’t belong to one esnaf, esnaf of programmers and admins. I have to say that I was said when I saw that some of founders of such type are not very active Wikimedians anymore: it is very predictable that such persons will be bored of dealing with extremists.

It is very interesting to see that out of people with nationalist positions, there are no founders with other kinds of clear political positions. Of course, people from other groups have their own political positions, but there is a difference between building a project to spread free knowledge and its idea and building a project to spread national, religious or any other political idea which is not free knowledge. Wikimedian projects are about free knowledge and it is the only “official” Wikimedian political ideology. And, of course, it is only about founders, not about all contributors.

And it is obvious that Wikipedias with national founders will suffer of heavy POV at the beginning. Of course, POV will be based on the biases of their cultures. If their country has bad relations with some other country, POV will be against the other country; if the culture is homophobic, some of the articles will be homophobic, too; etc.

And what to do with such communities at the founding stage? To block the whole community? To leave them? Of course, not. But, all small communities should be watched constantly. How? Well, for some languages it is not so hard — there are good enough machine translators, but for the most of the languages it is not possible to do that easy. This means that we have to find a way for watching small communities.

When to make an action? What are the limits of POV which may be added to some project? I don’t know. I only know that POV articles are usual for all Wikipedias and that we should think only about a level of POV contamination. Also, we should carefully watch for POV-related complains made by people who are inside of those communities or who know that language.

How to organize that? I don’t know; we should think about that…

* * *

(For the list of all articles from this series, see page Community development and POV stages.)