[Wikimedia-l] Study: Nobody cares about your copyright

[Andrew Gray]

On Monday, 21 May 2012, Samuel Klein wrote:
>
> > O'Reilly is offering works under 14 years (c), thence CC-by
>
> Campaign idea: set up a named class of license for friendly groups
> like O'Reilly that are committing to 14 years, which are defined by
> terming out in no more than 14 years to CC0 or equivalent PD
> declarations.
>

A thought on naming.

The obvious way to badge such a license is through Creative Commons; but
we've spilled vast amounts of metaphorical ink over "is NC free?" and "is
ND free?", and one of the results is a good deal of confusion over what a
"free license" is, what we should campaign for, etc etc etc.

If we throw into the mix *another* license from the same stable, the
situation gets even more muddled. The inevitable vague descriptions ("this
work is under a creative commons license" with no definition or link is
surprisingly common) will encompass a much wider range of use cases - "do
what you like, just credit me" and "all rights utterly reserved until 2025"
will be under the same umbrella.

- Andrew.


-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Study: Nobody cares about your copyright

[John Vandenberg]

On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 5:51 AM, Andrew Gray  wrote:
> On Monday, 21 May 2012, Samuel Klein wrote:
>>
>> > O'Reilly is offering works under 14 years (c), thence CC-by
>>
>> Campaign idea: set up a named class of license for friendly groups
>> like O'Reilly that are committing to 14 years, which are defined by
>> terming out in no more than 14 years to CC0 or equivalent PD
>> declarations.
>>
>
> A thought on naming.
>
> The obvious way to badge such a license is through Creative Commons; but
> we've spilled vast amounts of metaphorical ink over "is NC free?" and "is
> ND free?", and one of the results is a good deal of confusion over what a
> "free license" is, what we should campaign for, etc etc etc.
>
> If we throw into the mix *another* license from the same stable, the
> situation gets even more muddled. The inevitable vague descriptions ("this
> work is under a creative commons license" with no definition or link is
> surprisingly common) will encompass a much wider range of use cases - "do
> what you like, just credit me" and "all rights utterly reserved until 2025"
> will be under the same umbrella.
>
> - Andrew.

I'd love to see -NC and -ND dropped from the CC catalog, but I doubt
its going to happen.

It would be nice if -NC and -ND had a time limit on them, after which
the work becomes CC-BY or CC-BY-SA.

--
John Vandenberg

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Study: Nobody cares about your copyright

[Tom Morris]

On 28 May 2012 22:37, John Vandenberg  wrote:
>
> I'd love to see -NC and -ND dropped from the CC catalog, but I doubt
> its going to happen.
>
> It would be nice if -NC and -ND had a time limit on them, after which
> the work becomes CC-BY or CC-BY-SA.
>

Although NC and ND cause pain for Wikipedians and Commonists and so
on, I'd actually not be a big fan of getting rid of them.

NC and ND give people a chance to dip their toe into free culture
licensing. Then upon finding that their leg hasn't been bitten off by
ravenous sharks and that actually mostly everything is fine, we can
come along and nudge them into upgrading.

See, for instance, the UK government: many government departments
published images under NC/ND. And then when nobody got fired for it,
they pass the Open Government License, which is a free content license
very much like CC BY.*

The question is: does NC/ND give people an excuse not to go for a
freer license, or does it give them a stepping stone towards freer
license from no licensing? It'd be nice if we could have some evidence
on this rather than anecdote trading. ;-)

NC and ND do have some uses. For instance, the very common use case of
publishing an academic paper. Yes, CC BY would be better. But BY-ND is
still pretty useful for the most common use case for a lot of academic
papers, namely photocopying a paper for a whole class of students...

(Plus getting rid of NC and ND won't mean that people won't stop
licensing works under NC/ND. There's a huge load of NC/ND work out
there already.)

* https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/OGL

-- 
Tom Morris


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[Wikimedia-l] Academics and accessible writing

[Steven Walling]

Hey folks,

Today I was browsing the many fine articles that have been edited on EN as
part of the Wikipedia initiative by the Association for Psychological
Science.[1] There is no doubt that the articles which these professors and
students have worked are better by any measure of quality.

But I was left with a nagging annoyance: these articles are almost all
incomprehensible to someone without a advanced college education and a high
degree of proficiency in English. Topics as basic as [[job satisfaction]]
or [[social network game]] are written like a literature review or a paper
for a journal. When an article about gaming on Facebook is that academic, I
think we might have a problem. ;-)

That's not to say the articles written by regular volunteers are always so
concise and clear. But I think it's pretty obvious that professors and grad
students in particular have trouble adapting to a more general interest
audience. This is an issue that could seriously impact how useful Wikipedia
is to most of our potential readership around the world.

I think the addition of uncovered topics and much-needed citations balances
out the inherent tendency of academics to write unnecessarily complex
prose. But maybe there are ways that folks in the General Education Program
at the WMF and in volunteer projects can start to be bolder about letting
academics know that they direly need to conform to the Wikipedia style of
"Writing should be clear and concise. Plain English works best: avoid
ambiguity, jargon, and vague or unnecessarily complex wording."

Thoughts? Do people from non-English outreach programs to academics have
any similar experiences?

Steven

1.
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/members/aps-wikipedia-initiative
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Academics and accessible writing

[Anya Shyrokova]

My main thought is that the statement: "Writing should be clear and
concise. Plain English works best: avoid ambiguity, jargon, and vague or
unnecessarily complex wording" is somewhat self-contradictory. Jargon
exists in order to increase precision and decrease vagueness/ unnecessary
wording. That is why academics, or really any community of professionals,
tend to develop it. However, if one uses too much of it, the reader begins
to feel that he needs a higher level degree to understand what's going on.
People who are not good writers tend to poorly handle the balance between
needing to use common language and being precise.

Getting people to "conform" to a style of writing that is somewhat
contradictory and may require a skilled eye to interpret seems to me a bit
of an unnecessarily complex battle. But I agree that maybe more can be done
to highlight to people that they aren't really writing in a way that others
understand. Or even somehow flagging to other editors who are better at
writing that re-styling may be necessary. I'm all for making it easy for
people to contribute their knowledge in a way they are comfortable with and
then making it easy for others to make that knowledge more accessible.
Divide and conquer, so to speak.

On Mon, May 28, 2012 at 6:30 PM, Steven Walling wrote:

> Hey folks,
>
> Today I was browsing the many fine articles that have been edited on EN as
> part of the Wikipedia initiative by the Association for Psychological
> Science.[1] There is no doubt that the articles which these professors and
> students have worked are better by any measure of quality.
>
> But I was left with a nagging annoyance: these articles are almost all
> incomprehensible to someone without a advanced college education and a high
> degree of proficiency in English. Topics as basic as [[job satisfaction]]
> or [[social network game]] are written like a literature review or a paper
> for a journal. When an article about gaming on Facebook is that academic, I
> think we might have a problem. ;-)
>
> That's not to say the articles written by regular volunteers are always so
> concise and clear. But I think it's pretty obvious that professors and grad
> students in particular have trouble adapting to a more general interest
> audience. This is an issue that could seriously impact how useful Wikipedia
> is to most of our potential readership around the world.
>
> I think the addition of uncovered topics and much-needed citations balances
> out the inherent tendency of academics to write unnecessarily complex
> prose. But maybe there are ways that folks in the General Education Program
> at the WMF and in volunteer projects can start to be bolder about letting
> academics know that they direly need to conform to the Wikipedia style of
> "Writing should be clear and concise. Plain English works best: avoid
> ambiguity, jargon, and vague or unnecessarily complex wording."
>
> Thoughts? Do people from non-English outreach programs to academics have
> any similar experiences?
>
> Steven
>
> 1.
>
> http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/members/aps-wikipedia-initiative
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Academics and accessible writing

[Michael Snow]

On 5/28/2012 5:08 PM, Anya Shyrokova wrote:

My main thought is that the statement: "Writing should be clear and
concise. Plain English works best: avoid ambiguity, jargon, and vague or
unnecessarily complex wording" is somewhat self-contradictory. Jargon
exists in order to increase precision and decrease vagueness/ unnecessary
wording. That is why academics, or really any community of professionals,
tend to develop it. However, if one uses too much of it, the reader begins
to feel that he needs a higher level degree to understand what's going on.
People who are not good writers tend to poorly handle the balance between
needing to use common language and being precise.
The great advantage of using a wiki to create an encyclopedia is that it 
allows a community to collaborate in building it. As Anya's insight 
indicates, communities tend to develop their own language in order to 
communicate about issues. These languages invariably specialize to meet 
community needs, like conveying precise meanings, and become a little 
challenging for outsiders to understand (our own community jargon 
illustrates the point quite well).


Well, the great advantage of creating an encyclopedia on the web is that 
it enables us to use hyperlinks. In this environment, writing that uses 
a specialized vocabulary should take advantage of hyperlinks in order to 
explain the language. In theory, that alone would be able to solve most 
of the problem here.


I agree that academics, among others, may need to improve their writing 
styles in order to better serve our readers. But I think there are more 
fundamental cultural issues at work as well, and addressing some of 
those might produce an encyclopedia in which it's easier for writers to 
stick with language they find accurate and precise. These issues 
include: concerns about "overlinking" in article text; hostility to 
"redlinks" for articles not yet created; work that focuses exclusively 
on single articles rather than how they fit into the context of the 
encyclopedia; greater interest in working on new, hot topics than older, 
established knowledge; and lack of skill being applied to crafting 
articles about core concepts in many fields. For that matter, a stronger 
and more effectively utilized Wiktionary would help as well.


--Michael Snow


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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Academics and accessible writing

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2012/5/29 Steven Walling :
> Thoughts? Do people from non-English outreach programs to academics have
> any similar experiences?

Depends on the particular project and the people involved.

In a project about Tort law we got several dozens of Hebrew articles
about the subject and they were long, detailed, very well-referenced -
and barely readable because of the legalese. Which is a shame, because
this topic is quite useful for the general public.

In another project about political economy, we got articles about
potentially hard-to-understand things like Monetary union and Trade
tariffs. They were of comparable quality with regards to referencing
and comprehensiveness, but they were very readable, too (at least to
me, and I'm not an economist). The lecturer with whom we worked on
this project understood that Wikipedia is supposed to be accessible
and demanded this in the assignment description.

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Academics and accessible writing

[Keegan Peterzell]

On Mon, May 28, 2012 at 6:30 PM, Steven Walling wrote:
>
> Thoughts?
> Steven
>
> 1.
>
> http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/members/aps-wikipedia-initiative
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Time will tell how these outreach articles work, and by time I mean years.
 We sell the collaborative model that makes everything accessible over time
with community editing.  If an article particular to any outreach project
reaches the cop-yedit of any contributors, that's part of the goal and
process.  I'm hesitant to solicit widespread review of these projects,
because that kind of defeats the exploration of how once an article is
written, it is created by others.  Articles on math and physics are often
times incomprehensible to the lay-person, but time and subjectivity invites
cleanup.  We're eleven years in and just beginning the experiment.

-- 
~Keegan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Academics and accessible writing

[Ms. Anne Frazer]

On Tuesday, May 29, 2012 9:30 AM Steven Walling  
wrote:

But I was left with a nagging annoyance: these articles are almost all
incomprehensible to someone without a advanced college education and a 
high

degree of proficiency in English. Topics as basic as [[job satisfaction]]
or [[social network game]] are written like a literature review or a paper
for a journal. When an article about gaming on Facebook is that academic, 
I

think we might have a problem. ;-)



'...articles written by regular volunteers...'


>'...adapting to a more general interest audience.'


'to write unnecessarily complex prose.'


'"Writing should be clear and concise. Plain English works best: avoid 
ambiguity, jargon, and vague or unnecessarily complex wording."'


Hi Steven,
In wanting to express thoughts, in the form of writing them, we can stumble 
when attempting to make a message clear and concise, as do we all from time 
to time. We are not alone in recognising that the act of writing requires 
careful editing. I have been selective (above) in picking out just some of 
the words and phrases you use in your emailed paragraphs; this is a willful 
act on my part, and more than likely is imbued with unfairness on my part, 
as to the selection. My selection of your words could be said to be 
presented 'out of context', and I would agree with that call.


However, when I read your words, the essence of your comments is clear in 
that part of your message is couched in attacking good prose because it is 
too difficult to read and understand. I remind myself that you don't mean to 
engage in a call for the dumbing down of articles in the 'Wikipedia 
Encyclopedia' when you suggest that they are too difficult to comprehend by 
'the man in the street', (my phrase, and a commonly used one) by which I 
mean the 'ordinary citizen', the 'ordinary person'; it is a much used phrase 
I sardonically use in tandem with an apology to women. But here I have 
strayed from the clear and concise message I would like to be able to convey 
to you; so back on track...


Good writing requires attention to good rules on writing; to a degree this 
is the rule rather than the exception. The magnificent work-in-progress that 
is the Wikipedia encyclopedia becomes much-lauded because people from all 
over the world and from all walks of life will and do contribute to it 
growth. If we begin to consider lowering the bar of excellence to some point 
of middle acceptance we are acting exclusively; we are not acting in good 
faith; we are not acting inclusively.


Another personal comment if I may. It is my experience that those who, 
metaphorically speaking, 'cry' about having to read too many words are often 
too used to not wanting to read much and who have developed an ability to 
concentrate for shorter periods than others. Who is to say without the 
benefit of hindsight that this is a bad thing; but it seems a less than 
desirable trend.


Anne Frazer
Secretary
Wikimedia Australia


- Original Message - 
From: "Steven Walling" 

To: "Wikimedia Mailing List" 
Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2012 9:30 AM
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Academics and accessible writing



Hey folks,

Today I was browsing the many fine articles that have been edited on EN as
part of the Wikipedia initiative by the Association for Psychological
Science.[1] There is no doubt that the articles which these professors and
students have worked are better by any measure of quality.

But I was left with a nagging annoyance: these articles are almost all
incomprehensible to someone without a advanced college education and a 
high

degree of proficiency in English. Topics as basic as [[job satisfaction]]
or [[social network game]] are written like a literature review or a paper
for a journal. When an article about gaming on Facebook is that academic, 
I

think we might have a problem. ;-)

That's not to say the articles written by regular volunteers are always so
concise and clear. But I think it's pretty obvious that professors and 
grad

students in particular have trouble adapting to a more general interest
audience. This is an issue that could seriously impact how useful 
Wikipedia

is to most of our potential readership around the world.

I think the addition of uncovered topics and much-needed citations 
balances

out the inherent tendency of academics to write unnecessarily complex
prose. But maybe there are ways that folks in the General Education 
Program

at the WMF and in volunteer projects can start to be bolder about letting
academics know that they direly need to conform to the Wikipedia style of
"Writing should be clear and concise. Plain English works best: avoid
ambiguity, jargon, and vague or unnecessarily complex wording."

Thoughts? Do people from non-English outreach programs to academics have
any similar experiences?

Steven

1.
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/members/aps-wikipedia-initiative
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Academics and accessible writing

[Keegan Peterzell]

On Mon, May 28, 2012 at 11:41 PM, Ms. Anne Frazer wrote:
>
> However, when I read your words, the essence of your comments is clear in
> that part of your message is couched in attacking good prose because it is
> too difficult to read and understand. I remind myself that you don't mean
> to engage in a call for the dumbing down of articles in the 'Wikipedia
> Encyclopedia' when you suggest that they are too difficult to comprehend by
> 'the man in the street', (my phrase, and a commonly used one) by which I
> mean the 'ordinary citizen', the 'ordinary person'; it is a much used
> phrase I sardonically use in tandem with an apology to women. But here I
> have strayed from the clear and concise message I would like to be able to
> convey to you; so back on track...
>
> Good writing requires attention to good rules on writing; to a degree this
> is the rule rather than the exception. The magnificent work-in-progress
> that is the Wikipedia encyclopedia becomes much-lauded because people from
> all over the world and from all walks of life will and do contribute to it
> growth. If we begin to consider lowering the bar of excellence to some
> point of middle acceptance we are acting exclusively; we are not acting in
> good faith; we are not acting inclusively.]


The issue is not with the high standard of prose, the issue is with reader
comprehension.  I'm a fairly bright person at this, and I cannot make heads
or tails of the theoretical properties of the Higgs boson[1], much less
what the caption of the second image means[2] without about twenty minutes
of reading.  For a reference work, that's a bit iffy.  It's supposed to be
a jumping point to grasp the subject.

Really, it's not about style.  It's about understanding, because without
out that you cannot teach.

1.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_Boson#Theoretical_properties
2.  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:One-loop-diagram.svg
"A one-loop Feynman
diagram of
the first-order correction to the Higgs mass. The Higgs boson couples
strongly to the top quark  so it
might decay into top–anti-top quark pairs if it were heavy enough."


-- 
~Keegan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan
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[Wikimedia-l] Fwd: Report to Board: Chinese Internet Research Conference

[Ting Chen]

 Original-Nachricht 
Betreff:Report to Board: Chinese Internet Research Conference
Datum:  Sun, 27 May 2012 18:07:54 +0200
Von:Ting Chen 
An: Board list 



Hello dear all,

at Mai 21st and 22nd I attended the 10. Chinese Internet Research
Conference at the University of Southern California and this is my
report on this conference.

At the begin of the year Andrew Lih, who as you know is maybe one of the
first researchers who took Wikipedia as a research topic and certainly a
longtime Wikimedian, asked me if I can give a keynote on the 10. Chinese
Internet Research Conference that he was organizing. And I said yes. He
wanted me to talk about the Chinese Wikipedia, which is a relatively
easy topic for me.

The first CIRC took place in USC and this is their anniversary and it
again went to USC. It was organized by the Annenberg School for
Communication and Journalism. Andrew is currently an assistant professor
there. There were about 150 attendees of the conference from all arround
the world. According to Andrew the number of attendees vary in the
years. Last year for example there were only 50 attendees and this year
there were more than 100. The attendees are mostly researchers, so
university professors, doctoral and graduate students, and a few
journalists.

The topics of the conference can mainly be grouped in two: The influence
of internet on chinese politics and the situation of less previleged
peoples and their use of internet in China. On the first topic there are
a lot of papers about the microblogging [1]: The community, the
influence of the microblogging on the politics (especially on the
current events), how the government and the party regulate the
microblogging, how they use microblogging as an instrument for
themselves, etc. On the second topic there were a handful papers on
field studies about the use of internet by the migrant workers, and how
internet influenced their work and life, and studies about the use of
internet in the rural areas of China in different provinces.

To my surprise the papers are all very bold and direct in internet
censoring and GFW (Great Firewall). Before I planned my speech I asked
Andrew if I should mention the blocking and he said yes, and its
influence on the project. I was a little skeptical because meanwhile all
Wikipedians I know in China were visited by the National Security there.
So in my presentation I didn't mention blocking directly by said that we
had connectivity problems. But actually almost all papers on the first
topic mentioned censoring and blocking and deleting of blog entries as
such. Some of the papers have these topics as their main research area.

There were no paper about Wikipedia (my speech doesn't count), but all
attendees I spoke with use Wikipedia, independant of where they live and
work (US, the Netherlands, France, Singapur, mainland China, Hongkong
and Taiwan). To my surprise most of them don't know that we are a
nonprofit organization. There were a few questions about if we pay
Google to get a high ranking.

My speech was the closing speech of the conference. I organized it in
three sections: A brief history of the chinese Wikipedia, the current
state of the project and what we can offer researchers and how
researchers can help us.

There were two high-lights for me personally on this conference. One is
that I met our Advisory Board member Jing Wang [2] there. When we met
each other two years ago in Gdansk Jing just started her work on her
project NGC 2.0 in China and she told me that she is very successful in
the last two years. Her work there is concentrating on bringing the
local NGOs (mostly not registered as organizations, but more grassroot
groups) and enterprices together so that entrepreneurs who want to fund
charitable works and NGOs who do social works can find each other. In
her opinion the central government is more open and progressive then the
provincial and local governments. She experiences more troubles with the
provincial governments than the central gorvernment (which she stated is
very supportive to her work). She believes that between the two there
are a lot of room and freedom which one can use and thinks that the art
to work in China is to explore that room and freedom. She repeated that
we should try to get our chance there. She expressed her sorry about not
be able to attend Wikimania this year because at that time she will be
in China again, and not be abled to do any work for the Foundation
because she is so busy.

The other high-light for me I had already mailed you. It was the keynote
speech by Jenova Chen [3]. Jenova is a game designer and some of the
most remarkable games he designed were Flow [4], Flower [5] and Journey
[6]. Especially the design principle of Journey impressed me most. So
Jenova said in online games in most cases gamers try to kill each other
or try to group with each other to kill something. And he thought this
is a very poor social interaction. He

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Academics and accessible writing

[David Gerard]

On 29 May 2012 00:30, Steven Walling  wrote:

> I think the addition of uncovered topics and much-needed citations balances
> out the inherent tendency of academics to write unnecessarily complex
> prose. But maybe there are ways that folks in the General Education Program
> at the WMF and in volunteer projects can start to be bolder about letting
> academics know that they direly need to conform to the Wikipedia style of
> "Writing should be clear and concise. Plain English works best: avoid
> ambiguity, jargon, and vague or unnecessarily complex wording."
> Thoughts? Do people from non-English outreach programs to academics have
> any similar experiences?


In general, it's much easier to find good contributors of facts than
it is to find good contributors of facts who are also good writers.
Hence the flat dull grey Wikipedia house style - it's what happens
when people who aren't good writers write. And why any idiosyncrasy is
ruthlessly stamped out.

Although it's a problem, I'd suggest you completely leave it - having
the content is an improvement on not having it. YMMV of course.

There's always judicious addition of {{technical}} at the top ... but
the trouble is when it's actually quite a precise and technical topic.


- d.

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