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Wikipedia's $100 Million Dream
An anonymous reader writes "Jimmy Wales recently asked the Wikipedia community to suggest useful, 'works that could in theory be purchased and freed' assuming a 'budget of $100 million to purchase
copyrights.' He went on to say that he has spoken with a person 'who is potentially in a position to make this happen.' Ideas are being collected at the meta-wiki. Some early suggestions include, satellite imagery, textbooks, scientific journals and photo archives." So how about it? What works would you like to see wikified?
Maybe without that incentive, Disney will stop lobbying for copyright extensions? That way we can actually make use of all this material again.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
o/^ Write for us a trilogy, a four- or five-book trilogy... o/^
I wonder how many people might get drawn into reading sequels if the first book in a series or trilogy were made available for free?
I'd like to see some stuff like repair manuals for cars, exloded parts drawings, etc. That stuff can be hard to find sometimes, as its always copywrited. How would this work though, if they buy copywrited material is it just OK for them to post it up for free for everyone?
Technophile
A few years ago I took a GPS that kicked out serial positioning data, and a laptop that I had used to suck overhead satellite potography from teraserver, and had a genuine james bond dashboard radar thing. Novelty, but fun anyway to watch the red dot move around on the satellite map and know it's you. Found some places and roads in town that I didn't know existed and that were not on any map.
I had a hard time finding additional imagery after teraserver sold out. (to MS iirc?) I would like to have even been able to order it, but USGS charges a fortune for their quarter quads and you don't get the high resolution coordinates for each area on the map due to them not being photographed perfectly square. This is something that I would like to see opened up.
One thing to bear in mind unfortuantely is that this information goes stale. google maps is about 15 years out of date for half my city. So this would have to be renewed occasionally to stay of value.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
While there are plenty of things that could/should be wikified and added to Wikipedia's knowledge base, it would also be nice to help people use the things that are already present.
Specifically, I'm talking about the open formats upon which Wikimedia insists, and the lack of support for those formats on Mac OS X. Audio must be Vorbis and video Theora, but there isn't any convenient way to play these. Sure there are ports of mplayer and other such tools, but the average OS X user isn't willing to use tools with non-standard UIs and flaky behavior. IMHO there should be an effort to create plugins for Quicktime that allows seamless playback of Vorbis and Theora content with iTunes and/or Quicktime Player. This would include playback on the iPod.
I cringe every time I see a link to an audio or video file on a Wikimedia site, because I know that in order to view the content I'm going to need to fire up some program other than iTunes if I want to watch it. iTunes is well-designed and feels comfortable, and the third-party media players can't help but feel different—not to mention that it's impossible to play, say Vorbis music and iTS music with the same program.
The contribution of money towards a Quicktime component—or even to Apple, as that's where iPod changes would have to come from—might not be a frivolous use of a $100 million grant.
Alcohol and Calculus don't mix. Don't drink and derive.
English isn't my first language and I often spend good time searching for the right words to translate some term one way or the other.
Wikipedia could be a great platform to host dictionaries on. Every article/term should have an option to translate the term.
I know that the feature is half-way there already in the way that you can find the same article in a different language, but that doesn't work that great as a two way dictionary.
Buy a good base of dictionaries translating criscross between all (ok most of) the languages on wikipedia.
Get the rights to the "best of breed" textbooks; I know there are clear favorites in Engineering and Mathematics. From there, use them as the base in wiki format to extend them. A good set of undergraduate texts would do lots of good for the developing world and poor students everywhere. Buying books is EXPENSIVE, and in most engineering related disiplines, a real waste, since the base mathematics has not changed in many years.
..don't panic
- The Lexis Nexis database
- All scientific works ever written. This is work done by scientists for the betterment of mankind and to have it locked away from the public behind electronic library access fees is absurd. The public has a right to academic works, not just academics.
-- Bob1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
How much did it cost Disney to buy the senators and congressmen who voted for the latest copyright extension?
Find free books.
"Create a non-profit that researches 'orphaned' works for copyright status. A large percentage of works published post-1923 are eligible for public domain status but it requires time and work to track down the copyright holders."
This suggestion is already in the list, and it is far and away the best suggestion I have seen.
- The Feynman Lectures
- Weinberg, volumes 1-3
- Landau and Lifschitz
- Zinn-Justin
- Wald
- Kleinert
to name but a few.It's my son's first birthday on Tuesday and I'll be singing Happy Birthday to him. That's a copyrighted song, with royalties payable on public performance I believe.
Would be a nice touch to put that one into the public domain.
Cheers,
Ian
I don't know if "wikified" is the right term, but I've always thought that
classic "no-longer-for-sale" games should be handed over to the public domain.
The intellectual property for future projects and sequels should of course
remain in the hands of the copyright holder. It seems to me that this is a win/win
for publishers since the properties would gain a new lease on life.
Really, I just want to be able to download M.U.L.E., some Infocom titles
and Master of Orion (although I'm not sure I need another addiction in my life
right now).
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Call up novell and buy Unix and open source it all. beyond that standardized k-12 textbooks with interactive test databases so teachers can make custom exams. and make the whole thing available as a turnkey server schools could just plug-into their network and supply copies on DVD or BlueRay that would hold every single text. Imagine little Jimmy being issued a laptop containing every textbook he will every use. Hey we might even save enough money to hire more than one teacher for every 50 students
I'd love to see them acquire The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Opening up a classic resource for 'normal' people, to everyone, would be huge.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
These are great ideas (though I don't like the US bias :| ). But! $100M is a lot of money. It'll earn you a lot of annual interest. And academic books become dated quickly. Wouln't it be wize to buy updated copy each year, than as much as you possibly could all at once?
Because you can - or because you should?
I've got an idea for a new work that would require vast community input. I call it Rebuild the World project AKA In Case of Disaster. The idea is that you start with nothing (no tools, etc.) and bring the technology level back up to 1940's(or up to current levels). I'm talking everything from simple tools and shelters to finding ore and refining it to making automobiles and radios. The idea is way too big for one person to do.
Set up a holding company to buy shares in Disney and hold proxies for like-minded people who buy shares in Disney. Then change Disney's policies to be U.S. Constitution friendly with respect to copyright. That is, have Disney pay off the politicians to stop extending copyright and instead do the opposite.
I would guess each year of "copyrighted" works from 1920's on holds a value in excess of $100 Million to society. It is time society got its purchase back (we paid for those copyrights to be enforced for over half a century). Getting the law changed to stop extending copyrights (unconstitutionally) would be a very good return on a $100 million investment.
There already is a wiki for James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. It takes advantage of WikiMedia formatting and thus is "wikified." Every two or three words, there's a link to some obscure reference that good ol' Jimbo [Joyce] made, so you can understand the novel, if you really really want to.
There is a drawback to this, though. James Joyce did not intend that the novel be understood. It was meant to model a dream -- albeit a boringly long one -- and if someone wakes you up every two seconds to tell you what something means, it's not as fun. Annotated, it's like reading Nabokov's version of Eugene Onegin, and if given the choice, I would not have that one wikified, with all due respect to that Lolita guy.
While the Wake wiki is good for comprehension and finally understanding what that huge word in the second paragraph was, the addition of technology makes it inferior to the original. Obviously, you can ignore the links, but in several other cases with e-books, reading a book is made more inconvenient by wikifying it. There is no real electronic substitute for "flipping through a book", and the simple format of a single finite page, as opposed to turtles all the way down. (Just check out an e-book: most of the time, the webpages are huge.)
Oh, and Gutenberg? If anything, have Wikipedia partner with them, if the two are not in cahoots already. No use forming a needless schism in the world of free online e-books.
For $100 million dollars, a lot of people have talked about buying existing textbooks for education, but what about using the money to start the creation of new ones that are designed from the ground up in the wiki format.
I think it would make sense to hire professionals to perform edits and create base models for textbooks for classes in specific fields which could then be edited as needed perhaps with keeping some sort of professional editorial oversight.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
For 12 to 18 million dollars (US) you could create a complete reading program for the K through 6 grade levels, including teaching materials. I have worked on most of the major programs, which are $100M dollar programs. Without actual print products, there would be significant cost savings. For $100M a complete program across Spanish, Chinese, and English could be created. State specific materials could be tied to a subsciption model returning the significant portions of the money over several years. The best kind of philanthropy, profitable!
An editorial team could be drawn from the very same people who have created the products currently in use. A full, usable set could be accomplished in 18 months or less. The quickest I've seen being 12 months requiring 3 writer/editors, a designer, and a production person per grade.
n i c h o l a s [at] e d u k 8 . c o m
The universal cookbook for toolmakers, engineers and everyone else involved in manufacturing. They're like $70 a piece and even more for the electronic version, the single most useful book I've ever owned... (Of course, if you're not a machinist it's not that useful, but hey, we are still a manufacturing country aren't we?)
1) Assuming the capital (factories, roads, dams, mines, ships, etc) will magically disappear isn't sound. You're assuming something of infinitessimal probability (destruction of all durable goods, but survival of hundreds of millions of humans, and our environment). Also, if all that capital were gone, who could read this project?
2) Do you know how long it took us to do it the first time? The big problem of building the world isn't the technology - the problem is the shear cost of it all. It took something like 15,000 years to go from good stone tools to steam ships. That also required an increase in population from around 20 million to around 1 billion.
3) If there were a "post-apocalypse," the cost minimization strategy wouldn't be about knowing about technology, but rather establishing institutions that would enable collective effort. Same reason Africa has modern technology, but the farmers can't afford steel hoes let alone GM crops and combine harvesters.
If half of the world died, we'd have big problems. But half the coal miners, and half the geneticists and nuclear physicists, and half the politicians would likely survive. The shear numbers of these "specialists" in as large a population as we have on Earth would make the proportion of survivors roughly equal to the proportion of survivors in the general population.
Additionally, if our national product was cut in half, we'd be living like they did in the 1984. If cut into a quarter, life would regress to 1962. If to one tenth, to 1940. If to one twentieth, 1915. If to 100th, to 1872. Assuming we get back to 1872 means (in general) 1% of our population, and 1% of our capital (assuming technology benefits and lack of new job experience cancel each other out).
The worst known disease outbreak (smallpox in the Americas) killed about 95% over several centuries. Nuclear warfare between superpowers *might* be able to accomplish the same, but I personally doubt it. If both happened simultaneously and instantaneously, we'd be back to 1839. The amount of destructive effort necessary to take us back to before the Industrial Revolution is mind-bogglingly huge. Getting back to the stone-age is nigh impossible.
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Paying for things that already exist (even if copyrighted) is a waste. Books full of science can be read, summarised and written about with the existing rights we all have to that material. Paying to release the actual documents is unnecessary.
Let's pay for something new.
I'm betting most academics don't earn much over $100,000 a year. Take the $100M and pay the thousand smartest people on the planet to each spend an entire year writing about everything and anything they feel is important for the future of humanity - with the stipulation that every word they write in that year goes immediately into the public domain.
Think of the qualitative improvement in Wikipedia if we added tens of thousands of new articles by the smartest people in their fields.
www.sjbaker.org
Just where are you going to find a piece of land that has all the needed materials? ;)
1) Natural deposits of flint are rare and hard to find in North America, the best deposits I've heard of are in northern Europe.
1a) I'm a SCAdian, with a serious interest in history, I've tried flint knapping. It's one of of those things where, if you have an expert to teach you, you can pick up the basics in an afternoon. If you don't have an expert on hand, you'll spend weeks driving yourself nuts, cutting your hands to ribbons and making an awful lot of useless fragments. Making fire with flint requires a steel, something you apparently have ruled out bringing in with you.
2) I am not a geologist, but it seems to me that finding one tract of land that has both bornite (or cuprite I suppose) and an accessible deposit of magnetite (one of the easier iron ores for laymen to find and separate) *and* a supply of good quality limestone for the millwheel is next to impossible. Finding such a site where the deposits are accessible to one man digging with stone age tools would be even harder. (our ancestors grabbed up a lot of the easily accessible stuff, which is why we are digging so deep today)
3) Again calling on my SCAdian background, I happen to know that making even a simple quern is a major challenge, not all types of limestone have the right "grain" or texture to make a good grinding surface. Some are pretty friable, meaning you get grit in everything you grind in it. Granite is pretty much out of the question, at least for the first few years, since to work stone effectively, you need tools that are at least as hard as the stone you are working on.
4) Starting out with just some flint and presumably the clothes on your back? I hope you are living in SoCal or somewhere else warm, else you could well freeze to death before you get weather proof shelter. Building your own house should not be your last goal, it should be your third! Anyone who has taken any kind of survival training, even a boyscout, could tell you the big three are fire, food and shelter.
5) For one man trying to make his own rope, the obvious recommendation is hemp. But if you do try to grow it, keep your eyes out for DEA choppers
For most of human history, the average life span of a male was in the late 30's, lack of medicines accounts for a LOT of that, but not all. Some of it was due to the simple physical demands of living back then. Presumably you are planning to do this in your 50's or 60's since you want to do this after you retire. Are you up to the physical work load?
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj