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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.'
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
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.
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.
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