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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?
I think that this would be a good target as far as literature is concerned. I know that this costs ~$8k on Amazon so the copyrights are probably worth a lot but I think that a lot of these titles are public domain. If they are, I think it would be worth making a proposition in the millions to Penguin for their editions to be made available on the Wiki. I'm a computer scientist so I don't know how realistic this would be. Of course, they could probably host Project Gutenberg for free if they wanted.
As far as educational works go, I'm all for the textbooks. Grade school & high school, of course. But what I'd really like to see is the "Canonical works" of each field. I'm talking about the standard books that are used to teach each major in the United States. They could do a survey of books and then attempt to contact the authors & publishers to work a deal. Some titles I've seen on everyone's shelves are, of course, the Donald Knuth series and this list has a lot of standards I recognize just by the covers.
The most important thing for them to do would to pay lawyers and literature experts to scan the internet for potential authors willing to put out books for free. I've seen some classic computer science books go up like this and I'm sure that if Wikipedia asked for permission to host, they would be able to with mild restrictions. Like the author having the final say on what is kept and removed from the Wiki page. I mean, look at O'Reilly's OpenBook Project, don't you think they would allow Wikipedia to host that for a tiny one time fee? I'd bet that sales would increase if they even put a link to buy the book. I've heard a lot of authors argue for their books to be put online so that people will feel compelled to buy a hardcopy. Wasn't that the point of Google's textbook preview search?
Other people they could target is an open invitation to any estates that own the rights of long dead authors to have their ancestor's works published. Dr. Suess, anyone? I mean, how do you license a loved one's works and continually soak up money for them? To me, the work of Disney in this respect is just plain rotten and ruined some good guidelines to release works to the public domain.
I don't know, I just think that they should spend money over a period of time searching for permission to host books for free or nearly free. I have hope that this is done very very well and augments the OLPC project nicely.
My work here is dung.
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.'
A history of Pornography would be very informative.
You could generate new works under creative commons licences or other. I would start with a textbook for every subject and then spend the rest on 1000 new novels from every part of the world.
My little Linux and tech blog
Open content GIS data from around the world. It would make developing the next generation of location aware devices/webpages a reality
If you are going to make a $100m philanthropic gesture, which I assume this is, then surely you would want to see the largest possible impact for your effort. Remove the copyrights from the books necessary to give the impoverised of the world free access to the materials required for a decent education and I'm sure that those with the necessary skills to translate those works into as many languages as required and teach it to those willing to listen will step forwards as well.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
One book per academic subject.
One for each kind of math.
One for each kind of music.
One for each kind of computer science.
One for masonry, or automotive, or other trades.
and so on...
So, someone can go to the "tutorial" section of wikipedia and learn how to do whatever they would normally need textbooks or college to learn.
Granted that you could likely only reach an ametuer level this way most of the time, it would be a great starting point for a lot of people into business and hobby.
Gentlemen, the time to accomplish the long-expressed dream of Slashdot has come!
With this funding, I believe that we may at long last be able to open-source Natalie Portman.
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.
I always wanted to print my own copies. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
How much did it cost Disney to buy the senators and congressmen who voted for the latest copyright extension?
Find free books.
I would suggest the money should be used instead to support a powerful well-funded lobbying effort for copyright reform, perhaps helping any number of the existing organisations such as Union for the Public Domain. There are many issues - the unnecessarily huge and increasing length of copyright terms, the inaccessibility of orphan works whose copyright owners cannot be traced, questions of balance between just rewards to creators and fair use/dealing for consumers, non-expiry of DRM even after nominal copyright expiration, etc. Spending USD 100m on a number of popular copyrights is very generous, but copyrights can be extremely expensive, and USD 100m is a tiny bit of the total value of all the still current copyrights. Reforming copyright, however, would change the future for all copyright works, something which could be of greater long-term value to society, commerce and industry including the copyright holders.
Scroogle
"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.
Our founding fathers never intended for copyrights to last FOREVER as the do now, but for "limited times.' I think a little peace of that 100 million should be used to get copyright abuser enablers out of office. For one, find a another republican (red state Utahns will never vote for a democrat on principle alone) to replace Orrin Hatch PLEASE.
He was a big sponser of the Copyright Term Extension Act, DMCA, the patriot act II on steroids, FBI carnivore, extended wiretapping, and his office wanted to get the Claritin patent extended because he was using their jet when running for president.
Anything to get this IP black hole out of office will reap a 10x benifit in the future, and not just for better copyright law.
Once that is done, get a repeal of the bastard CTEA law (it won't happen while he is in the senate). In fact, bet on a CTEA II to come down the pike to protect that nasty rodent
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
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
Why should Wikimedia invest in extensions to iTunes to support free formats? Apple doesn't _like_ free formats. So what guarantee is there that such extensions would have a shelf life at all?
Media is a pain in the ass on every platform. Linux users cringe every time they see a Quicktime file, a Flash file, etc, etc, etc.
Given that state of affairs, it doesn't make sense for an organization that supports freeing information to invest in software from a company that's exacerbating the problem in the first place.
Think about this in conjunction with the one-laptop-per-child project: what if third world countries suddenly had access to Wikipedia? Where would you put your hundred million bucks to buy content that would make the human race better off simply by having access to this knowledge?
I understand why people are suggesting basic textbooks, but they're taking too much for granted.
Start by acquiring the best English skills courses so that these billions of third world kids will be able to understand first world content.
Giving a kid a laptop only gets them so far: they have to be able to understand what they're viewing. That's where the $100 mil could really leverage all of Wikipedia's existing content. Make it easy for these kids to learn English, no matter which language they're starting from.
What's your damage, Heather?
For sure there are plenty works still under copyrights that are almost monetarily worthless, yet have many years to go before falling into the public domain. They will remain where they are as there is no reason for the copyright holder to give them up.
However..... if a copyright holder is made an offer for a given piece ($1,000, $10,000, whatever) - a very straightfoward commercial decision can be made; One free of copyright religion and politics. "Is the future returns on the copyright of this piece worth less than the offer."
Someone who has a copyrighted item earning $12.50 per year might easily be swayed to release it into the public domain for $200. Almost *nothing* under copyright is actually earning any real money, and thefore may be liberated with a very modest purse.
Perhaps if there was a simple online process in place, individuals could seach for their items of choice, pay up and free them.
Most people that have the cash and some inclination simply don't have the time. If those who have the time could make this process trivial, everyone could win.
Now please excuse me - I have to RTFA
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.
Most of these are owned by private entities, making it quite difficult to access the information -- for example, a copy of the California building codes costs close to $500 in three-ring binder form. Most jurisdictions incorporate the copyrighted documents into law by reference only, trying to sidestep the problem that the law of the land is not copyrightable.
My core computer science texts date back more than ten years. They are still perfectly relevant today. Core subjects in computer science have not changed in ages. Data structures, operating systems, networking, relational databases all go back more than two decades. And they are just as, if not more, relevant today.
The key is to acquire texts on core concepts. These are things that should hold true forever. You would not want to waste money on Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days. For things like that, someone will write up a tutorial. Instead you would acquire works on the concepts of higher-level languages, virtual machines, design patterns, etc.
JSTOR has back issues of several hundred well known journals, dating back to 1665. The bulk of scientific knowledge is in there. Web of Science is an index of basically every scientific paper that has ever been published. I belive that puting these resources in the public domain would accelerate the creation of scientific knowledge. Imagine the millions of intelligent people that today can't access these sources because they are expensive. Also, making scientific knowledge available for public scrutiny would make scientists more accountable for their work.
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.
Consider the economics of it:
3,860,567 = Number of 20 year olds (2000 census rough estimate based on 1/5th of 20-24 year olds)
27% = Percent of population over 25 with a bachelor's degree (2000 census)
25% = Percent of students taking the most popular/useful classes (estimate)
50% = Percent of these students using the most popular textbook (estimate)
5 = Years a textbook edition remains in print (estimate)
6% = Risk free rate of return (estimate)
$100 = Average textbook price (estimate)
20% = McGraw hill net margin (per www.fool.com)
The textbook company would sell 131,259 textbooks per year, for a net profit of $2,625,186 annually. Given the 5 year life span and 6% risk free rate, the textbook company would be willing to sell a textbook with the above expected sales for no less than $11 million. This means we could purchase roughly 9 of the most popular textbooks for $100 million. May be off by a fair margin, but it's clearly not going to be near 100 textbooks. Seems like there are much better uses of the money.
On my EE degree program, a couple of our professors handed out full photocopied sections of the pages we needed to save us from having to buy the books. Since they owned the copyright, they figured it was theirs to do with as they pleased. (Of course those were generally not the same professors that drove sports cars)
I wouldn't be surprised if you could find academically minded authors who'd take a relatively small payoff and the feeling that they'd done good for the world.
Text books, for instance. Where countries have radically different curriculum at different years, and text books do change from year to year, and from location to location (economics, accounting, history, politics, botany, language, English, geography, medicine, pharmaceuticals, law, for example) ALL vary from year to year and from country to country.
Reminds me of the story of the very eminent economist who went back to his alma mater for a visit, and saw the current examination papers.
"Why, these are the self same questions I had to answer when I was here!" he exclaimed.
"Yes", replied the Dean, "But the answers are completely different!"
Repair manuals is another area where geographic and periodic differences would render anything of this nature very transient.
What is the average life of a model of car, or a model of washing machine, for instance. Not very long, if the marketers have any say about it. And not very geographically wide spread, either. In America, do you know what a 2006 Monaro, or Statesman, or even Falcon even look like? No, most of you, except for the car freaks probably say "No", and I'd say the same about your makes and models, too, of course.
Gutenberg, atlases, ancient literature and history, and just aboiut any material that doesn't impact on our daily lives, with multiple interpretations would be fine for this, but manuals, text books, histories - only if you want to kill Wikpaedia off as an internationally reputable repository of information.
Will those of you who think that you know what you are doing, get out of the way of those of us who know what we are doi
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.
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