I'm curious, have you ever tried reviewing a traditional encyclopedia in the same manner you have reviewed Wikipedia? What was the result? Personally, whenever I compare Wikipedia with, say, Britannica or Encarta on a controversial topic, I find that Wikipedia tends to have a history of edit wars on that topic, a discussion going into the hundreds of kilobytes -- but an article that is vastly more neutral and informative.
For example, the Britannica article on circumcision is heavily biased in favor of the practice and the "hygienic" argument and does not mention with one word that the practice was historically rooted in attempts to combat masturbation; the Wikipedia article has this information, as well as a detailed (and NPOV-tagged, and messy) article about the medical opinion on the matter. If I wanted to learn about the practice, I'd much rather try to get an overall picture by reading the presentation on Wikipedia, following links, and trying to check claims for plausibility, than by taking whatever Britannica says (which, in this case, is very biased and, in my opinion, wrong) as divine truth.
In other words, Wikipedia tends to give you a very good overview of the different opinions on any given subject. It doesn't give you the truth; I believe that, since everyone has different standards of truth, the only way to do this would be to fork the project into subprojects that use specific methodology to determine truth. For example, you could create a Wikipedia fork that is written from a skeptical/scientific/progressive point of view, and which excludes or dismisses most religious and pseudoscientific statements and beliefs. Or you could create a "Catholic Wikipedia" that follows Church doctrine. The free license makes this possible, and such forks are only a question of time -- the free license makes this possible. Some already exist: SourceWatch, dKosopedia, Memory Alpha, Wikinfo, Wikicities all take Wikipedia articles and develop them according to different editorial policies (or include stuff that Wikipedia doesn't).
Because Wikipedia is maximally inclusive of different opinion, as long as the article meets the general criteria for inclusion, it is both a good starting point for your own research, and a good basis to build forks following certain standards of truth. Wikipedia is not, and never will be, the truth; that is not its goal. It is not an encyclopedia following traditional enlightenment views, but rather one taking a more constructivist or libertarian outlook on the concept of truth. I'm personally convinced that this is needed, but that forks are also needed.
Wikinews currently has a human-maintained RSS feed here, and a feed of all new pages here; as I replied to the other poster, code for category RSS feeds has been written. It has been temporarily deactivated for security concerns, which should be addressed in the next few days.
At 5-25 stories a day, we can afford to put all of them on the frontpage. However, our mid term plan is to have topic portals, such as Science and technology, or region portals, such as South America, where you get all the news from that particular category. We already have some automation in use to do this, but it's a bit flaky, and we are in the process of putting in place an extension for MediaWiki that will do a better job at it, and allow you to subscribe to individual categories via RSS.
So, just like Wikipedia, Wikinews will have areas where people interested in certain topics will work on these topics only, while at the same time benefitting from the potential for massive collaboration, i.e. the entire community can quickly get involved in an individual dispute, or try to refine a problem article until it meets our standards of quality and neutrality.
For the last 6 months, the community over at Wikinews has been building up a citizen journalism project that does not narrow its focus on a single region, or a single to topic. We have written over 1500 stories in English alone, including more than 60 that are based on original reporting by Wikinews writers from various regions (see this report for some examples). Unlike Bayosphere, Wikinews does not have a big fat copyright notice at the bottom -- our content is in the public domain, and free for anyone to use for any purpose.
Wikinews is run by a non-profit organization, the Wikimedia Foundation, which also runs Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, and the Wikimedia Commons, a media repository with almost 100,000 free content images, videos and sounds.
Linspire et al. will not be able to succeed without the goodwill of the community. Why? Because you cannot make something truly useful out of the thousands of free software packages out there without utilizing the power of volunteers. You will end up being a "proprietary vendor", one which has to rely on its own resources because volunteers are not comfortable working for you. You will be outsmarted by distributions which have thousands of people from around the globe working on them.
But it's not just the maintenance of the actual distribution. Web communities like Slashdot will look down on you and only half-heartedly report on your latest achievements -- meaning that thousands of potential customers of you will get less information about you, or even negative commentary. When people want to know "Which distro should I use first?", the kind of people they will ask for advice will probably not recommend you.
Michael Robertson and similar people look down on the open source community. They think it has produced something they can turn into money, but secretly they believe that "they know better" because, if they didn't, why hasn't the open source community already achieved what they set out to achieve? Thus, the decision to make the distro root-only is justified as "user friendly", and people who clearly know what they are talking about are ignored. This leads to the alienation of the community with the aforementioned effects.
A distro maker needs to listen to his users, and be able to distinguish between suggestions from people who have lost touch with reality ("make vi the default editor") and those who have reasonable concerns. Those who do not listen to their users will fail. That is the beauty of competition in a market for a product that is largely community developed and community marketed.
Ubuntu seems like a safe bet at this point. Community developed, with a smart leader and a sufficient amount of money behind it to make it work.
.. that everyone will start talking about soon is the Wikimedia Commons, which already hosts about 40,000 files (mostly images). All of the content on the Commons is under a free license. What is it? It's the media archive used by the Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia and Wikinews. It's been created in September last year and has been growing at a rapid pace ever since.
If you own content that might be useful to Wikipedia or the other Wikimedia projects, such as holidy photos from a far-away country, please upload it to the Commons. If you don't want to learn the ways of the wiki, you can use the newly created (free) file upload service, where Wikimedia volunteers will tag and upload your files for you. The only condition is that you put them under a free license or in the public domain.
Remember, all the Wikimedia projects are run by a non-profit organization that depends on donations from people like you.
Avoidance and respect as alternatives to coercion
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Tracking GPL Violators
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· Score: 4, Interesting
While I used to be a GPL advocate, I now put all my code in the public domain. There are two primary reasons for that:
The GPL and other copyleft licenses weaken our position in lobbyism against insane copyright laws. I've personally been on a panel with a typical WIPO representative who argued that all us copyleft people should be understanding of her mission because we all needed copyright enforcement so badly for our own works. That is misleading to say the least, but it is difficult to refute in front of a neutral audience. The best response is: "No, we don't. We use the public domain. So there."
It generally sends the wrong message. I want to build a world of free sharing, not one of coercion. I want people to share because they believe in sharing, not because the law forces them to. Let's pretend there was no copyright law. Would we then still need a "copyleft law" to make sure that people share their source code (reverse engineering wouldn't be enough, since you can't reverse engineer code comments)? I don't want to replace one control regime with another. You could say that copyleft is socialist ("share for the good of the people"), while the public domain is more libertarian in nature ("do whatever you want").
So, if you use the public domain, how do you prevent people from abusing your work? By naming them when they take work without credit, by avoiding them and refusing to cooperate with them in any way, by expressing respect for people who share work freely and who give proper credit, and by gently trying to convince others to do so.
Many companies which ignore the GPL don't understand the benefits open sharing of their code contributions would give them. It's important for us to communicate better how an open source development model helps everyone (an open code contribution may inspire others to contribute more, to fix bugs, and so on; it is much easier to maintain over version upgrades when it's in the main tree). The problem with the GPL is that it's not a tool of communication. We have focused too much on forcing people to do the right thing, instead of convincing them of the benefits of our approach.
We also need a generally accepted registry for public domain works so that it is provable who the first creator of a work is (that's also necessary as a defense to make sure other people don't claim copyright and sue people for using a work that's in the public domain).
I do value the copyleft effect of the GPL. I think its significance is overestimated, but it does have value. In spite of the arguments above, I think it is of enormous importance that we avoid a split between the copyleft and the non-copyleft camps. In the larger scheme of things, these differences of opinion are minor, and what is important is that we all support the goal of free content. So while I don't approve of the means in this case (GPL enforcement), I do approve of the end (more free content). Still, I ask you to consider putting your code in the public domain.
Given that Larry Lessig is on the board of the Free Software Foundation, it is a bit strange that he uses a wiki engine which is proprietary, even though free (and, in many ways, superior) alternatives such as MediaWiki
(the engine used by Wikipedia) are readily available.
Actually, Brion Vibber has written an OAI-PMH interface for MediaWiki to allow answers.com and other mirrors to fetch updates very fast, so out-of-sync situations should be less common once that's put into use. Generally, I don't even see that as a problem. The real problem is that answers.com lists Wikipedia among a dozen or so other resources, none of which is editable. Only someone who already knows Wikipedia will know that the articles can be fixed. If answers.com ends up getting a very high profile due to its Google cooperation, this could mean that less people edit Wikipedia because they simply do not realize the nature of the project. That is much more important to communicate than to avoid the occasional pleasant surprise that a mistake has already been fixed -- to answers.com as well, since they benefit from higher quality content.
While answers.com is a fully compliant Wikipedia mirror in terms of respecting the requirements of the GNU Free Documentation License, it would be very nice and beneficial for both answers.com and Wikipedia if they could provide a prominent direct link to edit the Wikipedia article. Wikipedia can only work if people keep editing and improving its content, and that effect is lost on read-only mirrors. I have sent that suggestion to GuruNet (the company operating answers.com), and here's what I got back:
That's a very good idea, Erik, and one that we even discussed with Jimmy Wales when he visited our offices earlier this year. We're still working out how the Answers.com Wikipedia relationship is going to work, but I would not at all be surprised to see something like what you suggest down the road.
So, hopefully they will add an edit link soon. It is also notable that GuruNet has expressed an interest in supporting Wikimedia in various ways (the specifics are not public at this point).
I use OpenOffice.org, LaTeX and text files, all for different purposes. I cannot agree that OpenOffice is an "inferior clone" of MS Office; in particular, its handling of large documents with lots of images is more reliable and predictable. I also like the fact that I can use something like OODoc, a Perl library to manipulate OpenOffice documents. For a book I wrote, I wrote a mini-script to convert between LaTeX and OOo. The fact that OOo files are just ZIPs with XML and images really comes in handy.
It's true that OOo emulates some of the usability bugs of MS Office. Using the chart component of OOo Calc can be rather painful, for example: It has three (or more?) different modes of displaying a chart, and different menu options become available depending on which mode you're in; switching between them is not at all intuitive. I remember having had similar issues with Excel in the past. Still I found Calc's charts capability vastly superior to Gnumeric and KSpread (no offense to these projects).
The main beef people have with OOo is its monolithic nature, which makes it slow to load and heavy to download. I haven't found AbiWord usable enough to recommend it as a small alternative. Perhaps one day there will be a Firefox-like offspring of the OOo project. But OOo's feature set is certainly on par with MS Office. There's no valid reason for governments to subsidize Microsoft - if anything, they should subsidize open source development.
We need to keep re-inventing the browser
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Netscape Turns 10
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Firefox is gaining some momentum - maybe enough to make web developers take note. The Mozilla project also has two other great Firefox-like (small single-purpose applications) initiatives, Sunbird and Thunderbird.
The important thing right now is that we use this momentum, and that we continue to innovate. Here's some issues I believe are important:
SVG support. It's incomplete - but I think it is unwise not to have at least some level of SVG support in mainline Firefox 1.0 builds. "Build it, and they will come": both web and Mozilla developers. SVG is really a key technology for next-generation web design based on open standards. As an example, Wikipedia has a nice extension called EasyTimeline for rendering graphical timelines. These are currently ugly, non-zoomable PNGs -- SVG would be perfect here, as it would allow timelines with a changing level of detail as you zoom in. Much of the stuff that is currently being done with Flash can be done with SVG.
Leverage XUL. Whenever I show people demos like MAB and Robin, they tend to be impressed: easy, powerful, instantly deployable web applications. In my opinion, XUL should get a lot more exposure within Firefox - both the product and the website. Make a promise to XUL developers: If you use XUL to write open source applications, and it meets our quality standards, we will add it to the default Firefox bookmarks, and promote it on our website.
New UIs. Tabs are great, but they're not the Holy Grail of UI design. For example, they don't scale - managing more than 20 or so open documents in one browser is not feasible because you just have lots of "..."s. At this point, I would rather have a vertical, scrollable list of open documents with a nice, dynamic (incremental) title search to instant-switch to a window of your choice, and some other cool navigation tools ("skip to next website from another domain than the current one" etc.). There's no reason why a modern browser shouldn't make it easy to manage 50 or 100 open documents.
Better editing controls. Yes, I know what you're thinking: Keep Firefox lean. But having a good integrated text editor for things like wikis or even this form into which I'm typing into right now makes life a lot easier for the average user.
Now, if you really want a glimpse of the future, imagine, if you will, that a HTML textarea worked like SubEthaEdit and allowed you to invite other users to edit with your collaboratively, in real-time, a wiki page or weblog entry.
But even this really just scratches the surface. The point is, the browser is an immensely important platform. With Firefox, we now have the chance to give an incredible amount of real power to end users. It's not "just a browser" - it's one of the key components of future information and collaboration devices.
Congratulations to the Mozilla project for getting us where we are right now. We still have a long way to go. I hope in 10 years, open source technology will be used by virtually everyone to access the rapidly growing digital commons.
Who is "building the semantic web"? Academics or web authors? The only semantic web technology that has actually gained wide usage in the sphere of user-generated content is RSS, a syndication format (or rather, a bunch of competing syndication formats). The reason for this is that weblog engines like Slash and Movable Type support syndication. This then allowed programmers to create news aggregators and filters.
The same can be said about any semantic web technology - whether it's FOAF (an RDF vocab for describing people and their interests) or a vocabulary for reviews. As soon as major authoring tools (i.e. both web editors and content management systems) start integrating these technologies, people will use them if they are useful. Do not expect web designers or bloggers to have a clue about all the great things that the semantic web can do - give them one useful thing which they understand, package it in a pretty UI, and they will start using it.
If you use Mozilla or Firefox, click this link. It's a fully powered application that you can run directly in your web browser. It uses XUL, the Mozilla project's XML User Interface Language, and JavaScript. It's like Java applets without the crappiness.
This is what Microsoft must be afraid of: cross-platform user interfaces with pluggable scripting languages and super-easy application deployment. This is why they originally fought Netscape - they were afraid that Netscape would become a "platform" independent from the operating system layer. And now exactly that is happening, thanks to open source. The people who designed this stuff were some true visionaries.
The Spread Firefox initiative may seem like a trite marketing effort. But in reality, it is one of the best ways to enable people to switch to other platforms tomorrow. I really hope that the Firefox hackers will get SVG support ready soon, as this is one of the other key features that can have immediate amazing benefits.
Using the existing institutions is not an option, as they are thoroughly corrupt, for otherwise they would have been unable to exist through the last few decades. The credibility of the UN to do anything has been forever ruined after the preventable genocide in Rwanda.
If you want world democracy, start from scratch. A political party entirely ruled through direct democracy and consensus is possible. That means that even if the party becomes part of a state or national government, all its political decisions are made by the whole membership. This in itself gives people an incentive to join the party, creating a snowball effect. The key to making the whole thing work is to tie the process of voting on ideas to the process by which people arrive at judgments about ideas, i.e. to connect democratic media and democratic decision-making. That way you avoid the common pitfall of direct democracy, ill-informed voters. You could in fact make participation in the democratic media a requirement for participation in the voting process.
This is not an unsolvable problem. It's just that there aren't enough people who care about solving it. Yourparty is similar to what I describe here, IIRC, although I'm not sure they're doing the democratic media side of things.
It gets more complex when you try to address the major problem of centralization, which has potential for abues. Then you soon get into discussions about replacing the web itself..
Re:Speak for yourself, OSX is more than there alre
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Syllable 0.5.4 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The more freedom there is in the underlying platform, the more freedom will thrive on top of it. There are plenty of great open source projects that have been ported to Windows - check out The Open CD - but the majority of development obviously happens on Linux and other free systems, hence those implementations will be the best tested and first available.
Furthermore, like it or not, by giving Apple control over the operating system of your machine you make it possible for them to sabotage any serious competition - look at the history of DR-DOS. Within a single vendor market they also have all the other trade and technology advantages that Microsoft used to lock out the competition, and they're not burdened by a monopoly (i.e. they are less likely to be investigated). Again, political naivete is very dangerous here.
And if Linux does become mainstream, do you really think Adobe and Macromedia will release Photoshop and Flash as open source projects?
Of course not, and I don't want either Adobe PhotoShop or Macromedia Flash. I want free SVG editors, good SVG/SMIL support in browsers, and the GIMP and Krita to become as useful as PS in every way - in many ways, they already are, esp. the GIMP. This can only happen through larger adoption.
If your job absolutely requires you to use PhotoShop, you can use CrossOver Office.
An appealing GUI is obviously important, but Mac users sometimes act like it's all that matters. That bothers me. The rampant homosexuality among Mac users is also slightly disturbing (just kidding).
Re:Speak for yourself, OSX is more than there alre
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Syllable 0.5.4 Released
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· Score: 2, Interesting
1) Only small parts of OS X are open source. Most of the high level stuff that matters is proprietary, meaning that you give all control over it to a single company, Apple - including control over copy prevention technology, multimedia formats and the like. Apple is no more good or evil than Microsoft - it is a corporation motivated by profit maximization and will act accordingly. I would rather use software written by the people, for the people to avoid unpleasant surprises.
2) Linux and all its apps are free as in beer and runs on $200 machines, neither of which can be said about Apple. This also means that software developed in the Linux world can be easily used in developing nations on the basis of donated intel PCs, etc.
3) Closed source prevents collaboration on the software components. The Linux world is full of innovation - even within a single desktop like KDE, you will find plenty of useful widgets and gadgets that are not copied from either Windows or MacOS. But if you look at the entire set of desktop offerings, from XFCe to ion to WindowMaker to GNOME etc., then it really becomes apparent that open source is an innovation space.
Yes, Apple currently has produced the more integrated desktop experience, but like Microsoft, Apple will try to lock you into that specific experience. If you want choice and you want to make sure you will always have that choice, OSS is the way to go.
4) Closed source prevents learning - in an open environment, kids can easily start experimenting and playing around with all parts of the system, hence become the innovators of tomorrow.
5) If you use Debian's apt-get, apt-rpm, urpmi or a similar update service, all your packages will be upgraded to the latest version with a single click. On Windows, there is no comparable service and there cannot be because the software is not free - Windows Update can't even properly handle Microsoft's own products as the JPEG Office fix has shown. Open source is far ahead of the competition in this department, there is just a lack of standardization. Yes, installing packages from source can be a pain - but with almost 10000 packages for Debian, the average user will virtually never have to do that. That they can if they need to is a good, not a bad thing.
Bottom line: If all you want is pretty pictures and the slickest GUI, then hey, go for Apple Mac OS X. But there are people who care about more than just that. GNU/Linux is the operating system of choice for people with a social conscience who care deeply about the future of computing. One of the best ways to make sure open source software keeps getting better is to use it, to thank the developers who have made it possible, and to send in bug reports. But open source has no chance if its users run away once a proprietary vendor offers slightly shinier widgets. That's why I share the GNU project's attitude with regard to proprietary software, if not their way of communicating it. It is important to talk not just about the technological, but also about the philosophical aspects of free software. I am confident that end users can and will understand that difference if it is explained to them in clear terms.
It isn't the answer to getting laid, or to becoming a carpenter, or to learning to cook. But when it comes to software development, the OSS model is superior to any other, because it is a model of continued sharing, of accumulation of knowledge, that over time will produce products that are superior to anything else. That doesn't mean that it can't be optimized, i.e. the way money is put into open source projects by users, the way developers with shared interests find each other, the OSS development model itself all can be improved. But copyrighting programs and not sharing the source is simply a primitive, outdated development model, and it limits your personal freedoms.
You can spend all day thinking about how horse-drawn carriages might be superior to cars after all, how your beliefs about cars might be arrogant, and so forth. But that would be a waste of time. It is useful to develop degrees of certainty about issues and prioritize your thinking time based on that. For example, thinking about how the Linux kernel development model can be improved is more useful than considering that copyright might not be such a bad idea after all, because the evidence that it is, is quite overwhelming.
I must have missed that part. Can you refer me to the relevent episode?
The relevant episode is XI: The Persistence Of Memory, where he describes whale behavior, and explains the threat to whales posed by humans, not least simply because of the noises our motor ships make, which disturb the whale communication network. He correctly points out that we barely have a solid understanding about life on Earth, which is still as true as it was then.
Sagan's work was not only scientific, it was also political. I see no evidence that this is the case for this new production. In Cosmos, Sagan fought for the protection of the environment, criticized religious fundamentalism and pseudoscience, and warned of the dangers of nuclear war. If we had someone like Sagan today in the field of science, they would point to the huge domestic problems in the United States (poverty, largest prison population in the world, loss of civil rights, abuse of teenagers in "correctional facilities", sexual hysteria..) as well as the world political situation and ways to build a peaceful society through cooperation and the teaching of secular values.
Sagan criticized the Cold War, and so he would criticize the misguided "war on terror" (which followed decades of propping up fundamentalist regimes to combat communism).
The way to bring peace to the world is to lead by example, to educate, to promote free speech, to restrict the proliferation of all types of weapons, to reduce inequality, and to limit corporate meddling in other nations' affairs.
But of course science and politics are completely unreleated according to today's standards. I fear all we can hope for from this series is a watered down version of the science and none of the politics. With that attitude, is it any wonder that just three months ago, 48 Nobel Prize winners complained that "the Bush administration is undermining the nation's future by impeding medical advances, turning away scientific talent with its immigration practices and ignoring scientific consensus on global warming and other critical issues"? [source] Sadly, most scientists only bother to speak out when it is too late, if even then.
When was the last time you read a story about Ayn Rand on Slashdot? The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, is an objectivist (highly active participant in the We the Living objectivism portal, check the Atlantis archive, also do a groups.google search), and so are many of his friends, therefore there was a strong libertarian/objectivist bent to Wikipedia articles in the early days. That has nothing to do with "the encyclopedia that Slashdot built" type nonsense. These people didn't come from Slashdot. These are the people that started Wikipedia.
The Jargon file was one of the early sets of data that was imported. This highlights a general problem with importing data, in that large sets of data imported from a single source may skew the overall impression of Wikipedia in one direction or another, without that impression necessarily being based on any real inherent bias. It's just like saying "Wikipedia is made of US census fans".
I've first edited Wikipedia articles about half a year after it started and am quite familiar with the project's history.
It's never been the encyclopedia that Slashdot built. Everything2 is. In fact, before there was Everything2, there was everything.slashdot.org. The code was created by some of the same people as Slashdot, and so was a content. For a while, Slashdot used to link to E2 articles using "[?]" links. Of course, unlike Wikipedia articles, you can't just start to improve them. Everything2 is a very geeky system that takes a long time to grok, with a complex, role-playing style experience model that hooks people.
Wikipedia started out as the progeny of Nupedia, a very serious, peer-reviewed encyclopedia which managed to produce all of two dozen articles. If you look at the Wayback Machine in July 2001, you will find that Wikipedia early on was actually quite philosophy-centric (in part because the original, full-time chief editor, Larry Sanger, is a philsopher).
Of course we have Slashdot readers among our editors, including myself. But we also have credentialed experts and amateurs from many different fields. We try to make it as easy as possible to join in, and many people who know nothing about computers do. If you (the reader, not the parent poster) know a way to make Wikipedia easier to use, please do not hesitate to submit a feature request.
We don't go around deleting articles on geeky subjects if they're well-written and encyclopedic. But Wikipedia never aimed exclusively at a nerdy audience and its editors were never made up exclusively of members of that audience.
Slashdot Mirror
For example, the Britannica article on circumcision is heavily biased in favor of the practice and the "hygienic" argument and does not mention with one word that the practice was historically rooted in attempts to combat masturbation; the Wikipedia article has this information, as well as a detailed (and NPOV-tagged, and messy) article about the medical opinion on the matter. If I wanted to learn about the practice, I'd much rather try to get an overall picture by reading the presentation on Wikipedia, following links, and trying to check claims for plausibility, than by taking whatever Britannica says (which, in this case, is very biased and, in my opinion, wrong) as divine truth.
In other words, Wikipedia tends to give you a very good overview of the different opinions on any given subject. It doesn't give you the truth; I believe that, since everyone has different standards of truth, the only way to do this would be to fork the project into subprojects that use specific methodology to determine truth. For example, you could create a Wikipedia fork that is written from a skeptical/scientific/progressive point of view, and which excludes or dismisses most religious and pseudoscientific statements and beliefs. Or you could create a "Catholic Wikipedia" that follows Church doctrine. The free license makes this possible, and such forks are only a question of time -- the free license makes this possible. Some already exist: SourceWatch, dKosopedia, Memory Alpha, Wikinfo, Wikicities all take Wikipedia articles and develop them according to different editorial policies (or include stuff that Wikipedia doesn't).
Because Wikipedia is maximally inclusive of different opinion, as long as the article meets the general criteria for inclusion, it is both a good starting point for your own research, and a good basis to build forks following certain standards of truth. Wikipedia is not, and never will be, the truth; that is not its goal. It is not an encyclopedia following traditional enlightenment views, but rather one taking a more constructivist or libertarian outlook on the concept of truth. I'm personally convinced that this is needed, but that forks are also needed.
Wikinews currently has a human-maintained RSS feed here, and a feed of all new pages here; as I replied to the other poster, code for category RSS feeds has been written. It has been temporarily deactivated for security concerns, which should be addressed in the next few days.
So, just like Wikipedia, Wikinews will have areas where people interested in certain topics will work on these topics only, while at the same time benefitting from the potential for massive collaboration, i.e. the entire community can quickly get involved in an individual dispute, or try to refine a problem article until it meets our standards of quality and neutrality.
If you want to contribute, you can submit a story right away, or you can learn more about writing news stories the wiki way.
Wikinews is run by a non-profit organization, the Wikimedia Foundation, which also runs Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, and the Wikimedia Commons, a media repository with almost 100,000 free content images, videos and sounds.
I've started a free wiki at Wikicities called EventWiki that can be used for the same purpose (but is broader in scope than MeetUp).
But it's not just the maintenance of the actual distribution. Web communities like Slashdot will look down on you and only half-heartedly report on your latest achievements -- meaning that thousands of potential customers of you will get less information about you, or even negative commentary. When people want to know "Which distro should I use first?", the kind of people they will ask for advice will probably not recommend you.
Michael Robertson and similar people look down on the open source community. They think it has produced something they can turn into money, but secretly they believe that "they know better" because, if they didn't, why hasn't the open source community already achieved what they set out to achieve? Thus, the decision to make the distro root-only is justified as "user friendly", and people who clearly know what they are talking about are ignored. This leads to the alienation of the community with the aforementioned effects.
A distro maker needs to listen to his users, and be able to distinguish between suggestions from people who have lost touch with reality ("make vi the default editor") and those who have reasonable concerns. Those who do not listen to their users will fail. That is the beauty of competition in a market for a product that is largely community developed and community marketed.
Ubuntu seems like a safe bet at this point. Community developed, with a smart leader and a sufficient amount of money behind it to make it work.
If you own content that might be useful to Wikipedia or the other Wikimedia projects, such as holidy photos from a far-away country, please upload it to the Commons. If you don't want to learn the ways of the wiki, you can use the newly created (free) file upload service, where Wikimedia volunteers will tag and upload your files for you. The only condition is that you put them under a free license or in the public domain.
Remember, all the Wikimedia projects are run by a non-profit organization that depends on donations from people like you.
So, if you use the public domain, how do you prevent people from abusing your work? By naming them when they take work without credit, by avoiding them and refusing to cooperate with them in any way, by expressing respect for people who share work freely and who give proper credit, and by gently trying to convince others to do so.
Many companies which ignore the GPL don't understand the benefits open sharing of their code contributions would give them. It's important for us to communicate better how an open source development model helps everyone (an open code contribution may inspire others to contribute more, to fix bugs, and so on; it is much easier to maintain over version upgrades when it's in the main tree). The problem with the GPL is that it's not a tool of communication. We have focused too much on forcing people to do the right thing, instead of convincing them of the benefits of our approach.
We also need a generally accepted registry for public domain works so that it is provable who the first creator of a work is (that's also necessary as a defense to make sure other people don't claim copyright and sue people for using a work that's in the public domain).
I do value the copyleft effect of the GPL. I think its significance is overestimated, but it does have value. In spite of the arguments above, I think it is of enormous importance that we avoid a split between the copyleft and the non-copyleft camps. In the larger scheme of things, these differences of opinion are minor, and what is important is that we all support the goal of free content. So while I don't approve of the means in this case (GPL enforcement), I do approve of the end (more free content). Still, I ask you to consider putting your code in the public domain.
There are no shortcuts to truth.
Given that Larry Lessig is on the board of the Free Software Foundation, it is a bit strange that he uses a wiki engine which is proprietary, even though free (and, in many ways, superior) alternatives such as MediaWiki (the engine used by Wikipedia) are readily available.
Actually, Brion Vibber has written an OAI-PMH interface for MediaWiki to allow answers.com and other mirrors to fetch updates very fast, so out-of-sync situations should be less common once that's put into use. Generally, I don't even see that as a problem. The real problem is that answers.com lists Wikipedia among a dozen or so other resources, none of which is editable. Only someone who already knows Wikipedia will know that the articles can be fixed. If answers.com ends up getting a very high profile due to its Google cooperation, this could mean that less people edit Wikipedia because they simply do not realize the nature of the project. That is much more important to communicate than to avoid the occasional pleasant surprise that a mistake has already been fixed -- to answers.com as well, since they benefit from higher quality content.
It's true that OOo emulates some of the usability bugs of MS Office. Using the chart component of OOo Calc can be rather painful, for example: It has three (or more?) different modes of displaying a chart, and different menu options become available depending on which mode you're in; switching between them is not at all intuitive. I remember having had similar issues with Excel in the past. Still I found Calc's charts capability vastly superior to Gnumeric and KSpread (no offense to these projects).
The main beef people have with OOo is its monolithic nature, which makes it slow to load and heavy to download. I haven't found AbiWord usable enough to recommend it as a small alternative. Perhaps one day there will be a Firefox-like offspring of the OOo project. But OOo's feature set is certainly on par with MS Office. There's no valid reason for governments to subsidize Microsoft - if anything, they should subsidize open source development.
The important thing right now is that we use this momentum, and that we continue to innovate. Here's some issues I believe are important:
Now, if you really want a glimpse of the future, imagine, if you will, that a HTML textarea worked like SubEthaEdit and allowed you to invite other users to edit with your collaboratively, in real-time, a wiki page or weblog entry. But even this really just scratches the surface. The point is, the browser is an immensely important platform. With Firefox, we now have the chance to give an incredible amount of real power to end users. It's not "just a browser" - it's one of the key components of future information and collaboration devices.
Congratulations to the Mozilla project for getting us where we are right now. We still have a long way to go. I hope in 10 years, open source technology will be used by virtually everyone to access the rapidly growing digital commons.
The same can be said about any semantic web technology - whether it's FOAF (an RDF vocab for describing people and their interests) or a vocabulary for reviews. As soon as major authoring tools (i.e. both web editors and content management systems) start integrating these technologies, people will use them if they are useful. Do not expect web designers or bloggers to have a clue about all the great things that the semantic web can do - give them one useful thing which they understand, package it in a pretty UI, and they will start using it.
This is what Microsoft must be afraid of: cross-platform user interfaces with pluggable scripting languages and super-easy application deployment. This is why they originally fought Netscape - they were afraid that Netscape would become a "platform" independent from the operating system layer. And now exactly that is happening, thanks to open source. The people who designed this stuff were some true visionaries.
The Spread Firefox initiative may seem like a trite marketing effort. But in reality, it is one of the best ways to enable people to switch to other platforms tomorrow. I really hope that the Firefox hackers will get SVG support ready soon, as this is one of the other key features that can have immediate amazing benefits.
If you want world democracy, start from scratch. A political party entirely ruled through direct democracy and consensus is possible. That means that even if the party becomes part of a state or national government, all its political decisions are made by the whole membership. This in itself gives people an incentive to join the party, creating a snowball effect. The key to making the whole thing work is to tie the process of voting on ideas to the process by which people arrive at judgments about ideas, i.e. to connect democratic media and democratic decision-making. That way you avoid the common pitfall of direct democracy, ill-informed voters. You could in fact make participation in the democratic media a requirement for participation in the voting process.
This is not an unsolvable problem. It's just that there aren't enough people who care about solving it. Yourparty is similar to what I describe here, IIRC, although I'm not sure they're doing the democratic media side of things.
It gets more complex when you try to address the major problem of centralization, which has potential for abues. Then you soon get into discussions about replacing the web itself ..
Furthermore, like it or not, by giving Apple control over the operating system of your machine you make it possible for them to sabotage any serious competition - look at the history of DR-DOS. Within a single vendor market they also have all the other trade and technology advantages that Microsoft used to lock out the competition, and they're not burdened by a monopoly (i.e. they are less likely to be investigated). Again, political naivete is very dangerous here.
And if Linux does become mainstream, do you really think Adobe and Macromedia will release Photoshop and Flash as open source projects?
Of course not, and I don't want either Adobe PhotoShop or Macromedia Flash. I want free SVG editors, good SVG/SMIL support in browsers, and the GIMP and Krita to become as useful as PS in every way - in many ways, they already are, esp. the GIMP. This can only happen through larger adoption.
If your job absolutely requires you to use PhotoShop, you can use CrossOver Office.
An appealing GUI is obviously important, but Mac users sometimes act like it's all that matters. That bothers me. The rampant homosexuality among Mac users is also slightly disturbing (just kidding).
2) Linux and all its apps are free as in beer and runs on $200 machines, neither of which can be said about Apple. This also means that software developed in the Linux world can be easily used in developing nations on the basis of donated intel PCs, etc.
3) Closed source prevents collaboration on the software components. The Linux world is full of innovation - even within a single desktop like KDE, you will find plenty of useful widgets and gadgets that are not copied from either Windows or MacOS. But if you look at the entire set of desktop offerings, from XFCe to ion to WindowMaker to GNOME etc., then it really becomes apparent that open source is an innovation space.
Yes, Apple currently has produced the more integrated desktop experience, but like Microsoft, Apple will try to lock you into that specific experience. If you want choice and you want to make sure you will always have that choice, OSS is the way to go.
4) Closed source prevents learning - in an open environment, kids can easily start experimenting and playing around with all parts of the system, hence become the innovators of tomorrow.
5) If you use Debian's apt-get, apt-rpm, urpmi or a similar update service, all your packages will be upgraded to the latest version with a single click. On Windows, there is no comparable service and there cannot be because the software is not free - Windows Update can't even properly handle Microsoft's own products as the JPEG Office fix has shown. Open source is far ahead of the competition in this department, there is just a lack of standardization. Yes, installing packages from source can be a pain - but with almost 10000 packages for Debian, the average user will virtually never have to do that. That they can if they need to is a good, not a bad thing.
Bottom line: If all you want is pretty pictures and the slickest GUI, then hey, go for Apple Mac OS X. But there are people who care about more than just that. GNU/Linux is the operating system of choice for people with a social conscience who care deeply about the future of computing. One of the best ways to make sure open source software keeps getting better is to use it, to thank the developers who have made it possible, and to send in bug reports. But open source has no chance if its users run away once a proprietary vendor offers slightly shinier widgets. That's why I share the GNU project's attitude with regard to proprietary software, if not their way of communicating it. It is important to talk not just about the technological, but also about the philosophical aspects of free software. I am confident that end users can and will understand that difference if it is explained to them in clear terms.
No, what's needed is the application of the precautionary principle.
It isn't the answer to getting laid, or to becoming a carpenter, or to learning to cook. But when it comes to software development, the OSS model is superior to any other, because it is a model of continued sharing, of accumulation of knowledge, that over time will produce products that are superior to anything else. That doesn't mean that it can't be optimized, i.e. the way money is put into open source projects by users, the way developers with shared interests find each other, the OSS development model itself all can be improved. But copyrighting programs and not sharing the source is simply a primitive, outdated development model, and it limits your personal freedoms.
You can spend all day thinking about how horse-drawn carriages might be superior to cars after all, how your beliefs about cars might be arrogant, and so forth. But that would be a waste of time. It is useful to develop degrees of certainty about issues and prioritize your thinking time based on that. For example, thinking about how the Linux kernel development model can be improved is more useful than considering that copyright might not be such a bad idea after all, because the evidence that it is, is quite overwhelming.
The relevant episode is XI: The Persistence Of Memory, where he describes whale behavior, and explains the threat to whales posed by humans, not least simply because of the noises our motor ships make, which disturb the whale communication network. He correctly points out that we barely have a solid understanding about life on Earth, which is still as true as it was then.
Sagan criticized the Cold War, and so he would criticize the misguided "war on terror" (which followed decades of propping up fundamentalist regimes to combat communism). The way to bring peace to the world is to lead by example, to educate, to promote free speech, to restrict the proliferation of all types of weapons, to reduce inequality, and to limit corporate meddling in other nations' affairs.
But of course science and politics are completely unreleated according to today's standards. I fear all we can hope for from this series is a watered down version of the science and none of the politics. With that attitude, is it any wonder that just three months ago, 48 Nobel Prize winners complained that "the Bush administration is undermining the nation's future by impeding medical advances, turning away scientific talent with its immigration practices and ignoring scientific consensus on global warming and other critical issues"? [source] Sadly, most scientists only bother to speak out when it is too late, if even then.
The Jargon file was one of the early sets of data that was imported. This highlights a general problem with importing data, in that large sets of data imported from a single source may skew the overall impression of Wikipedia in one direction or another, without that impression necessarily being based on any real inherent bias. It's just like saying "Wikipedia is made of US census fans".
I've first edited Wikipedia articles about half a year after it started and am quite familiar with the project's history.
Wikipedia started out as the progeny of Nupedia, a very serious, peer-reviewed encyclopedia which managed to produce all of two dozen articles. If you look at the Wayback Machine in July 2001, you will find that Wikipedia early on was actually quite philosophy-centric (in part because the original, full-time chief editor, Larry Sanger, is a philsopher).
Of course we have Slashdot readers among our editors, including myself. But we also have credentialed experts and amateurs from many different fields. We try to make it as easy as possible to join in, and many people who know nothing about computers do. If you (the reader, not the parent poster) know a way to make Wikipedia easier to use, please do not hesitate to submit a feature request.
We don't go around deleting articles on geeky subjects if they're well-written and encyclopedic. But Wikipedia never aimed exclusively at a nerdy audience and its editors were never made up exclusively of members of that audience.