Includipedia Blog

Just to let people know, I’ve modified Includipedia so people can edit it without being logged in.

I’ve added articles for Britblog Roundup and Scottish Roundup to Includipedia.

I’ve also added an article on my blog, Amused Cynicism.

because Includipedia is inclusionist, unlike Wikipedia, there are few restrictions on what sort of material can be added there. So I’d like to take this opportunity to remind my readers that if you have a blog, you can create an article for it on Includipedia.

(this article also appears on Amused Cynicism)

Includipedia now has two mailing lists — a read-only announcements list (for announcements, obviously), and a discussion list where you can discuss the Includipedia project and any related subjects, for example Internet-based open content repositories.

Announcements list: subscribe | archives.

Discussion list: subscribe | archives.

Encyclopedia Britannica’s new Webshare program allows bloggers and other people who create web content to get free access to Britannica, in the hope that they’ll link to articles on it. Techdirt isn’t impressed, likening it to rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic:

Jacob Grier points out the launch of Britannica Webshare, a service that will allow bloggers to access the Encyclopedia Britannica for free, and even to provide links that will allow readers to read individual articles — but not the whole encyclopedia — for free. This is a fine step, as far as it goes. But it’s a comically small step given the challenges Britannica is facing. The site apparently still won’t be available to non-bloggers, and presumably that means it also won’t be available on search engines. And that means they’re throwing away a huge chunk of their potential audience. But the more fundamental problem is that Wikipedia is already a much better encyclopedia, and it continues to improve rapidly. Wikipedia is roughly as accurate and it’s an order of magnitude timelier and more comprehensive.

TechCrunch is also rather unimpressed by Britannica:

Encyclopedia Britannica often is used in case studies as a definitive example of how new technology can disrupt a business. Everything was great for the nearly 250 year old privately held company until the Internet came around and a Category Five hurricaned on their parade. According to Comscore, for every page viewed on Brittanica.com, 184 pages are viewed on Wikipedia (3.8 billion v. 21 million page views per month). In short, they are a classic example of the Innovator’s Dilemma (see also the Music Industry).

You can purchase the 32 volume Britannica, which has 65,000 articles and 44 million words, for just $1,400. Or you can access it on the web for $70 per year.

I agree with Techdirt and TechCrunch’s rather nagative assessments of Britannica’s future. When I was considering whether to set up Includipedia, I considered who the possible competitors would be. Two that I considered important were Wikipedia and Google’s proposed Knol (though it would be more accurate to describe Wikipedia as coopetition). Britannica didn’t figure at all — it was simply an irrelevance.

Anyway, I’m going to apply for Britannica Webshare, both for Includipedia and for my personal blog Amused Cynicism, in a spirit of curiousity and exploration. We’ll see what comes of it.

Glyn Moody writes in Computerworld UK:

As I’ve written elsewhere, I am a big fan of inclusionism when it comes to Wikipedia - the idea that there is no good reason why it shouldn’t include entries on anything. After all, nobody forces you to read the stuff, and it’s not as if it’s sitting on your bookshelves. Includipedia feels the same.

Moody also mentions Encoresoup, a reference guide to FOSS projects:

The goal of Encoresoup is to provide a comprehensive reference guide to virtually all Free Software and Open Source projects and the FOSS ecosystem.

The core and inspiration for Encoresoup is the set of Wikipedia’s FOSS articles managed by the Free Software WikiProject. Encoresoup seeks to build on and enhance this content in the following ways :

* Include many more articles. Practically any Free/Open Source Software project can be documented here (but see our inclusion policy) and we hope one day to host articles covering the vast majority of projects.

Incidently Includipedia’s aim of coverage is a superset of the subject matter of Encoresoup, since we also aim to have articles on FOSS projects.

I’ve added some content to the About Includipedia page, setting out my goals for the project in some detail.

Progress on Includipedia has been slow recently, due to the system administrator being unavailable to work on the project and a programmer leaving and getting a job in London. But we now have a new sys admin, and it looks like we’ll be employing two new programmers.

The Economist has an article about the struggle within Wikipedia between inclusionists and deletionists:

Wikipedia is facing an identity crisis as it is torn between two alternative futures. It can either strive to encompass every aspect of human knowledge, no matter how trivial; or it can adopt a more stringent editorial policy and ban articles on trivial subjects, in the hope that this will enhance its reputation as a trustworthy and credible reference source. These two conflicting visions are at the heart of a bitter struggle inside Wikipedia between “inclusionists”, who believe that applying strict editorial criteria will dampen contributors’ enthusiasm for the project, and “deletionists” who argue that Wikipedia should be more cautious and selective about its entries.

I come down firmly on the side of the inclusionists. Why shouldn’t every film, every TV programme episode, every book, every minor band, every small-circulation magazine, every pokemon character, every restaurant, fish-and-chip shop or takeaway, every open source software project, etc have an article about it? For every one of these articles, most people won’t be interested in it, but that’s not a problem because they won’t be searching for it in the first place. But for people who are interesting in the subject, the article will be relevant and useful.

The Internet isn’t paper; there’s no need for limitations on what can go in articles.

Consider the fictional characters of Pokémon, the Japanese game franchise with a huge global following, for example. Almost 500 of them have biographies on the English-language version of Wikipedia (the largest edition, with over 2m entries), with a level of detail that many real characters would envy. But search for biographies of the leaders of the Solidarity movement in Poland, and you would find no more than a dozen—and they are rather poorly edited.

If lots of entries on Pokémon are deleted, it’s not as if this will somehow magically create new articles on Solidarity. In fact, if anything the opposite is true, because people might originally come to the encyclopedia via a search on a Pokémon-related subject, and later edit articles on other subjects.

To measure a subject’s worthiness for inclusion (or “notability”, in the jargon of Wikipedians), all kinds of rules have been devised. These rules are used to devise official policies on particular subjects, such as the notability of pornographic stars (a Playboy appearance earns you a Wikipedia mention; starring in a low-budget movie does not)

Why not have an article on anyone who’s played a part in any movie (pornographic or otherwise)?

Mr Lih and other inclusionists worry that [the prospect of an article being deleted] deters people from contributing to Wikipedia, and that the welcoming environment of Wikipedia’s early days is giving way to hostility and infighting.

I know for a fact that I’ve been deterred from contributing to Wikipedia after articles I’d created or worked on were deleted. That was the original impulse that drove me to creating Includipedia.

(via Slashdot)

A story has hit the news concerning Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’ relationship with “controversial Canadian TV pundit Rachel Marsden”. I’m not going to talk about that, because frankly I’m not interested in Wales’ sex life. But one thing that did interest me is the allegation that he spent Wikimedia’s money on himself. (Wikipedia is run by the Wikimedia Foundation, a charity that gets its money from donations). According to Wired:

Former Wikimedia exec Danny Wool, who left the foundation last year, wrote a blog post insinuating that Wales used the nonprofit foundation as his own personal piggy bank. Expenses that Wales tried to apply to the foundation included $300+ bottles of wine and visits to Moscow massage parlors, Wool alleges. According to Wool, the expenses got so out of hand that the Wikimedia Foundation took away Wales’ corporate credit card.

Since the Wikimedia Foundation is a charity, it’s obviously relevant how it spends its money. Includipedia, on the other hand, is a for-profit organisation which aims to fund itself by advertising, and if I want to spend £150 on a bottle of wine (I don’t, incidently), that’s no-one’s business but mine.

But although Includipedia is for profit, it’s not just for profit. We have other goals, too: we want to encourage open content, including free software/open source. So we’ll be developing software for MediaWiki and other projects, and giving it back to the community under open source licences. One project we’re particularly interested in is OpenStreetMap, because non-free alternatives such as Google Maps restrict what you can do with the data.

Our long-term goal is to bring all the world’s information to all the world’s people. This has implications. For example, some people cannot afford an Internet connection. It may be that mesh networking will help to solve that problem; if so we can develop or fund suitable mesh networking software.

Another way to help people afford an Internet connection (and other things) is to help them be richer. Perhaps Includipedia could do a tie-in with organisations such as Kiva to allow the businesses they fund to have micro-wikis on the Includipedia site.

Nine Inch Nails have released their latest album on BitTorrent:

Nine Inch Nails has just released the first volume of their new album “Ghosts” on BitTorrent sites as a free download. The band encourages its fans to share the album with friends, post it on websites and play it on podcasts

“Ghosts” is released under a non-commercial Creative Commons license and can be shared freely, something their fans weren’t allowed to do when the band was held back by a record label.

In the release notes the band writes: “Now that we’re no longer constrained by a record label, we’ve decided to personally upload Ghosts I, the first of the four volumes, to various torrent sites, because we believe BitTorrent is a revolutionary digital distribution method, and we believe in finding ways to utilize new technologies instead of fighting them.”

This demonstrates once more that the old business model for selling information, based on the idea of putting that information in a physical package that’s difficult to copy, and then selling copies of the physical package, is obsolete. Furthermore, it isn’t going to be replaced by a model that’s the same but just substituting “DRM downloads” for “physical copies” — bits are inherently copyable and trying to make them not be so is like trying to make water not wet. People still using the old business model need to wake up and realise they’re not living in the 20th century any more. And if anyone’s thinking of setting up a new business based on this model, my advice is: don’t.

So what business models will replace it? There will probably be many, but one that I think has a large chance of success in the Street Performer Protocol:

The Street Performer Protocol (SPP) is a way of encouraging the creation of creative works in the public domain, described by the cryptographers John Kelsey and Bruce Schneier^[1] of Counterpane Systems (although the underlying idea is much older). It assumes that traditional forms of copyright and creative compensation will not work in the future, because of the ease of copying and distribution of digital information.

Under the SPP, the artist announces that when he receives a certain amount of money in escrow, he will release a work (book, music, software, etc.) into the public domain. Interested donors make their donations to a publisher, who keeps the donations in escrow, identified by their donors. If the artist releases the work on time, he and the publisher are paid from the escrow fund. If not, the publisher repays the donors, possibly with interest.

What does this have to do with Includipedia? The foundation of Includipedia is an inclusionist fork of Wikipedia, but over time we hope to make the project a lot broader in scope than that. We aim to be a repository for an ever-increasing amount of open content — for example open-content maps, directories of every film, book and piece of music (including reviews), a directory of all open-source software programs (again, including reviews), how-to information, recipes, etc — eventually, as our tagline says, to bring “all the world’s information to all the world’s people”.

So it’s quite likely that Includipedia will at some stage get involved with producing open content works funded by the Street Performer Protocol (or some variation thereof).

(Ghosts I is available from the band’s site as well as The Pirate Bay.)

There has been some controversy when a person or organisation edits the article about themself on Wikipedia. Such a person is Sir Norman Bettison, the chief constable of West Yorkshire, who has apparently ordered his underlings to monitor his article:

“A chief constable has told his staff to monitor online encyclopedia Wikipedia - to stop its users posting rude comments about him. Sir Norman Bettison took exception to being described as a “greedy, vain moron” on the online encyclopaedia, according to Police Review magazine. The 52-year-old chief constable of West Yorkshire - favourite to succeed Sir Ian Blair as head of the Met - has ordered employees to check for changes often.”

There is an obvious issue here regarding misuse of public funds.

But I think a more interesting issue is that of vandalism of Wikipedia, and other online encyclopedia projects. When Includipedia is fully up and running the policy will be to limit what people can do with their own articles. If someone edits an article about themself, or about an organisation they work for, or a person or organisation where they are being paid to edit it, then they will be obliged to state their connection with the subject on the article’s talk page. And any such editor will be forbidden under Includipedia’s terms and conditions from removing material that is uncomplementary to the subject.

Which brings up an interesting possibility. Unauthorised modification to a computer system is illegal in Britain under the Computer Misuse Act. Modifying Includipedia contrary to its terms and condictions is clearly unauthorised modification, so if Norman Bettison got his staff to do so then both they and he would be breaking the law; it’d be amusing to see a chief constable charged under this.