Includipedia Blog

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.

Ernest Adams agrees with me that the Era of Copyright is ending:

I think we are witnessing the beginning of the end of a major era in world history. It may take fifty years, it may take a hundred, but the age of copyright is drawing to a close. I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s inevitable.

When enough people feel that it’s OK to do a thing, that thing ceases to be wrong in their own cultural context. You can complain about moral relativism all you like, but the facts are inescapable: that’s how people behave. When the photocopier came along, people simply didn’t think it was wrong to copy a few pages out of a book, even though it was against the law and the authors would have preferred that they buy the whole book. So eventually, the Fair Use doctrine evolved with respect to copyright materials. The law changed. It’s now OK to photocopy parts of books for educational, non-commercial use. In effect, the authors and book publishers had to give some ground in the face of the overwhelming tide of public opinion.

If the public simply refuse to acknowledge that copying books or movies or software is wrong, then in a democracy, it will eventually cease to be wrong. People elect the legislators, and legislators make the laws.

Does the end of copyright mean that books or music or movies or games will die? Of course not. What it does mean for sure is that the giant dinosaurs that currently dominate the distribution channels had better learn to adapt or die.

And fifty years from now, kids will be asking, “What does that © symbol mean in this old book, Grandpa?”

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 been spending the last few hours reading Cory Doctorow’s new novel Little Brother. It’s available in print, and online under a Creative Commons license. Set in the near future, Little Brother is both an exciting story and an instruction manual on how citizens can fight omnipresent government surveillance.

Doctorow explains it thus:

What’s Little Brother about?
Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.

But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.

When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.

My verdict: highly recommended.

Are you worried about automatic number plate recognition? This may be the solution:

(via Schneier on Security)

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.

An absurd patent threatens to destroy Web 2.0 websites, including Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, etc:

The Register has an article about one of the patents up for sale in the latest Ocean Tomo auction that could potentially be used to sue pretty much every web 2.0 company. The patent, for “a global sideband service distributed computing method” is described by its owner as being a core component in any kind of AJAX implementation, and lists out basically everyone as infringing. Any site that uses AJAX? Yup. Google, eBay, Yahoo? Yup. Amazon’s S3 service? You bet.

Software patents are not just absurd, they are actively harmful to the Internet economy. That’s why we need to End Software Patents. Now.

The more I learn about patents, the more I wonder if the whole system should just be abolished — I’m not just thinking software patents here, which clearly are absurd, but patents in general. It seems to me that there is little or no evidence that patents do any good at all, and lots of evidence that they do harm.

An article in Techdirt demonstrates this:

Back in 2005, we pointed out that Seagate’s CEO, Bill Watkins, should be worried about the future of flash solid state drives (SSDs) eventually replacing hard drives. It’s taken some time, but those SSDs are starting to show up in laptops like the MacBook Air and the Lenovo Thinkpad x300. […] So what’s Watkin’s response? If SSDs get really cheap, he’ll just sue everyone for patent infringement. Yes, even though SSDs are totally different technology than a standard hard drive, Seagate’s holding on to patents that cover “many of the ways a storage device communicates with a computer.”

If the USA (and other developed economies such as the EU) had a market economy, then Seagate would be forced to compete on the quality of their products — and they’d be successful to the extend that they made stuff people wanted, which would benefit us all — rather than using legal tactics to knobble the competition. The present system allows rent-seeking patent holders to harm competitors, consumers, and (indirectly) everyone.

OpenStreetMap has been accepted as an “organisation” for Google Summer of Code 2008. This means that Google will potentially be funding students to work on open source projects to do with OpenStreetMap.

The notice on OpenGeoData reads:

We’ve been selected to mentor students this year. We have about six potential mentors so far, and now we need some students. If you are a student, or teach students, or know either teachers or students, and think they’d be good match for OpenStreetMap in the Summer of Code, encourage them to look through our projects, get in touch with us, and apply next week.

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)