As part of my infatuation with scientific mysteries, I really dug this Nature News piece about how the number 10^122 keeps popping up in many seemingly-unrelated places in physics. Scott Funkhouser (what a name) from The Citadel identifies five of them- I’m sure this ‘coincidence’ would seem weirder if I knew more physics, but it seems pretty weird regardless. The basic implication is that the universe is a lot simpler than we think it is. An old, but surely good, theme in physics. With this sort of physics data mining getting easier and easier, the Large Hadron Collider coming online this year, and a growing institutional hunger to move beyond the Standard Model, the smell of new physics is in the air. Good things.
Secondly- and more importantly in my book- my favorite author is mulling running for congress. If you like what Lawrence Lessig writes about copyright, technology, corruption, and politics, I encourage you to check out his campaign at http://lessig08.org/ . I regret I don’t live in his congressional district, because I literally can’t think of a better person to send to congress.
Paul Buchheit on The most important thing to understand about new products and startups:
For web based products at least, there’s another very powerful technique: release early and iterate. The sooner you can start testing your ideas, the sooner you can start fixing them.
I wrote the first version of Gmail in one day. It was not very impressive. All I did was stuff my own email into the Google Groups (Usenet) indexing engine. I sent it out to a few people for feedback, and they said that it was somewhat useful, but it would be better if it searched over their email instead of mine. That was version two. After I released that people started wanting the ability to respond to email as well. That was version three. That process went on for a couple of years inside of Google before we released to the world.
As a few readers of this blog know, since last summer I’ve been working on a large writing project. The tentative plan is for a book, and the release date is unknown. I’m about 60,000 words in, most of the argumentative structure and key points are there, and there’s lots and lots of work on the prose left to do. I’ve dedicated this next week to being a mental health week. It’s my first real break since summer… hopefully I can actually keep myself to it and decompress a little. Trying to write a book is a lot more brain-space intensive than I thought it’d be.
I was trying to explain exactly what I’m writing about to some friends, and having some difficulty… and I have an executive summary due in a couple weeks. So I’ll take this opportunity to try to explain a little bit about just what this big project that’s been soaking up most of my time is about.
The topic is cognitive enhancement. As in, drugs, gene therapy, treatments, or other sorts of technology that will make a person smarter in noticeable, meaningful, and multidimensional ways. I’ve outlined seven different potential technological routes to “first-generation” cognitive enhancement, and I think/hope/plan that this book will end up being a pretty good overview of what the field of cognitive enhancement will look like in the coming years. I’ve hopes to get into the genetics, pharmacology, supporting research advancements, major hurdles, likely dead-end approaches, and neuroscience/psychology surrounding this field, as well to cover things like what IQ does (and doesn’t) mean, social influences on intelligence, the concept of ‘neuroengineering’, somatic vs germline enhancements, and what caveats and limitations will likely go along with these potential enhancements. What sorts of complexity can be sidestepped, and what sorts of complexity will need to be tackled head-on. I’d say about 60% of it will deal with the science and systems theory involved (but I’ll try to make it interesting, promise!).
(At least, that’s an overview of the science stuff I hope to figure out and fit in. Actual results may vary considerably.)
The other 40% will cover the policy and ethics issues which go with the idea of ‘enhancement’– thoughts about how these technologies may stress the fabric of society, and some important things for scientists and policymakers to keep in mind. I’m neither “pro” nor “con” enhancement: I just think it’ll happen. In fact, to sum up the message of the book, I’d say this:
Significant cognitive enhancement is going to happen sooner than most people, even most experts, think. These seven distinct approaches are viable, and if even one of them works, it’ll transform society in many ways. We should start thinking about the implications and ideal forms of these technologies now, so we have choices about how they enter the world.
So that’s my current project. I’m really excited about it. There are a lot of “ifs” in making it happen. Honestly, I think if I write half the book I want to write I’ll be happy.
I try hard to keep away from politics and religion here at Modern Dragons. They make for divisive discussions, people (including myself) tend to have all sorts of dogmatic baggage about these topics, and often I have very little to add that can’t be found elsewhere. But I think it’s an unhealthy trend in modern life to turn vast swaths of the public sphere completely apolitical. The political process is messy and divisive, but if we remove it from our day to day life, or even try to segment society into “political zones” and “non-political zones” I think democracy breaks down.
So, here’s a little dip into politics on a mostly apolitical blog.
Obama
I’m solidly behind Obama for president. Of all the candidates, I feel he most appreciates complexity, most understands the nature of corruption, and is most able to generate, adapt, and implement a positive vision for America. He’s not perfect– but I believe in him like I’ve never believed in any other political candidate.
Two items I would point readers who are curious about Obama toward are
1. Ars Technica’s coverage of Obama’s technology proposal;
2. Lawrence Lessig on why he supports Barack.
Steve Sailer
A rather odd thing about my political leaning is that, though I’m a fairly committed liberal, my favorite political blogger is the pretty hardcore conservative (and decidedly maverick) Steve Sailer. I’d like to say something high-minded like reading a conservative blogger was a conscious choice to diversify my information stream, but the fact of the matter is it wasn’t: Steve is just the most engaging, self-critically honest, and fair political blogger I’ve found. Very smart as well, and drawn to what I think are important topics. Often, very difficult and divisive topics I would never feel comfortable writing about, but topics I see real value in building open discussions around. Maybe I’m corrupting my mind by reading Steve, but I simply haven’t found a liberal political blogger of his blogging caliber (suggestions in the comments welcome!). So while we disagree on plenty of things, the way he approaches his topics compels me to take what he says seriously.
Steve’s Latest Column
Steve has been writing a lot about Obama. His latest VDare column delves into questions of Obama’s racial and religious identity, largely drawing from Obama’s first book, Dreams from My Father and connections between Obama and the pastor of Obama’s church. Like most of Steve’s VDare columns, I don’t think it’s as fair or as balanced as what’s on his personal blog. In fact, though I don’t have any objections to its factual content, it may be the worst thing Steve has ever written in how it selectively engages some facts in order to tar someone’s public persona. I think it’s unintentional and completely non-malicious, at worst just willful selective engagement and willful ignorance of how the piece (and its 20+ siblings) will be interpreted.
Maybe I’m a little touchy when it comes to my political candidate. And maybe I’m a liberal, Steve’s a conservative, and never shall we see eye to eye. But lots of Steve’s other regular readers have been commenting about his odd and continuing implicit criticisms of Obama- I don’t think I’m way out of line, bringing it up.
If it were some political hack writing this I wouldn’t care. And Steve is entitled to run his blog as he sees fit. But damn it, Steve, you’re my favorite political blogger. I’m not going to give you a free pass.
So in the interest of keeping an honest blogger honest, here’s my reply to Steve’s column (a draft of which was posted in the comments). One sentence version: Steve, you say you actually kinda like Obama? Prove it.
Based on this, and your 20+ other recent postings on Obama which largely concentrate on these issues, I believe you have an impressively nuanced (and, I think, generally fair) understanding of Obama’s racial and religious identity. You touch on a lot of very interesting things in fresh ways.
But having said that, you write very critically, and your choice of topics– both to write so much about Obama and not any other candidate, and to concentrate on racial and religious identity issues, at the expense of other candidates and other topics– is not a neutral action. You’ve said you actually kinda like the guy, but these writing choices change the discussion, and I believe they hurt Obama’s candidacy. If that’s your intention, that’s your intention, and I’ll butt out- but based on what you’ve said in the past, I don’t think that’s what you mean to be doing.
To put it less delicately, if you don’t want to be an accessory to electing someone you really dislike, such as Clinton, I think you should broaden your coverage of candidates or topics, or put a stronger “I actually like Obama because X, Y, and Z” disclaimer on your writings. Because, regardless of your intentions, I feel pieces like these generate and nurture anti-Obama feelings.
Tangentially… after reading your blog for years, I’m surprised you seem to identify so strongly with the Republican party. I think one can have good reasons to support the Republican party– historically, at least, they’ve been the party of competence and realism– but in your case, the blind consistency of support is a datapoint that doesn’t really fit. You’re not dogmatic about anything else– why do you still consistently back said horse, especially after the dog’s breakfast that neocons (and to some extent evangelicals) have made of things these past few years? Income from what you see as your base, perhaps. Income is important. And insidiously persuasive. I’m very far from calling your blogging money-driven or corrupt– you’re the least corrupt, most open-minded political blogger I’ve come across. That’s why I read you. But I read these critical analyses of Democratic candidates, and I wait for similarly incisive analyses of Republican candidates, and they don’t show up.
Well, maybe that’s a bit of a cheap shot. Maybe not. It’s hard to say.
To get back to my original point… you seem to secretly appreciate Obama. At least, you seem to have much less disdain for him than almost any other candidate. Why not write about some of his good attributes for a change? At minimum, you’ve said he’s an interesting candidate– I understand you write about what you know (and I wouldn’t have it any other way, and Obama did write a book tackling his racial identity, so you’re not just shooting in the dark), but surely there are non-racial and non-religious attributes about this complex candidate you find interesting enough to write about?
Mike.
They say that discussing politics can be like pulling teeth. So, as long as I’m at it, here are some political musings before I head out to get my wisdom teeth out.
Geek icon RU Sirius of the webzine 10 Zen Monkeys has called for the creation of an Open Source Party in American politics. As a hybrid of libertarian/liberal/paleocon/futurist/other philosophies, the party would stand for such things as making government more transparent and accountable, strengthening civil liberties, and re-tooling items ranging from copyright law to currency to work better in today’s and tomorrow’s increasingly digital (and post-scarcity) world.
Specifically, the seven platform items are:
1. Let’s Have A Democracy (let’s figure out secure internet voting and remove the systemic constraints on creating new political parties);
2. Let’s Have Civil Liberties and a Bill of Rights (let’s repeal legislation that has infringed on our constitutional liberties and rethink the drug war);
3. Let’s End the Imperial Foreign Policy;
4. A New “Energy Task Force”;
5. Let’s Explore The Possibility of an Open Source Monetary System;
6. Let’s End Corporate Personhood and Other Rules that Unfairly Advantage Corporations;
7. Let My Web People Go! (let’s figure out how copyright should work in a digital, post-scarcity economy).
Though the party is still just “a gleam in the eye and not an extant organization,” I think it has a lot of potential– not only does the party’s philosophy seem coherent and communicable, but RU Sirius’s position statements read like a laundry list of thoughtful approaches to what may be some of the most important issues of the 21st century. There are a few notable exceptions (enhancement ethics/bioethics?) and I have a few misgivings about the platform (can strong civil rights survive in the age of garage biotech? I hope so, but I’m not sure.). But I think the platform offers a fresh and thoughtful take on what issues are important and I sincerely hope, whether or not the party takes off, that the concepts inherent in the platform make their way into our political discourse.
In the long run, of course, more is at stake in how we deal with Sirius’s overarching point of ‘openness’ than just the singular (albeit important) issues RU Sirius lists. What’s at stake is the participatory nature of our government. There’s been a trend in America (perhaps western society, perhaps the world) to treat governance as someone else’s problem. I think this springs from the weird way our culture, institutions, and indeed, government have emergently co-evolved to compartmentalize, obfuscate, and encourage outsourcing of political activity, rather than there being any sort of explicit conspiracy. But it’s led to systemic disconnects between voters and their government. People don’t participate in government: they tend to elect least-worst candidates whom they hope will be able to navigate and weather Washington’s dysfunctional and corrosive economy of influence, or if nothing else, maybe bring home some bacon. Votes are “fire and forget”.
In short, our government sucks. It’s not participatory in any significant sense of the term, and it’s simply broken in some respects. RU Sirius’s point seems to be that, surely in the age of the internet and with the potential openness that Web 2.0 technologies could provide, it doesn’t have to suck as badly as it does.
The example that springs to mind when I try to understand how this “open source government” philosophy could be translated into practical initiatives is the Sunlight Foundation. It’s a non-profit government watchdog organization named after the disinfectant powers of sunlight. It has notably has created a Web 2.0 mashup that clearly and intuitively lays out the location of every congressional earmark (aka ‘porkbarrel legislation’). To oversimplify some, it’s a map of who the most corrupt politicians are.
It’s just one mash-up. It won’t change the world overnight. But this “open source” style of political activism, in allowing voters a clear, intuitive look at the inner workings of government, has the potential to sidestep the vast and layered forces of inertia in Washington. Eventually, the theory goes, if everything about the way government is run is made available, accessible, and intuitive to the public, that’s going to normalize how decisions in Washington are made, no matter how many special interest groups want to skew the system in their favor.
All in all, RU Sirius’s proposal is based on a powerful and seemingly feasible core idea. I hope it pans out.
A contemplation for a Sunday night-
America’s founding fathers meant for the Constitution to be a living and binding governance document. To both guide and reflect the shape of America’s government, and to be amended as things came up.
However, though we’re still bound by the Constitution, in large part we’ve stopped updating it, or at any rate, the amendments we’ve ratified aren’t representative of the most significant ways we’ve altered, reinterpreted, or departed from the original governmental forms and rights set forth in the Constitution (e.g., see the tangled skein that has arisen from the commerce clause, or the banality of perhaps half of the amendments after the Bill of Rights). The majority of our federal government- to this day- has very little constitutional basis.
Simply put, for whatever reasons, our big legal, organizational, and social shifts no longer get amended into the Constitution, and thus the Constitution (though still binding) no longer reflects our actual government, our society, or the law of the land.
Is that good or bad? I don’t know– but I would guess somewhat bad, because having a constitution detached from the how the law of the land actually works obscures the form of government from its citizens, and it obscures and hampers the function of the ideals and checks and balances built into the Constitution.
Now, I realize I’m probably not the first person to make this observation. However, here’s the question I’m throwing out there:
If we were to update the Constitution to be consistent with how our government is *actually* run, what would our new-slash-actual constitution look like?
Some existing amendments would be dropped, as they’ve been rendered toothless or are obsolete in modern society. Many amendments would need to be reworded; and many, many would need to be added. The sections dealing with the shape of the government would need a major overhaul, with very little in the way of states’ rights, and huge sections on federal bureaucracies, intelligence and defense agencies, new executive branch powers, regulatory agencies, and so forth.
It could be a very scary document, at that.
Ed Boyden, a neuroscientist over at MIT/Technology Review, has started a general-interest science blog. I’m happy to see this, as Ed seems not only smart, but prone to write frankly and creatively about deeply relevant issues.
Another interesting, rather speculative piece I’d direct people toward is “Is There Anything Good About Men?” – American Psychological Association, Invited Address, 2007, Roy F. Baumeister.
I’ve not decided whether I agree with his conclusions, and since it’s a conference address it’s a little citation-lite, but it’s a thoughtful and thought-provoking mix of fact, theory, and conjecture.
Back to paper writing.
Citizendium, the wiki encyclopedia I volunteer with, is holding a call for essays about which free content license we should choose for our content. It’s an open call for essays, so even if you’re not a member of Citizendium and have an opinion you’re encouraged to write it up and send it in. Wikipedians and other indirect stakeholders welcome.
Here’s my essay (i.e., personal opinion) on what and how things should be considered. As a complete position statement it may be a little rough around the edges, and it may move rather slow for those who live and breathe this stuff. Feel free to leave comments.
Citizendium’s License
Mike Johnson
DRAFT version
There’s a lot at stake in our choice of free content license, and we have lots of options. In this essay I’ll run through options that have been discussed on the forums, some practical concerns, potential future developments which may be relevant, and my own recommendation. I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t claim this essay to be a definitive analysis- but I think, at minimum, it maps out some options, issues, and opinions that should be considered.
===Part 1: Our Options===
The most common content licensing options discussed on the forums have been:
– GNU Free Document License (like Wikipedia): people may use our content freely, so long as they credit Citizendium and any improvements under the same conditions, and conform to certain (some some circumstances, rather unwieldy) regulations pertaining to including licensing information along with documents. It’s very similar to CC-by-sa, but as the license wasn’t designed with wikis in mind, it’s a bit ‘creaky’ in various ways (it may be sacrilege, but I’d refer readers to the Wikipedia article on the GFDL for criticisms of the license). Wikipedia was founded before there was a mature ecosystem of free content licenses and chose this license by necessity.
– Creative Commons: Attribution, Share-alike (CC-by-sa for short, aka the “Creative Commons Wiki License”, like the Encyclopedia of Earth): people may freely copy and improve our content, as long as they credit Citizendium and release any improvements they make under the same conditions.
– Creative Commons: Attribution, Share-alike, Non-commercial (i.e., CC-sa-nc, like many images on Flickr): people may freely copy and improve our content, as long as they credit Citizendium, release any improvements they make under the same conditions, and don’t use our content to gain “commercial advantage or private monetary compensation”.
– Dual-licensing our content under both the GFDL and CC-by-sa, since they essentially lay out the same abstract set of rights and obligations (there are certain technical legal uncertainties about the possibility of doing this, but the people who work on these licenses with whom I’ve interacted didn’t shoot this down as a possibility). The benefit would be better outgoing compatibility, that websites using either the GFDL or CC-by-sa could integrate our content with their content. The main drawback would presumably be another layer of licensing complexity.
– Public Domain. No legal protections on our content whatsoever; people are free to do anything they please with our content (and importantly, repackage, change, and sell it under whatever conditions they prefer).
Of note, any license we choose for our fully homegrown content will exist side-by-side with the GFDL, which applies to articles with content originally sourced from Wikipedia. There’s no way of changing this.
===Part 2: Practicalities===
Non-commercial clause. One of the big question marks in choosing a license is whether to add a clause prohibiting commercial or commercial-related use of our content. On paper, it sounds great: we’re contributing to Citizendium for humanitarian reasons, and we don’t want anyone making money off the sweat of our brows. Or if anyone does, it should be us.
But from a practical standpoint, I personally don’t like the non-commercial clause, because it
1. Adds a level of ambiguity to our license: commercial acts don’t necessarily have clear boundaries. And if people have to ask whether a use will be okay, most won’t.
2. Answers a danger (other people making money off our content) which may be rather trivial. Someone may sell our content if we license it under CC-by-sa– but they could just get it for free from citizendium.org. I can’t dismiss this as a concern, since in the future businesses may get more clever and obnoxious in their attempts to wring money out of free content– but it hasn’t been a major problem for Wikipedia yet. That Wikipedia is freely available online (and that the GFDL protects Wikipedia’s content from people trying to claim ownership and economic rights over it) takes a lot of wind out of the sails of those trying to monetize it.
3. Puts our content at a competitive disadvantage in the quest for eyeballs. Content without this clause will simply get used more. I think getting our wonderful content out there to be read by as many people as possible is really very important. Relatedly, it
4. Walls our content off from being combined with other sorts of free content (one can’t mix-and-match CC-by-sa and CC-sa-nc content unless one can clearly show it’s not for a commercial use- a risk many people will not take.
So, I think it’s cleaner and better for reaching more people with our content to forego a non-commercial clause.
That said, the clause would increase our options for fundraising via selling businesses the right to use our work in commercial settings. We may or may not want to do this, but options are generally good.
Whether or not to go with CC-sa-nc is probably the most consequential choice on our plate. However, other relevant factors among the licensing options are:
Compatibility with Wikipedia. This is a huge factor in choosing a license, and one that’s been debated on the forums: some are strongly for compatibility, some strongly against. Personally, I see full and seamless compatibility as very desirable in the long-term: Wikipedia’s going to be around for a while, and if we set things up such that we can seamlessly share content between projects, I think it’ll help us both out in obvious (less duplicated effort, less license administration overhead) and non-obvious ways. And philosophically, it’s very much in the spirit of free content to work toward a licensing ecosystem where omnidirectional sharing is easy.
But in the short-term, things are more mixed. I don’t think any of us want Wikipedians to swoop in and copy some of our competitive advantage away (and I assure you, from reading certain blogs, some Wikipedians are waiting to try to do so). Honestly, for a variety of reasons, I’m not all that worried about this– but I do strongly believe we need to avoid the appearance that the really good stuff from Citizendium ends up on Wikipedia anyway during our first few years of existence.
Now, to be honest, I feel a little dirty about bringing this up. We’ve used some of Wikipedia’s articles as jumping-off-points for some of our articles, and it seems natural that we should return the favor. And it just seems right to allow content to freely pass between our projects. I think it’s very important to be a good neighbor to Wikipedia (as well as to other free content projects). And I think choosing incompatibility for incompatibility’s sake, to wall off our homegrown content from Wikipedia for competitive advantage, would simply be unacceptable and inconsistent with our mission of improving the state of free content.
But I believe that in choosing a license there are many things to weight, and we should also keep in mind that, though there are external stakeholders in this decision whose wishes we should consider, we’re not beholden to any one of them: we are a sovereign community and our most fundamental responsibilities in choosing a license are to our community, its philosophical and practical goals, and its health.
So I think we need to take this situation seriously and, if we do choose to be compatible or incompatible with Wikipedia, we should make our choice with respect to the likely practical consequences to our community in addition to philosophical ideals. I don’t know what these practical consequences would be with respect to compatibility/incompatibility with Wikipedia- I think we’d do just fine in either scenario, and perhaps this issue is a tempest in a teapot. This is quite possible. But I view talking about these issues surrounding compatibility with Wikipedia as 1. part of due diligence in writing this essay, and 2. a reminder to the Erik Möllers of Wikipedia that we are a sovereign community (I do encourage Mr. Möller and others who hold an opinion to submit an essay. Wikipedians are among the stakeholders in this decision, and our decision will be poorer for not hearing from them).
As a digression, I think it’s in Wikipedia’s best interests to not swoop in and copy our content wholesale, from both the standpoint of having pride in their own content (if Wikipedia copies wholesale from us, that’s a pretty harsh statement about the health of and confidence in their processes), and that they should take care to avoid anything that might stifle competition, because competition is valuable to the health of their community. But although there are many thoughtful people at Wikipedia, I don’t think we should count on Wikipedia per se to keep these things in mind, since it’ll be individual contributors acting under many different assumptions that would be doing the copying. I think at this point we should assume that, depending on internal politics at Wikipedia, they may copy from us very freely if we legally allow it. And we couldn’t really cry foul, since they’d be fully within their rights.
So, though my personal stance is to weight long-term seamless compatibility with Wikipedia as a significant positive (albeit among other important factors), and short-term seamless compatibility as a minor positive, I do suggest that people think very carefully and honestly about this issue. It’s complicated and potentially important, and I doubt I’m doing it full justice.
Compatibility with Creative Commons. Wikipedia is, of course, a major factor in compatibility, but Creative Commons content is growing very quickly as well. If we went with CC-by-sa we’d be compatible with e.g., the Encyclopedia of Earth. There are reasons to put compatibility with Wikipedia on a pedestal in relation to Creative Commons, but in the long run, perhaps not as many as one would think.
Ease of internal administration. Frankly, I think this is the strongest argument for going with the GFDL. It’s simple, and simple is very good. If we have some content licensed differently than other content, it becomes a headache to administer very quickly. Going with the GFDL isn’t necessarily a silver bullet, however, since we’d face problems with importing Creative Commons-licensed content. It would be worth examining Wikipedia’s approach to importing CC-licensed content to see if they’ve figured out clever and low-friction ways to handle this.
Quality of License. Put simply, Creative Commons licenses are better laid-out and more suitable for wikis than the GFDL.
Customization. We should consider whether we want to accept any of these licensing options as-is or whether we want to (at risk of making our content less compatible with other free content) add in any additional terms to the broad-stroke license we choose.
===Part 3: Future Developments in Free Content Licensing===
– CC-by-sa has a ‘compatibility framework’ which attempts to bridge the gap between a Creative Commons-structured license and other free content licenses. The current revision of CC-by-sa isn’t compatible with the GFDL (or any FSF license), but from personal correspondence with the FSF I believe it was a matter of timing and not substantive reasons.
– The current draft of the next revision of the GFDL includes a relicensing provision that
If the Work was previously published, with no Cover Texts, no Invariant Sections, and no Acknowledgements or Dedications or Endorsements section, in a system for massive public collaboration under version 1.2 of this License, and if all the material in the Work was either initially developed in that collaboration system or had been imported into it before 1 June 2006, then you may relicense the Work under the GNU Wiki License.
The unreleased GNU Wiki License will presumably be much more suitable for wikis than the GFDL, and include compatibility provisions matching up with CC-by-sa’s compatibility framework.
So, as a bottom-line, I would say there’s a good chance CC-by-sa and GFDL content will be compatible sometime in the future. This potential development would make choosing between CC-by-sa and the GFDL a lot less pressing (though, naturally, we shouldn’t depend on this happening). I think it’d make CC-nc-sa a less desirable licensing choice because there wouldn’t be that potential for radical simplification since the GFDL and CC-nc-sa simply can’t be made compatible.
===Part 4: Other Issues===
Copyright sharing. I think it’s desirable for contributors to share copyright with Citizendium, if and only if Citizendium enters into a legally binding contract with contributors to not use said power for certain aims. Or to use said power only for certain aims. The devil’s in the details, but I see no reason why copyright sharing paired with such a contract couldn’t provide all of the positives and none of the negatives put forth in these arguments. Of note, copyright sharing would only apply to homegrown content, which would reduce its utility.
One of the possible benefits of copyright sharing would be the ability to merge homegrown CC-licensed and GFDL-licensed articles under a GFDL article. There would like be many other such relatively minor legal maneuverings that would become possible with copyright sharing. However, once we start importing non-homegrown CC content, such merges would become more complicated. Copyright sharing isn’t a silver bullet.
===Part 5: My Recommendation===
If you’ve been reading closely, you can probably guess what my recommendation will be: that we should license our content under CC-by-sa. It will probably give us eventual full compatibility with Wikipedia (good, in my mind), short-term incompatibility with Wikipedia (mixed, but slightly negative in my mind), full compatibility with Creative Commons sources, and a more sane wiki license than the GFDL. Until compatibility is reached, there’ll be some administration headache in keeping licensing issues sorted out; hypothetically, after CC-GFDL compatibility is established, most of that should go away.
Alternatively, I think simply going with the GFDL is a good second choice (for many of the administrative reasons argued here), provided that we will indeed be able to relicense our content under the GNU Wiki License. If we choose this route, I think we should make a point of following up with the FSF for information and advice.
As a third choice, I would have few qualms about dual-licensing our content under both CC-by-sa and the GFDL. It would add some legal ambiguity (depending on whom one asks, the GFDL may not allow this) for what seem like rather ephemeral gains. Perhaps others have alternative perspectives on this.
There’s no silver bullet licensing choice– but conversely, for what it’s worth, with the GFDL and CC-by-sa likely converging I think there are relatively few bad licensing choices.
Dear Readers,
Here’s a quick update on what I’ve been up to and blog plans:
1. I’ve written an article for the Wikipedia community newsletter, the Wikipedia Signpost. It covers what’s been going on at Citizendium, our future plans, why Wikipedians should care about Citizendium, and some personal philosophical digressions. I really like how the article turned out. If you’re a Wikipedian or interested in wikis I encourage you to go check it out.
2. Quotes of the week- I’ve been working full-steam on some ideas (see 3.) and my quote of the week tradition has been one of the casualties. Sorry! They’ll likely return when the intellectual ferment on these new ideas settles down. This gives me some time to build up more really good quotes, too.
3. I promised you five novel research ideas in July, and I gave you three. Well, the last two ideas have grown into a rather substantial research project, which may yet end up on this blog– I’m just not ready to post it. I might also look for alternate or additional venues to publish it, and may be asking my neuroscientist friends for publication advice once it’s in a more polished form (appreciated, as always).
A lot has been said about Andrew Keen’s new book, The Cult of the Amateur, in which he argues that the products of user-driven content communities (e.g., Wikipedia) often compare poorly to those produced by more traditional institutions.
Over at the Wikipedia Signpost, Wikipedia user Thespian opens his review of Andrew Keen’s new book with this quip:
One of the hardest parts of reading The Cult of the Amateur is the temptation to agree with the author, Andrew Keen. It’s tempting, when involved in an edit war, to pick up the book, read it, and say, “My god, he’s right! People who don’t have a clue are RUINING the Internet!”, before stepping back and realizing, he’s also talking about you.
For some reason, this reminds me of David Gerard‘s amusing (and doubtlessly true) note that
[M]assive collaboration is hard. The main problem is how to work with idiots you can’t get rid of, who consider you an idiot they can’t get rid of.
