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Playing within the rules: Free content communities and copyright
It is commented sometimes that Commons is a haven for a particular variety of wikilawyering known as copyright wikilawyering. It is one of the most irritating types of wikilawyering to be on the receiving end of (and I have, several times), because for Wikimedians there is no trump to the “non-free content” card. It can seem utterly petty and pointless.
But (although we don’t have to be jerks about it) we have no choice. There are two ways to protest the current copyright system: use the existing system to subvert the traditional conclusions from within the system; or fight through courts and parliaments to have the system changed. If you use Creative Commons, or like to think of yourself as part of the “free content movement” like Wikimedia does, then you are part of the former.
And if you choose to play the game, you have to play it better than anyone. You accept the limitations as soon as you deal yourself in, and you work within those parameters. And that’s why you learn about freedom of panorama and sadly find yourself applying it to all kinds of previously-thought-free scenes. Just as Wikiquette has “Assume good faith”, Free content has “Assume unfree content”. They play off each other uneasily at times.
The benefits of this approach, of playing the copyright game, are that anyone can do it, today, right now. They can give up some of their copyrights and let people copy their work as suits them. Fighting in courts and parliaments is expensive and difficult with no great hope or guarantee of victory.
It would be nice if our lawmakers would go back to the drawing board and write a new copyright that made sense in the era of the Internet, but all efforts to “fix” copyright since the passage of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998 have only made things worse, granting more unenforceable exclusive rights to an ever-increasing pool of “authors” who have no need or desire to sue the people with whom they are engaged in the business of “culture” — holding conversations, publicly re-imagining the stories that make up their lives.
Creative Commons aims to do what Congress won’t or can’t do — offer an approach to copyright that helps those of us who don’t want deal that Disney and their pals have insisted on for every snatch of creativity. Creative Commons achieves this through a set of licenses, legal notices that set out permitted uses for creative works.
In explaining the benefit of Creative Commons, he also exactly highlights its weaknesses. Lawmakers have failed us (most jurisdictions worldwide now have ridiculous copyright terms). Creative Commons is a soothing non-answer to this failure.
It reminds me, in a strange way, of how the media promotes outrageous ideals of beauty for women, and many women feel it is their personal failure for not meeting these ideals rather than the extremity of the outrageous system in the first place. It’s the twisted system that needs your attention, not your personal behaviour.
I like Creative Commons. But I wish I had an angry noisy anti-copyright-system movement to go along with it.
What's hard about Wikipedia?
Erik reported some good news to foundation-l recently: WikiEducator has won a grant of US$100,000 for ‘‘the Learning4Content project to assist in building capacity in MediaWiki editing skills for at least 2500 educators in 52 countries of the Commonwealth’‘.
I’m not very familiar with WikiEducator, but they look like WMF might if you dragged everyone away from their computers. I imagine they overlap a fair bit. Maybe it’s like: WMF is all about the content creation, and WikiEducator is about the content distribution.
The full Learning4Content proposal is here.
Luckily Erik has got in their ear – they only want to use CC-BY or CC-BY-SA. :D (see section G)
One of the outcomes is ‘‘The establishment of a community of free content developers.’‘ (I think they mean developers as in editors, rather than coders.) But the main activity that seems like it will lead to this is ‘‘Develop tutorials for Wiki editing[…]’‘ which is reflected in the summary as “MediaWiki editing skills”.
So, what’s hard about Wikipedia? Is it just learning how to use MediaWiki? I don’t think so. That is just the first step, and for the computer-literate, one that is soon passed.
What’s hard?
- Learning the appropriate attitudes and practices between authors and content:
- No ownership. (Wikipedia probably has the most aggressively anti-ownership attitude of any wiki I’ve seen. I really like it, but it can be confronting.)
- You can contribute by making small edits. You don’t have to submit a completed article ready for FAC. Everything is a work in progress.
- Be bold. This was hard for me to learn. For the first few weeks I hung around reading and re-reading policy pages and talk pages in the hope of avoiding possibly offending anyone or getting anything wrong. I made suggestions on talk pages instead of just putting the edits in (and they were mundane things). Luckily someone communicated to me that I should really take “Be bold” seriously, and I did. :)
Maybe what is really confronting about “be bold” (aside from the potential of causing conflict) is its connection to Sapere aude, a phrase I just learned thanks to Wikipedia. It is Latin: ‘’“Dare to know” or “Dare to be wise”, or sometimes translated as “Have courage to use your own reason”’‘. It is the act of giving everyone equally the encouragement and space to speak with authority. You can write history: be bold. Believe that it is just as legitimate for you to write it as anyone else. Once one is ingrained in Wikimedia culture I think one forgets how confronting this is to the status quo, where authority is a heavy tome with dusty pages, or a broadsheet with a Gothic script. I think it is this aspect of Wikimedian culture that earns it the tags “democracy” or “revolution”, although I don’t know of any policy or guideline that states this attitude explicitly. It is just part of the wallpaper, part of the building, part of the atmosphere.
- Learning attitudes and practices between contributors:
- Consensus. (Mainly “Consensus can include times when you personally disagree.”)
- Assume good faith: easy to parrot, hard to live.
- “It’s OK to disagree”. Something else that I don’t know of a neat guideline for, but it follows from “Be bold” and “Consensus” (if everyone just disagreed, you wouldn’t need either).
- Learning the community attitude towards content:
- Neutral point of view. Although it’s possible to edit for a long time and not interact with others, you’d have to either consciously practice NPOV in the first place (which means you “get it”), or else edit incredibly, incredibly esoteric topics. (Topics that are merely “incredibly esoteric” may well have their followers in Wikipedia already.) Confronting what NPOV means on a topic that is dear to your heart is not easy. Some people never get it.
- Wikipedia is free content. You’re welcome to package it up however you like and even sell it. No, really. (This is another thing that is stated more indirectly than directly: there is Wikipedia:Non-free content but no “Wikipedia:Free content”. Or even a “WP:IS”. ;) [This point is perhaps the one that is least-well taught and even known among existing community members.]
Although I’ve talked about Wikipedia, these points all apply to all Wikimedia projects, with the possible exception of NPOV.
So I wonder, what else is essential to the Wikimedian culture? Is anything here superfluous?
How well are we doing at sharing these as our values? (Especially given half of them are not explicitly stated)
I wonder if WikiEducator will cover these kinds of things?
The Wikimedia projects: history and deliberation
After Wikimania was over, I caught a taxi to the Taipei airport with Adam Hyde and we discussed his pet wiki(s), FLOSS Manuals, and mine, Wikimedia. He asked me about the projects that WMF manages (I prefer that verb to runs, which implies rather more control), and like probably a good many Wikimedians, I struggled to make sure I hadn’t forgotten any as I listed them. “Did I mention Wikisource?… oh, and don’t forget Wikispecies…what is that other one… ah, Wikiquote!” As it happens I think I still left out Wikinews.
Why is it so hard to remember which projects fall under the WMF umbrella? Shouldn’t they be a natural consequence of the Foundation’s Mission statement?
On the 11 April 2007, the WMF Board accepted the Mission statement, the first line of which reads
The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.
This statement was formalised and accepted four years after the creation of the Foundation, and some six years after Wikipedia began. MetaWiki sprang into creation just ten months after Wikipedia, and Wiktionary followed hot on its heels two months later.
Why does WMF have a Mission statement? In his RFC, Erik commented
What’s the point [of a mission statement]? Aside from uniting behind a set of key goals, it helps us to decide which activities fall within our scope and which ones don’t — something that is not always easy, given the diversity of our existing projects and communities. Should we launch a WikiFoo project, or is Foo not part of our mission? Both the vision and mission statement will be frequently cited in future discussions of this kind, so they are relevant, and not just organizational fluff.
I argued at the time for the word “educational” to be included (originally it just said “knowledge”, and then “content” – then “educational content”).
It’s all been a bit backwards. By the time this document was made official, all the existing Wikimedia projects had been created (or at least conceived of), and dozens of others had been rejected. The driving force behind a project’s adoption or rejection (and by “project” here I mean Wikipedia, Wikinews, etc – not a specific language incarnation), lately, has been how noisy and determined the start-up group of users has been. So failing to make one’s case right now does not mean the project is forever doomed: it just means “not right now”. Get enough people on board and try again.
In the early days I believe it can be summed up by a single keyword: “WP:NOT”.
“WP:NOT” is Wikipedian short-hand for the Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not policy. It goes like this: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. It is WP:NOT a place for meta-essays. (Hence, meta, which as far as wikis go is kind of like the spare bedroom where you store all the junk you can’t quite bear to throw out, fix or find a proper home for.) Wikipedia is WP:NOT a dictionary. (Hence, Wiktionary.) Wikipedia is WP:NOT a place for how-tos. (Hence, Wikibooks.) Wikipedia is WP:NOT a collection of quotes. (Hence, Wikiquote.) And so on.
It makes me wonder what Wikipedia might have ended up like if it had started life as “Wiki-almanac” or something other title altogether. What’s in a name, indeed. The idea that Wikipedia is WP:NOT an indiscriminate collection of information is, after all, one that came solely from the community.
Wikinews is perhaps the only “original” project after Wikipedia. (If it was supposed to counter recentism, I guess it has dismally failed, whereas the other projects have largely “succeeded” in ridding Wikipedia of their style of content.) The rest all began life as a definition of what something else was not. This is not a criticism: it’s my explanation for why it’s so hard to remember the precise set of projects. And it’s also the reason why the Mission statement rather fails the task Erik set for it. It doesn’t at all explain why we do have Wikiquote, after all, or why we don’t have a code archive like LiteratePrograms. (Erik proposed in April that it be adopted into the WMF family, an idea that was halfheartedly agreed with. The lack of enthusiasm was the real killer of this adoption, rather than anything ideological.)
I asked a question that I’ve not really seen answered: It’s not obvious to me that just because we could subsume a project with suitable qualities, we should. Are we aiming to host every such suitable project?
Does WMF succeed in its mission only when it is the organisation managing the projects that match its mission, or whenever any such project exists? The status quo would suggest that WMF feels the mission is met as long as someone, somewhere, is doing the thing in a vaguely neutral fashion with a vaguely free/open license. And maybe that’s fair enough. Splintering communities of contributors is not likely to be very helpful.
I was interested to learn recently that WMF once offered to take over management of Wikitravel. (This was well before the days of the Mission statement, though.) I wonder how such a prospect would go down today.
There are dozens upon dozens of rejected or ill-conceived projects. Anyone trying to start a new project today has a tough case to make. I suspect that each time a new project starts, part of the existing community is cannibalised, rather than the total community actually expanding. Wikimedia is already spread quite thin and I daresay in five years not all the existing projects will still be with us. I guess the first two to go will be Wikiquote and Wikispecies.
Wikiquote will go because it’s simply not justifiable on the free-content and educational grounds. On both these points it has a pretty weak case. In the end, “but quotes are WP:NOT part of Wikipedia” will not sustain a project forever, I feel. So the how and when of Wikiquote’s demise will be interesting. Like the disowning of a sibling, common sense will struggle with historical fact, lived history. But wait long enough and lived history will just be history. No-one feels nostalgia for events they have not themselves experienced. At that point, it will be bye-bye, Wikiquote. At this stage my guess is Wikia will offer to adopt them. (That makes it sound far simpler than I guess it will be. I expect a fair bit of drama — just like the disowned sibling.)
As for Wikispecies, it will be closed because it simply is a failure. It has not been able to tempt enough Wikipedia editors and Wikimedia Commons editors away from their regular wikis and over to Wikispecies. In the past I have tried to use Wikispecies to look up species information, but it has failed me. I turn to Wikipedia and wa-la, success. It now strikes me as an incomplete set of infoboxes of Wikipedia. So Wikipedia in effect WP:IS Wikispecies, and given its huge head start it is naturally much more successful at it. Wikispecies has failed to articulate its unique selling point.
Given WMF has nothing resembling a policy on closing projects, it will likely hang around for quite a long time, continuing to be stripped away by Wikipedia.
——
So why does any of this matter, anyway?
It matters because the WMF is the guardian of one of the most powerful and influential information sources of our time, Wikipedia. Wikipedia right now is not even seven years old. Most of the people around the world who use it, enjoy it, marvel at it, only understand a tiny part of how amazing a thing it is. When Wikipedia is 20 years old, imagine the potential it has to make a difference in people’s lives around the world. Imagine the potential the other projects have, who are still just toddlers to Wikipedia’s school-age. Now imagine how powerful the WMF umbrella may be, to say who is deemed worthy of shelter, and who is cast out to survive on their own luck.
This lift is going up. If you want to beat the crowds, best be hopping in now.
