[FM Discuss] back from wikimania

Thu Aug 9 02:09:25 PDT 2007

a great read.. 

very interesting to hear of Liang's thesis on user-improved texts in 
the early days of the printed book.

localisation into Hindi and Chinese would be very great to see, and 
perhaps also Spanish. that would give us combined coverage of languages 
spoken by close to 3 in 5 people ;)

i might be able to act as a driver for Spanish localisation to some extent. 
i notice that the Blender Foundation documentation committee (i'm on the 
mailing list) has had no problem finding people to translate their wiki 
manuals into Spanish and Portugese. 

to a large degree the popularity of the tool itself will determine the
likelihood of finding volunteers; it's generally the case that volunteer
translators are also users. would it be necessary to translate all 
manuals into a given language at once or do we encourage translation on a 
tool-by-tool basis? the latter would be much easier i think.

where licensing is concerned i sway strongly in favour of the GPLv2/v3.
while uncompromising in many respects it is a proven license and offers
me (for instance) the convenience and simplicity of being able to bring 
code and documentation together under equal distribution terms.

finally, congrats to Lotte for her fine work on the visual 'branding'. 
it seems the project as a whole is greatly benefitting as a result.

cheers,

julian

Madrid, Spain.
-- 
http://julianoliver.com
http://selectparks.net
emails containing HTML will not be read.

..on or around Wed, Aug 08, 2007 at 08:14:29AM +0200, adam hyde said:
> hey,
> 
> I just got back yessterday from Wikimania. The jet lag is still
> lingering, but a few gins on the plane helped me with adjusting to the
> timezones so I'm in not too bad shape.
> 
> The event was pretty amazing. I will write up a really detailed report
> of it and post it here and on the FM news blog. I think also all talks
> are going to be put online in audio and video although I am not sure
> when.
> 
> So, for a quick report - the event was very focused on all things
> wikimedia (the umbrella foundation for wikipedia and its associated
> projects - wikimedia commons, wikiversity, wikibooks etc -
> http://www.wikimedia.org/)  and mediawiki (the mediawiki tool that the
> fouundation uses for all its projects - http://www.mediawiki.org/). 
> 
> The first day had some excellent speakers
> (http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Schedule). Every presentation
> was very informative and some very inspiring moments. Lawrence Liangs
> presentation about the 'authority of knowledge' was a highlight for me
> on the first day. He spoke about how wikipedia could learn from the
> demise of manuscipt culture at the birth of the print age. As I
> understand it at the start of the print age, printed books were
> considered as the most recent release of a body of work, and updating
> these works and feeding into the content cycle of a book was common. As
> an example Liang used Chaucers Canterbury Tales. The works were updated
> by many people and were living breathing entities, however when he died
> the works became his canon and were considered in some way 'frozen' by
> the academics. Any edit of the text after his death was seen as
> producing a defective edition. So the 'authoritative' point (the
> canonisation of Chaucer by Academics) killed off the participatory
> culture surrounding his texts. Liang was pointing this issue at
> Wikipedia and the debate surrounding how Wikipedia might be striving to
> attain an analogous 'authoritative' position. His point, I think, is
> that the pursuit of wikipedia towards being an 'authoritative knowledge
> object' is less interesting (and potentially troublesome as it may deter
> contributions) than the methodology for creating knowledge that
> wikipedia has established.
> 
> Also on the first day was Masayuki Hatta, another excellent talk. It was
> small but on the button. Masayuki is a debian hacker from Japan, and he
> was talking about the troubled Free Documentation License (FDL) that the
> wikimedia foundation uses for its projects. He argues that the license
> is inappropriate (many people at the event agree with this position) and
> suggested that there is a big problem with changing the license because
> under the FDL the person that created the document holds the copyright
> and only they can relicense the content. We went through this process
> too with fm a few months ago and thankfully everyone agreed to change to
> the GPL. Evan Prodromou (http://wikitravel.org) suggested it might not
> be necesary to get everyones permission as there has been several large
> open source projects that have changed licenses without getting
> permission from all contributers - an interesting point, but I think
> that if Wikipedia did this it would be followed by a great deal of
> controversy as consultation and 'doing things the right way' (not just
> the expedient way) seems me to be regarded very highly in wikimedia
> projects. So Masayuki, being a hacker, suggested a hack to get out of
> the license. He suggested that the Wikimedia Foundation send an envoy to
> the Free Software Foundation to speak to the redraft of the FDL
> currently underway. Masayuki had been involved in a similar process for
> the GPLv3 and said he was surprised that the FSF actually listened and
> made some notable changes as a result.  So, Mayasukis hack included
> lobbying the FSF to make the FDL compatible with other licenses (such as
> some Creative Commons licenses) - this would allow for license
> interoperability between the FDL and other licenses but also it would
> allow for content currently covered by the FDL to be distributed under
> the compatible license. This in effect opens a backdoor for the
> Wikimedia foundation to slip out of and ditch the FDL in favour of
> something more interesting.
> 
> I found this a pretty interesting strategy and Mayasuki and I will start
> a mailing list to kick start this process. 
> 
> There were many other really great panels and presentations. Magnatune
> (http://magnatune.com/) presented their interesting sales strategy for
> CC licensed material. Essentially you can download the music for free of
> buy it for a price you are happy with. This was interesting and I will
> think of this further while I write the financial sustainability plan
> for fm this month.
>  
> Dominic Chen presented the c-shirt project which allows you to remix a
> t-shirt design from cc licensed material and they print out a t-shirt
> for you. I made a pretty clumsy t-shirt from a road sign that said 'gpl'
> and the wikipedia definition of floss. It was admittedly a pretty geeky
> design, but I really appreciated the c-shirts attempts to make this
> whole world of open licenses live beyond the screen.
> 
> I met some very cool people at the event and I found the 'wikimedians'
> very supportive of non-wikimedia/non-mediawiki projects. The feedback
> for what we are doing was immensely positive. I had taken a roll-up
> banner to present fm with (will put some photos up), and printed some
> 'free manuals for free software' t-shirts, had postcards, businesscards,
> stickers, and buttons, and copies of the printed Audacity Manual...plus
> I did 4 presentations of fm - 2 'poster sessions', 1 lightning talk, and
> one workshop. 
> 
> The feedback on the design was huge. The buttons were so popular they
> ran out in the first day. The stickers got stuck to everything from
> laptops to the t-shirts of volunteers. I had a few people come up and
> say the logo was 'hot'...hehe!...so, I think we can pat Lotte on the
> back (I'll do it in about 30 mins when she wakes up ;). 
> 
> I had many people wanting the Audacity book, I didnt have many so I was
> a bit hesitant to hand them out as it was good to have them to show
> people what kind of work we are doing.  I gave 3 away and will send
> another 4 to people that are interested.
> 
> There was interest about the remixing function from quite a few people.
> Christoph Sauer from WikiCreole (http://www.wikicreole.org/) took a very
> close look at it and was very interested in how we did it and which
> libraries we used etc. Also, Kim Tucker from the Meraka Institute in
> South Africa was very interested in the HTML export functionality and
> said he will be in touch to explore how we might work together.
> 
> 2 discussions have begun to translate FM - into Hindi and Chinese.
> Frankisy has emailed me a few times and he is forming a crew and a plan
> to begin the Chinese translations.
> 
> A few people asked me about which manuals were available and I was happy
> to talk to a few people specifically about the blender manual and the
> forthcoming puredata manual. There is also interest in a fast forward of
> a Gimp manual (which I am working on today) and Inkscape manual, to
> perhaps assist people who want to contribute content to wikimedia
> commons. There are alot of other discussions to follow up such as the
> possibility of hosting a mediawiki user manual on fm, fms involvement in
> the one laptop per child documentation writing, a jumpstart in the
> mplayer manual (which needs a lot more content in my mind) and many
> other threads. 
> 
> So, it was excellent for fm to be there and I can't really overstate how
> proud I was to be presenting us there. Being at Wikimania not only
> opened my eyes to a lot of what is going on in the wiki world, but it
> opened others eyes to the great job we are doing, and it reinforced my
> belief that we are on the right track and doing a great job. 
> 
> So congratulations to everyone :))) 
> 
> We also have some new members to this list who I met at the
> event...welcome!
> 
> I will write up a full report. I have some jet lag to get through and a
> huge to-do. Tomorrow I also go to Croatia for a week. I will use it as
> an opportunity to write up the report and also to focus on the financial
> sustainability plan for fm. 
> 
> So busy busy... 
> 
> :)
> 
> adam
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> 
> 
> adam hyde
> floss manuals
> 
> free manuals for free software
> http://www.flossmanuals.net
> 
> mobile : + 31 6 154 22770 (Netherlands mobile)
> email : adam at flossmanuals.net
> 
> 
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