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Wikipedia's $100 Million Dream
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Oct 22, 2006 05:23 PM
from the omg-free-kermit dept.
from the omg-free-kermit dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Jimmy Wales recently asked the Wikipedia community to suggest useful, 'works that could in theory be purchased and freed' assuming a 'budget of $100 million to purchase
copyrights.' He went on to say that he has spoken with a person 'who is potentially in a position to make this happen.' Ideas are being collected at the meta-wiki. Some early suggestions include, satellite imagery, textbooks, scientific journals and photo archives." So how about it? What works would you like to see wikified?
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The Penguin Classics Library (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as educational works go, I'm all for the textbooks. Grade school & high school, of course. But what I'd really like to see is the "Canonical works" of each field. I'm talking about the standard books that are used to teach each major in the United States. They could do a survey of books and then attempt to contact the authors & publishers to work a deal. Some titles I've seen on everyone's shelves are, of course, the Donald Knuth [amazon.com] series and this list [amazon.com] has a lot of standards I recognize just by the covers.
The most important thing for them to do would to pay lawyers and literature experts to scan the internet for potential authors willing to put out books for free. I've seen some classic computer science books go up like this and I'm sure that if Wikipedia asked for permission to host, they would be able to with mild restrictions. Like the author having the final say on what is kept and removed from the Wiki page. I mean, look at O'Reilly's OpenBook Project [oreilly.com], don't you think they would allow Wikipedia to host that for a tiny one time fee? I'd bet that sales would increase if they even put a link to buy the book. I've heard a lot of authors argue for their books to be put online so that people will feel compelled to buy a hardcopy. Wasn't that the point of Google's textbook preview search?
Other people they could target is an open invitation to any estates that own the rights of long dead authors to have their ancestor's works published. Dr. Suess, anyone? I mean, how do you license a loved one's works and continually soak up money for them? To me, the work of Disney in this respect is just plain rotten and ruined some good guidelines to release works to the public domain.
I don't know, I just think that they should spend money over a period of time searching for permission to host books for free or nearly free. I have hope that this is done very very well and augments the OLPC project nicely.
Re:The Penguin Classics Library (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The Penguin Classics Library (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Penguin Classics Library (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The Penguin Classics Library (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Penguin Classics Library (Score:5, Insightful)
Homer, Virgil, Euripides, Sun Tzu, Chaucer-- yeah, I think a few of those might be off copyright already.
Re:The Penguin Classics Library (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The Penguin Classics Library (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The Penguin Classics Library (Score:5, Informative)
No, they aren't. The texts of those works derived from manuscripts--in series like the Teubner texts or the Oxford Classical Texts--are often still under copyright, and many translations into English are still copyright. One is either dependent on Victorian-era stuff, or one has to translate the material himself (and distribute only the translation, since the text may be copyright).
Re:The Penguin Classics Library (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Penguin Classics Library (Score:5, Informative)
The translations aren't. For out-of-copyright versions, you still have to go back to versions published a century ago, where the translations are uniformly full of "thou"s and "thee"s and written in bad verse more incomprehensible than the original languages. In fact even modern critical editions of the texts in their original languages are under copyright.
Re:The Penguin Classics Library (Score:5, Insightful)
Something else to go with these "books" would be high quality lectures by some of the best lecturers in respective field.
Free "books" and lectures would allow anyone anywhere, that just have access to the internet, to learn whatever he/she want.
(Another wish would be to "liberate" all papers ever written and put those on a nice website)
Copyright clearing-house online... (Score:5, Insightful)
However..... if a copyright holder is made an offer for a given piece ($1,000, $10,000, whatever) - a very straightfoward commercial decision can be made; One free of copyright religion and politics. "Is the future returns on the copyright of this piece worth less than the offer."
Someone who has a copyrighted item earning $12.50 per year might easily be swayed to release it into the public domain for $200. Almost *nothing* under copyright is actually earning any real money, and thefore may be liberated with a very modest purse.
Perhaps if there was a simple online process in place, individuals could seach for their items of choice, pay up and free them.
Most people that have the cash and some inclination simply don't have the time. If those who have the time could make this process trivial, everyone could win.
Now please excuse me - I have to RTFA
Re:The Penguin Classics Library (Score:5, Insightful)
There is an old rule of thumb that a classic has to be re-translated and re-introduced in every generation to remain inviting and accesible to the student and general reader. Preserving the original texts is a trival problem in comparison.
If you know Plato, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare only as assigned English reading you'll recognize the truth of this.
Dr. Suess, anyone? I mean, how do you license a loved one's works and continually soak up money for them? To me, the work of Disney in this respect is just plain rotten and ruined some good guidelines to release works to the public domain.
The truths about Disney that the Geek ignores is that the Disney archives remain intact and the Disney product remains accessible and to affordable. You want Bambi in pristine digital restoration? You'll find it at your corner drugstore selling for under $20.
Bambi was filmed in three-strip technicolor. The matte paintings on glass survive. The pencil tests survive. Steamboat Willie was distributed on unstable nitrate stock with synchronized sound on phonographic disks. Conservation costs money. Restoration costs money.
The skills required are rare and demanding.
But you don't need Big Daddy Warbucks to "rescue" Mickey Mouse. The Mouse is still on stage.
How about the original Mickey Mouse cartoon? (Score:5, Interesting)
Book one. (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder how many people might get drawn into reading sequels if the first book in a series or trilogy were made available for free?
Well (Score:5, Funny)
Use the money to generate new works (Score:5, Insightful)
What a waste! Buy an existing base. (Score:5, Interesting)
$100 million not enough for most popular textbooks (Score:5, Insightful)
3,860,567 = Number of 20 year olds (2000 census rough estimate based on 1/5th of 20-24 year olds)
27% = Percent of population over 25 with a bachelor's degree (2000 census)
25% = Percent of students taking the most popular/useful classes (estimate)
50% = Percent of these students using the most popular textbook (estimate)
5 = Years a textbook edition remains in print (estimate)
6% = Risk free rate of return (estimate)
$100 = Average textbook price (estimate)
20% = McGraw hill net margin (per www.fool.com)
The textbook company would sell 131,259 textbooks per year, for a net profit of $2,625,186 annually. Given the 5 year life span and 6% risk free rate, the textbook company would be willing to sell a textbook with the above expected sales for no less than $11 million. This means we could purchase roughly 9 of the most popular textbooks for $100 million. May be off by a fair margin, but it's clearly not going to be near 100 textbooks. Seems like there are much better uses of the money.
Depends on the Author I suppose (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't be surprised if you could find academically minded authors who'd take a relatively small payoff and the feeling that they'd done good for the world.
Re:Depends on the Author I suppose (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's pay for something new.
I'm betting most academics don't earn much over $100,000 a year. Take the $100M and pay the thousand smartest people on the planet to each spend an entire year writing about everything and anything they feel is important for the future of humanity - with the stipulation that every word they write in that year goes immediately into the public domain.
Think of the qualitative improvement in Wikipedia if we added tens of thousands of new articles by the smartest people in their fields.
Re:What a waste! Buy an existing base. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Use the money to generate new works (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Use the money to generate new works (Score:5, Insightful)
How many people could actually make a working windmill, water wheel or atmospheric engine to kick start any sort of failed society?
How did we mine basic ores, make good charcoal and smelt them into metal?
How did our first carts and harnesses work?
How does one craft rock by hand?
What about the basics of farming? Most people in the west now live in cities and have no clue about food production.
This information needs recording permanently.
Common misconceptions (Score:5, Interesting)
2) Do you know how long it took us to do it the first time? The big problem of building the world isn't the technology - the problem is the shear cost of it all. It took something like 15,000 years to go from good stone tools to steam ships. That also required an increase in population from around 20 million to around 1 billion.
3) If there were a "post-apocalypse," the cost minimization strategy wouldn't be about knowing about technology, but rather establishing institutions that would enable collective effort. Same reason Africa has modern technology, but the farmers can't afford steel hoes let alone GM crops and combine harvesters.
If half of the world died, we'd have big problems. But half the coal miners, and half the geneticists and nuclear physicists, and half the politicians would likely survive. The shear numbers of these "specialists" in as large a population as we have on Earth would make the proportion of survivors roughly equal to the proportion of survivors in the general population.
Additionally, if our national product was cut in half, we'd be living like they did in the 1984. If cut into a quarter, life would regress to 1962. If to one tenth, to 1940. If to one twentieth, 1915. If to 100th, to 1872. Assuming we get back to 1872 means (in general) 1% of our population, and 1% of our capital (assuming technology benefits and lack of new job experience cancel each other out).
The worst known disease outbreak (smallpox in the Americas) killed about 95% over several centuries. Nuclear warfare between superpowers *might* be able to accomplish the same, but I personally doubt it. If both happened simultaneously and instantaneously, we'd be back to 1839. The amount of destructive effort necessary to take us back to before the Industrial Revolution is mind-bogglingly huge. Getting back to the stone-age is nigh impossible.
Open content GIS data (Score:5, Insightful)
Text books of course (Score:5, Insightful)
How about one book per academic subject (Score:5, Insightful)
One book per academic subject.
One for each kind of math.
One for each kind of music.
One for each kind of computer science.
One for masonry, or automotive, or other trades.
and so on...
So, someone can go to the "tutorial" section of wikipedia and learn how to do whatever they would normally need textbooks or college to learn.
Granted that you could likely only reach an ametuer level this way most of the time, it would be a great starting point for a lot of people into business and hobby.
Core concepts do not go out of date (Score:5, Insightful)
My core computer science texts date back more than ten years. They are still perfectly relevant today. Core subjects in computer science have not changed in ages. Data structures, operating systems, networking, relational databases all go back more than two decades. And they are just as, if not more, relevant today.
The key is to acquire texts on core concepts. These are things that should hold true forever. You would not want to waste money on Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days. For things like that, someone will write up a tutorial. Instead you would acquire works on the concepts of higher-level languages, virtual machines, design patterns, etc.
Need you ask? (Score:4, Funny)
With this funding, I believe that we may at long last be able to open-source Natalie Portman.
james bond bad guy radar (Score:4, Interesting)
I had a hard time finding additional imagery after teraserver sold out. (to MS iirc?) I would like to have even been able to order it, but USGS charges a fortune for their quarter quads and you don't get the high resolution coordinates for each area on the map due to them not being photographed perfectly square. This is something that I would like to see opened up.
One thing to bear in mind unfortuantely is that this information goes stale. google maps is about 15 years out of date for half my city. So this would have to be renewed occasionally to stay of value.
Dictionaries (Score:5, Interesting)
Wikipedia could be a great platform to host dictionaries on. Every article/term should have an option to translate the term.
I know that the feature is half-way there already in the way that you can find the same article in a different language, but that doesn't work that great as a two way dictionary.
Buy a good base of dictionaries translating criscross between all (ok most of) the languages on wikipedia.
Lawyers, bureaucrats, and lobbyists (Score:5, Interesting)
- The Lexis Nexis database
- All scientific works ever written. This is work done by scientists for the betterment of mankind and to have it locked away from the public behind electronic library access fees is absurd. The public has a right to academic works, not just academics.
-- BobRe:Lawyers, bureaucrats, and lobbyists (Score:5, Interesting)
When "the public" pays me to referee papers by other astronomers, and "the public" pays the page charges for the papers I write ($110 per page, by the way), and "the public" pays the editors and typesetters of the journals, then "the public" might assert a right to those papers.
Just to forestall the inevitable responses, no, the federal government is not paying my salary, and no, it hasn't paid for the page charges of my most recent publications. The NSF and NASA do support a great deal of research in astronomy, of course, and grants from those agencies do pay for good fraction of the publications in this area.
On second thought, almost all recent work in astronomy and physics is freely available to public at the LANL preprint archive site [lanl.gov], so maybe this whole discussion is moot....
Re:Lawyers, bureaucrats, and lobbyists (Score:5, Insightful)
Strike 1. You don't understand how the refereed astronomical journals work. I pay THEM $110 per page so that they will publish my paper; they do not pay me.
Strike 2. RIT has a long history of teaching and has only recently -- in the past 5 or 7 years -- started heading in the direction of research. The school has a very detailed breakdown of income from tuition and expenses on items such as faculty salaries. Most of the money spent on my salary comes from tuition.
Would you care to try for a third statement illustrating your ignorance of this topic?
Bank notes! (Score:5, Funny)
senators and congressmen (Score:5, Interesting)
How much did it cost Disney to buy the senators and congressmen who voted for the latest copyright extension?
An alternative use for the money (Score:5, Insightful)
Create a Non-profit (Score:5, Interesting)
This suggestion is already in the list, and it is far and away the best suggestion I have seen.
This is a shame, really (Score:5, Insightful)
He was a big sponser of the Copyright Term Extension Act, DMCA, the patriot act II on steroids, FBI carnivore, extended wiretapping, and his office wanted to get the Claritin patent extended because he was using their jet when running for president.
Anything to get this IP black hole out of office will reap a 10x benifit in the future, and not just for better copyright law.
Once that is done, get a repeal of the bastard CTEA law (it won't happen while he is in the senate). In fact, bet on a CTEA II to come down the pike to protect that nasty rodent [wikipedia.org]
Happy Birthday (Score:5, Interesting)
Would be a nice touch to put that one into the public domain.
Cheers,
Ian
Re:Happy Birthday (Score:5, Interesting)
It's my son's first birthday on Tuesday and I'll be singing Happy Birthday to him. That's a copyrighted song, with royalties payable on public performance I believe.
Would be a nice touch to put that one into the public domain.
I completely disagree. There is no better spokesperson for the absurdity of our copyright laws than example, and this is the best example of absurdity that I can imagine.
When you tell someone they are infringing on copyright and have to pay royalties for singing Happy Birthday, they clue into the ridiculous laws that have been imposed on them. This awareness is the first step to creating momentum for reform.
The more absurd examples we can provide that the general public understands, the better armed activists are to achieve reform.
Teaching English to access more content (Score:5, Insightful)
I understand why people are suggesting basic textbooks, but they're taking too much for granted.
Start by acquiring the best English skills courses so that these billions of third world kids will be able to understand first world content.
Giving a kid a laptop only gets them so far: they have to be able to understand what they're viewing. That's where the $100 mil could really leverage all of Wikipedia's existing content. Make it easy for these kids to learn English, no matter which language they're starting from.
Re:Teaching English to access more content (Score:5, Insightful)
Classic Games (Score:5, Interesting)
classic "no-longer-for-sale" games should be handed over to the public domain.
The intellectual property for future projects and sequels should of course
remain in the hands of the copyright holder. It seems to me that this is a win/win
for publishers since the properties would gain a new lease on life.
Really, I just want to be able to download M.U.L.E., some Infocom titles
and Master of Orion (although I'm not sure I need another addiction in my life
right now).
the obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
National {fire|electrical|building} codes (Score:5, Informative)
Finnegan's Wake (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a drawback to this, though. James Joyce did not intend that the novel be understood. It was meant to model a dream -- albeit a boringly long one -- and if someone wakes you up every two seconds to tell you what something means, it's not as fun. Annotated, it's like reading Nabokov's version of Eugene Onegin, and if given the choice, I would not have that one wikified, with all due respect to that Lolita guy.
While the Wake wiki is good for comprehension and finally understanding what that huge word in the second paragraph was, the addition of technology makes it inferior to the original. Obviously, you can ignore the links, but in several other cases with e-books, reading a book is made more inconvenient by wikifying it. There is no real electronic substitute for "flipping through a book", and the simple format of a single finite page, as opposed to turtles all the way down. (Just check out an e-book: most of the time, the webpages are huge.)
Oh, and Gutenberg [gutenberg.org]? If anything, have Wikipedia partner with them, if the two are not in cahoots already. No use forming a needless schism in the world of free online e-books.
Re:Entertainment as well as education (Score:4, Informative)