Wikipedia's $100 Million Dream 560
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?
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?
Re:The Penguin Classics Library (Score:5, Interesting)
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 google maps is about 15 years out of date for half my city.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.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Periodicals and auto tech manuals (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
What a waste! Buy an existing base. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
-- Bobsenators and congressmen (Score:5, Interesting)
How much did it cost Disney to buy the senators and congressmen who voted for the latest copyright extension?
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.
A few of relevance to my subject area: (Score:4, Interesting)
- The Feynman Lectures
- Weinberg, volumes 1-3
- Landau and Lifschitz
- Zinn-Justin
- Wald
- Kleinert
to name but a few.Happy Birthday (Score:5, Interesting)
Would be a nice touch to put that one into the public domain.
Cheers,
Ian
Re:An alternative use for the money (Score:3, Interesting)
I would suggest the money should be used instead to support a powerful well-funded lobbying effort for copyright reform...
I disagree. While $100 million is no laughable chunk o' change, its effectiveness is somewhat doubtful. Buying the rights to publish copyrighted works for all to use would have the most immediate (and gauranteed) benefit to those not just in the US, but all around the world.
I think reforming copyright is a futile effort at the present time. This isn't to say that it isn't worth worrying about, there just needs to be a more substantial and tangible reason than currently exists in order to move the politicians.
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)
Physics (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: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:The Penguin Classics Library (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Use the money to generate new works (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The Penguin Classics Library (Score:4, Interesting)
I would guess each year of "copyrighted" works from 1920's on holds a value in excess of $100 Million to society. It is time society got its purchase back (we paid for those copyrights to be enforced for over half a century). Getting the law changed to stop extending copyrights (unconstitutionally) would be a very good return on a $100 million investment.
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:Lawyers, bureaucrats, and lobbyists (Score:3, Interesting)
Nice try. But I don't think you're aware of how much Lexis Nexis is worth. It dumps nigh on THREE BILLION /every year/ in revenue to its parent, Reed Elsevier (http://www.reed-elsevier.com/media/pdf/t/2/RE_Int erim_FINAL_27July06.pdf [reed-elsevier.com]) - I suspect they'd get an offer of $100M for copyright to their database and, well, laugh...
scientific articles may need more money (Score:3, Interesting)
Getting broad rights to scientific articles across many fields would be nearly impossible in the current culture of journal price-gouging. Support of one of the many attempts to break this business practice would be great.
Re:The Penguin Classics Library (Score:2, Interesting)
Additionally, I'd love to see the Very Short Introduction series [oup.co.uk] by the Oxford University Press. I think they would be perfect for Wikipedia as extended content on major topics.
What about Commissioning books to be written (Score:4, Interesting)
I think it would make sense to hire professionals to perform edits and create base models for textbooks for classes in specific fields which could then be edited as needed perhaps with keeping some sort of professional editorial oversight.
Re:$100 million not enough for most popular textbo (Score:4, Interesting)
An editorial team could be drawn from the very same people who have created the products currently in use. A full, usable set could be accomplished in 18 months or less. The quickest I've seen being 12 months requiring 3 writer/editors, a designer, and a production person per grade.
n i c h o l a s [at] e d u k 8 . c o m
Don't buy some books, buy some Senators (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Use the money to generate new works (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Penguin Classics Library (Score:2, Interesting)
Machinists Handbook! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Use the money to generate new works (Score:2, Interesting)
What WIkipedia should do with $100 million (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Use the money to generate new works (Score:3, Interesting)
Plus you don't have to figure out how to cast or mill a lightweight engine using ore of unknown quality and coarse sand.
What universidy btw?
Req: Currently dead newspapers and magazines (Score:1, Interesting)
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: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.
Re:The Penguin Classics Library (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Use the money to generate new works (Score:3, Interesting)
1) Natural deposits of flint are rare and hard to find in North America, the best deposits I've heard of are in northern Europe.
1a) I'm a SCAdian, with a serious interest in history, I've tried flint knapping. It's one of of those things where, if you have an expert to teach you, you can pick up the basics in an afternoon. If you don't have an expert on hand, you'll spend weeks driving yourself nuts, cutting your hands to ribbons and making an awful lot of useless fragments. Making fire with flint requires a steel, something you apparently have ruled out bringing in with you.
2) I am not a geologist, but it seems to me that finding one tract of land that has both bornite (or cuprite I suppose) and an accessible deposit of magnetite (one of the easier iron ores for laymen to find and separate) *and* a supply of good quality limestone for the millwheel is next to impossible. Finding such a site where the deposits are accessible to one man digging with stone age tools would be even harder. (our ancestors grabbed up a lot of the easily accessible stuff, which is why we are digging so deep today)
3) Again calling on my SCAdian background, I happen to know that making even a simple quern is a major challenge, not all types of limestone have the right "grain" or texture to make a good grinding surface. Some are pretty friable, meaning you get grit in everything you grind in it. Granite is pretty much out of the question, at least for the first few years, since to work stone effectively, you need tools that are at least as hard as the stone you are working on.
4) Starting out with just some flint and presumably the clothes on your back? I hope you are living in SoCal or somewhere else warm, else you could well freeze to death before you get weather proof shelter. Building your own house should not be your last goal, it should be your third! Anyone who has taken any kind of survival training, even a boyscout, could tell you the big three are fire, food and shelter.
5) For one man trying to make his own rope, the obvious recommendation is hemp. But if you do try to grow it, keep your eyes out for DEA choppers
For most of human history, the average life span of a male was in the late 30's, lack of medicines accounts for a LOT of that, but not all. Some of it was due to the simple physical demands of living back then. Presumably you are planning to do this in your 50's or 60's since you want to do this after you retire. Are you up to the physical work load?
Mod INSIGHTFUL (Score:3, Interesting)
Won't this reduce the incentive to write wiki's? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Common misconceptions (Score:3, Interesting)
Your response sounded skeptical. The parent obviously looked at the data while he authored his post. Of course, all of this could very well be misleading. The GDP is the best measure of economic performance we have, but it has a number of known flaws. It also fails to take economic shock into account -- but what the parent says is true on the face of it: if some catastrophe halved our economic output, we would be reduced to 1984 levels. Many of us lived through 1984. It wasn't bad.
So what's the problem with this logic? Let's look at the data. In 1929, the US's GDP was 865 billion dollars. In 1933, at the height of the great depression, it had fallen to 635 billion (you can see the blip on the Wikipedia graph linked above.) During the great depression, roughly 1 in 4 Americans was unemployed, people were starving and life is generally held to have been the hardest it has ever been in this country. And yet, in 1922 the GDP was 628 billion, even lower than the GDP of 1933 -- does this mean that in 1922, 1 in 4 people were unemployed, people were starving, and that quality of life was the same as in 1933? Of course not.
Between 1929 and 1933, in just 4 years, the GDP of the United States fell 26.6 percent and we barely recovered. Had it not been for the massive government spending required by World War II, who knows how we would have fared. Now just imagine for a moment that some catastrophe happened and the GDP of the United States fell 50% overnight to 1984 levels. Could we expect the same quality of life as 1984? No more than people in 1933 experienced the same quality of life as they had in 1922. And we're looking at a proportional decrease far greater and in far shorter a time than the 1929 to 1933 decrease.
I thought the grandparent's figures were interesting, but I have to say, I'm also a bit skeptical about how meaningful they are.
Global Digital Elevation Model (Score:3, Interesting)
Dream a little...
Recently we have seen a flood of publicly available satellite imagery on the web and this has greatly improved the possibilities of small NGO's and local communities to improve their lives - who couldn't otherwise afford expensive geographic information services. Unfortunately infrastucture projects such as roads, bridges, agricultural and water works all need accurate elevation data rather than fancy looking satellite imagines. Areas with no existing infrastucture could be provided for examaple with modern telecommunications using low-cost radiolinks if the topography of the area was known well. Things like irrigation and flood prevention could be planned by volunteers if such data was freely available. Maps, aerial photos and satellites images get old very quickly and thus are a waste of limited resources. Topographic information does not change in centuries and would thus make a valuable one time investment for our global community.
Geographic information services (GIS) typically utilize a digital elevation model (DEM) [wikipedia.org] datasets which define a grid of elevation values over an area. On top of this one is then able to lay down a map or image of any type using free publicly available software and perform calculations in three dimentions typically involved in civil-engineering. Currently the only publicly available global DEM is the GTOPO30 [wikipedia.org] compiled during 1993-95 by an internation efford involving USGS, NASA and UNEP among others. GTOPO30 is a global 30-arc-second grid (rougly 1 kilometer squared) with a mean accuracy of about +-30 meters in elevation but in many poor areas of the world much worse than this. This is way too rough for most practical applications. More accurate datasets are commercial and extremely expensive or simply impossible to obtain.
Much more accurate data should be available from numerous recently launched satellite systems by government agencies (NASA, ESA, JAXA) as well as commercial satellite vendors (DigitalGlobe, Geoeye, Spot). If the right people would just talk to other right people, the whole thing could be handled without exchange of huge monetary commitments. Selling elevation data for these companies isn't a huge cash cow due to the longevity of the datasets ones sold.
USGS hosted GTOPO30:o po30.html [usgs.gov]
http://edc.usgs.gov/products/elevation/gtopo30/gt
USGS Full specification of GTOPO30:A DME.html [usgs.gov]
http://edc.usgs.gov/products/elevation/gtopo30/RE
Sincerely
Miikka Raninen
Re:Depends on the Author I suppose (Score:3, Interesting)
And what if one or two do goof off - we'd be picking the 1000 most respected, smartest, people and making a big deal about the honor and aspects of perpetuity "The deepest thoughts of the thousand smartest people" - would such people really be stupid enough to goof off given that degree of public significance?
If only 900 of them produced anything - if just 1% of them produced something amazing...wouldn't it still be a wonderful way to spend a hundred mil?