…and should leave their source files publicly available. Because most logos need work, and you never know who’s going to improve on yours for their own reasons. (Of course you should still trademark them.)
Bjorn S. reflects on designing the first Wikipedia logo (designed for Nupedia but never used on that project), and describes how it led to today’s silver ball… and how he didn’t know about any of this until a week ago.
The GFDL 1.3 allows collaborative sites to switch from the GFDL to CC-BY-SA 3.0 as their license, under limited circumstances.
Wikimedia has been advocating for this change for some time, and with much effort from the FSF and Creative Commons a solution was worked out last November: such a transition would be available only for massively collaborative projects, and only for a limited time. If a project opted for this transition, it could not incorporate any new GFDL material after the release date of the new license (November 3, 2008); and it had to decide by August 1, 2009.
Given the first date, one would assume a site would want to move as quickly as possible to decide, to avoid a prolonged period when no outside material under most any free license could be incorporated. Nevertheless, it took us over 6 months to decide to make the transition. Now we are faced with two hurdles: ensuring that no GFDL material has been migrated into a Wikimedia project since November, and far more complex, communicating with the hundreds of smaller GFDL wikis who chose their license for compatibility with Wikipedia, to ensure they know about this change and what it means for them. They only have until the first of August to figure it out.
So I’ve started compiling a list of GFDL wikis and other collaborative sites that have not yet indicated any awareness about the license switch or considered switching themselves. This includes at least half of the 20 largest GFDL wikis other than Wikipedia, both major medical wikis (Medpedia and WikiDoc), PlanetMath, and the old Spanish Wikipedia fork. Please help contact these sites and update their status on this project page: [[m:Licensing update/Outreach]]
It has been claimed that twitterpedia will one day replace Wikipedia, at the point where everyone needs no more than a tweet about any given topic.
FT2 astutely comments:
the predictable twitterpedia sequel follows:
– user#217869: pov warring!!
– @83476238 not so!
– @217869 is so!!
– @83476238 not so!
– @both: u blocked 24 hrs 3rr
– @admin plz no?
– @217869 o ok
– @admin kthxbai
– @83476238 u block I not u suxxor pov war!!!
– @admin u involved,, @arbcom plzdesysopkthx?
– @user no wai!!
– ……….
A tip of the hat to all involved for scrying the essential parts of our post-singularity knowledge landscape.
Do you know people who are currently doing statistical and social research about Wikipedia, or have good ideas about this they haven’t had time to work on?
I’m trying to build support for continual, detailed statistics generation from Wikipedia data, possibly at the Harvard-MIT Data Center. There is still time to come up with good ideas for lightning talks and discussion groups at Wikimania 2009 this summer in Buenos Aires. And there is a research-related Wikimedia job available starting this summer.
I am uncomfortable with many of the details of said job posting*, but as long as its up the best people should apply.
Wikimedia recently held elections for the Board of Trustees — and, as in recent elections, elected an excellent candidate, a dedicated community member of long standing, interested in listening and facilitating rather than imposing his will on others.
We were lucky to have great community members running. However the whole process reminded me of class elections in high school and university, where a small minority of active community members were involved with the process at any level; and the candidates were asked to weigh in on broad aspects of community that they would not actually direct in their elected position.
The discussions around the election were about how the community should change and organize itself; whereas the meat of future work is likely to be about structure and facilitation and large-scale ideas about organizing resources and directing them to a common end.
The people who were running, and their friends, and the people who sat on the university council seats and cared about the details of annual elections, they all took the affairs very seriously — monitoring one another’s campaigns, askingo ne another questions, blogging within their circles and even publishing articles in the school appers about the elctions. But in the end, after 4 years, the etent to which campus life had been changed by those few elected officials, compared to how it had been changed by activists taking over parts of campus, or by studetns developing their own campus-wide projects and associations and summer drives, wasn’t terribly significant.
The OLPC community has been working through some big changes recently, and I was recently talking to a couple of friends about the development of the project’s mission. I was defending some of these changes, saying that they were small compared to the margin of error in setting the mission in the first place to achieve the goal of improving education. Mako was part of the conversation, and joked that I was pretty laid back about those changes, while I was much more concerned about the comparatively uncontroversial changes in the Wikimedia bylaws last month.
That made me think for a while. OLPC is an extraordinary education project, the realization of a vision through the hard work and inspiration of a few experts; something we as a society (committed to education, learning, and tool sharing) understand and know could be accomplished again. But Wikipedia feels like the greatest project of our generation, period. It is the realization of something too crazy to have been an articulate vision when it began, with self-organizing infrastructure dependent on general good faith and interest in sharing; something our society still has a hard time imagining could have been accomplished once, not to mention a second or third time. Small founder effects in decisions may influence what future generations think is possible.
So I hold the two projects, and especially their organization, governance, and assignation of organizational responsibility, to quite different standards. If Wikipedia falters, it’s not clear we will get another any time soon.