[WEB4LIB] RE: Yahoo-OCLC toolbar

[Lars Aronsson]

Karen Coyle wrote:
> It's hard for me to think of Wikipedia and CC in the same mental breath.
> CC is a statement of rights made by the rights holder. Wikipedia is a
> collective way to create constantly evolving documents. How do you see
> them interacting, or do you?

Every contributor to Wikipedia, by saving a new article, agrees that
it may be redistributed according to the GNU Free Documentation
License (GFDL).  The Creative Commons was founded in 2002, but if it
had existed a year or two earlier, Wikipedia would have used a CC
share-alike license instead.  GFDL has several drawbacks, and every
six months a new discussion about changing to a CC license comes up on
the Wikipedia mailing list.  So there is a connection.

Free software such as Linux, free contents such as Wikipedia, or
freely available scientific articles in open access journals are not
new in themselves.  It's the kind of licensing that is new.  And as
FRBR only reinvents the *functional* requirements for bibliographic
records, I think this is not radical enough, it's not Internet enough.
The functional requirements are probably OK, but we also need
ownership requirements, so we don't end up with everything being owned
by organizations like OCLC again.  (Note how the word "owned"  now
describes the worst form of humiliation among the younger crowd --
"you're so owned!"  You clearly don't want your bibliographic records
to be "owned".)

Take the existing article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Mice_and_Men
which describes a novel by John Steinbeck.  Forget for a moment that
this is an encyclopedia article, and instead consider it to be the
very first record in a new bibliographic database that is designed
according to the ideas in FRBR.  This record is describing a work, one
of the levels in FRBR. Ignore the current list of ISBN numbers, and
instead imagine there are links to other records for expressions, and
these records in turn have links to records for manifestations.  Or if
these links don't exist, anybody can update the first record to add
them. The "wiki" concept was not wellknown when FRBR was published in
1998, but that was six years ago.

Obviously, Wikipedia, with its encyclopedic ambition, is not the place
to add entries for different expressions and manifestations of this
work.  Even most works or authors would not deserve their own entry in
an encyclopedia. But we could easily start a separate database using
only a slight adaption of the software used by Wikipedia.  Besides
Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation already runs Wiktionary,
Wikiquotes, and several other smaller projects, so a Wikibibliography
could be the next one.  Or could it?  Is this idea just too crazy?


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se