GFDL corpus access provider
From Wikinfo
- This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.
A GFDL corpus access provider or GFDLcap is a web service or other net media, or potentially even email or CD-ROM distributor, that provides access to a large portion of the GFDL corpus open content.
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Current options
The best known of these is Wikipedia. There is often some confusion between that project and the corpus.
Wikinfo and Recyclopedia are lesser known access providers, in stricter compliance with the GFDL, to the degree that is possible given that it relies on XML export by Wikipedia for most content.
Wikinfo takes a sympathetic point of view, refusing to mix critical and sympathetic views in an article. This is a direct challenge to the neutral point of view wiki ideology that is promoted by Wikipedia, since that view gives maximum power to those who claim to be 'neutral' but are in a position of technologically granted power.
Other corpus access providers focus on particular subsets of the material, and do not have facilities to automatically import via the Wikipedia interface:
Challenges
There are several challenges common to all GFDL corpus access providers:
- agreeing on a wikitext standard and priorities to guide wiki code changes to accomodate it; GetWiki and MediaWiki are so far the only options.
- meeting the rigid terms of the GFDL itself, especially with regard to attribution and source access, i.e. to the original text written in the wikitext standard, not the HTML form into which it is rendered for prints or presentation.
- lack of interwiki identity standard makes attribution quite unreliable
- having one standard wiki URI from which to retrieve the source, that can be easily predicted and made permanent
- interwiki link standards so that differently-purposed or POV'd large public wikis can link to each other
- resolving point of view differences, to which there are several approaches:
- neutral point of view tries to do this always within one article, attributing disputed claims, but of course, a systemic bias then applies
- multiple point of view tries to separate views into articles of their own, e.g. as at Metaweb or via the "faction" system proposed at some wikis
- sympathetic point of view tries to separate positive and negative views, whatever that means
- dealing with server load, especially for full text search
- inadequate PHP-based software like MediaWiki and GetWiki - a concern Metaweb's supporters are paying particular attention to
- compiling and collaborative filtering to present adapted articles - a concern Consumerium takes very seriously
- governance problems in deal with a very large group of editors, see rule of 150 for one possible limit to this
- Tracking with change to the GFDL corpus as a whole, so that the best material can be copied into those services interested in presenting it to their users.
Future integration
There are proposals extant to track all changes to the GFDL corpus in any of the known access providers, and perhaps simplify signup for jabber or other services that could serve as basis for interwiki identity standard. Such proposals are simplified by an interwiki link standard and standard wiki URI, though they are not strictly required simply for tracking.
There are also proposals to work with FSF and Creative Commons much more closely to avoid abuses of the GFDL's terms and spirit.
Copyright
This article is copyrighted by contributors to http://oldwiki.creativecommons.org and contributors to Wikinfo, and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.
References
This article is a modified version of http://oldwiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/GFDL_corpus_access_provider (last modified at 20 November 2004) used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.
