Mailing List Archive: Projekt: OpenCritics (let's free subjective content, too!!)

Projekt: OpenCritics (let's free subjective content, too!!)

Aug 29, 2009, 3:52 AM

Post #1 of 7 (838 views)

Dear â€œWikipediansâ€,

please allow us to introduce a project we have been working on for
about a year now:

Explaining the importance of the open-source movement for a free
internet or the importance of Wikipedia (i.e. free content in the form
of factual knowledge) here would be like carrying coals to Newcastle.
The question, however, is why has *subjective* open content been
neglected so far? In the realm of user reviews and ratings we have
pretty much forfeited to closed systems like Amazon or Ciao.

That's why we created OpenCritics.com. The idea of OpenCritics is to
develop an open platform for freely licensed reviews. Published
reviews are then not only available for visitors of certain websites,
e.g Amazon, Ciao, etc. but can be copied freely. This also helps
against the trend towards internet monopolies.(Please find an
explanation and more advantages of this on:
http://www.opencritics.com/sp-dsp-user_idea )

We started off with movie reviews; book reviews and more will follow.
The ratings are published both on all participating websites as well
as on OpenCritics.de (in German, other languages will follow).

Who we are:
---------------------

Our office, the development and my computer are financed by a private
limited company. Eventually, I would be pleased if our company could
move into the direction of a non-profit organization and funding
through donations. However, I do have doubts about that since this is
even difficult for Wikipedia.

The second best (realistic) alternative is to do what many
Linux-distributors, companies like Zend etc do: The content will
remain free and open while the project is financed by consulting and
support for commercial users.

We are still a small team, mainly in our office in Hamburg ,with very
different backgound (juristic, webdesign, journalistic and two
students).

How to help:
-------------------

We are especially lacking a prominent team-member known even outside
the world of free-internet-geeks who could help us let the little
project rise above the attention threshold. Maybe you have an idea who
we could contact?

In the meantime we are happy about every blogentry (example:
http://de.creativecommons.org/freiheit-fur-die-user-ratings/ [in
German]) and appreciate critical feedback!

Kind regards
Georg

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Re: Projekt: OpenCritics (let's free subjective content, too!!) [ In reply to ]

ragesoss+wikipedia at gmail

Aug 29, 2009, 5:46 AM

Post #2 of 7 (810 views)

Permalink

On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 6:52 AM, Georg von
Zimmermann<g.v.zimmermann@evelope.de> wrote:

>In the realm of user reviews and ratings we have
> pretty much forfeited to closed systems like Amazon or Ciao.
>
> That's why we created OpenCritics.com. The idea of OpenCritics is to
> develop an open platform for freely licensed reviews.

I think this is an excellent, long overdue idea and something
Wikimedia should be interested in. I was actually thinking of
proposing something like this at strategy.wikimedia.org (and may still
do so).

> Our office, the development and my computer are financed by a private
> limited company. Eventually, I would be pleased if our company could
> move into the direction of a non-profit organization and funding
> through donations.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I'd be pleased to see a project
like this become part of Wikimedia. We've never really absorbed other
communities under the Wikimedia umbrella before (like Wikia has), but
at this point Wikipedia has earned enough goodwill also support lesser
known worthy projects.

-Sage Ross

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Re: Projekt: OpenCritics (let's free subjective content, too!!) [ In reply to ]

teun.spaans at gmail

Aug 29, 2009, 6:42 AM

Post #3 of 7 (798 views)

Permalink

This sounds like a good initiative. Wikimedia foundation favours neutral,
factual content, so the initiative is an addition in the area of open
licenses.

The only question which your statement here raises is why you limit yourself
to reviews. Imho there might be a considerable market area for people who
have opinions to voice on politics, religion, etc.

kind regards,
teun spaans

On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 12:52 PM, Georg von Zimmermann <
g.v.zimmermann@evelope.de> wrote:

> Dear â€œWikipediansâ€,
>
> please allow us to introduce a project we have been working on for
> about a year now:
>
> Explaining the importance of the open-source movement for a free
> internet or the importance of Wikipedia (i.e. free content in the form
> of factual knowledge) here would be like carrying coals to Newcastle.
> The question, however, is why has *subjective* open content been
> neglected so far? In the realm of user reviews and ratings we have
> pretty much forfeited to closed systems like Amazon or Ciao.
>
> That's why we created OpenCritics.com. The idea of OpenCritics is to
> develop an open platform for freely licensed reviews. Published
> reviews are then not only available for visitors of certain websites,
> e.g Amazon, Ciao, etc. but can be copied freely. This also helps
> against the trend towards internet monopolies.(Please find an
> explanation and more advantages of this on:
> http://www.opencritics.com/sp-dsp-user_idea )
>
> We started off with movie reviews; book reviews and more will follow.
> The ratings are published both on all participating websites as well
> as on OpenCritics.de (in German, other languages will follow).
>
> Who we are:
> ---------------------
>
> Our office, the development and my computer are financed by a private
> limited company. Eventually, I would be pleased if our company could
> move into the direction of a non-profit organization and funding
> through donations. However, I do have doubts about that since this is
> even difficult for Wikipedia.
>
> The second best (realistic) alternative is to do what many
> Linux-distributors, companies like Zend etc do: The content will
> remain free and open while the project is financed by consulting and
> support for commercial users.
>
> We are still a small team, mainly in our office in Hamburg ,with very
> different backgound (juristic, webdesign, journalistic and two
> students).
>
> How to help:
> -------------------
>
> We are especially lacking a prominent team-member known even outside
> the world of free-internet-geeks who could help us let the little
> project rise above the attention threshold. Maybe you have an idea who
> we could contact?
>
> In the meantime we are happy about every blogentry (example:
> http://de.creativecommons.org/freiheit-fur-die-user-ratings/ [in
> German]) and appreciate critical feedback!
>
> Kind regards
> Georg
>
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-l mailing list
> foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
>
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Re: Projekt: OpenCritics (let's free subjective content, too!!) [ In reply to ]

ragesoss+wikipedia at gmail

Aug 29, 2009, 10:17 AM

Post #4 of 7 (801 views)

Permalink

On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 9:42 AM, teun spaans<teun.spaans@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> The only question which your statement here raises is why you limit yourself
> to reviews. Imho there might be a considerable market area for people who
> have opinions to voice on politics, religion, etc.
>

Reviews are quite different political and religious opinion. Unlike
political or religious commentary, reviews (especially if they combine
numerical ratings with textual evaluation) are valuable in aggregate,
as they can help others make yes/no decisions about whether to invest
time and/or money into some particular, uniquely identifiable thing
(whether watching a particular movie or buying a particular
flashlight).

Hence the desirability of creating a free alternative to Amazon's
reviews. Amazon's reviews, especially for manufactured goods, are an
extremely valuable public service (even if you don't shop at Amazon),
and the fact they are controlled and maintained by a for-profit
company means that the potential exists for Amazon to lock down access
or suppress negative reviews (in fact, this happens already) for the
good of their profits but to the detriment of the public good.
Although individually such reviews have subjective elements, I don't
see that as fundamentally incompatible with WMF values.

-Sage

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Re: Projekt: OpenCritics (let's free subjective content, too!!) [ In reply to ]

dgoodmanny at gmail

Aug 29, 2009, 8:20 PM

Post #5 of 7 (784 views)

Permalink

People who want to write reviews of this sort generally want to
propagandize either for or against something they have strong
feelings about. The susceptibility of a project like this to
campaigning and cabalism is so great, that i doubt a community run
project could maintain objectivity. We have enough problem doing it
at Wikipedia when the avowed purpose is to NOT offer opinion. I think
maintaining NPOV --or anything like it--in this situation will be
impossible.

I'd like to see someone try nevertheless. I certainly am not opposing
the project. But it should not be us--we should keep far away from
that.

David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 6:44 PM, Joshua Gay<joshuagay@gmail.com> wrote:
> So, I think that such a project works well with the concept of NPOV. I think
> you can break the site into two distinct parts.
>
> Part 1: You collect opinions of various sorts in various ways.
> Part 2: You organize them in terms of their relative significance to each
> other and summarize them in a disinterested voice.
>
> This would be a lot like Wikibooks and Wikipedia; people write stuff on
> Wikibooks and then people cite those books on Wikipedia.
>
> -Josh
>
> On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 3:17 PM, Victor Vasiliev <vasilvv@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Sage Ross wrote:
>> > I think this is an excellent, long overdue idea and something
>> > Wikimedia should be interested in. I was actually thinking of
>> > proposing something like this at strategy.wikimedia.org (and may still
>> > do so).
>> >
>>
>> I don't think that creating such a project within Wikimedia would be a
>> great idea. NPOV is one of the most important Wikimedia principles.
>>
>> --vvv
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> I am running the Arizona Rock'n'Roll marathon with Team in Training. Help me
> reach my fundraising goals:
> http://pages.teamintraining.org/ma/pfchangs10/joshuagay
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Re: Projekt: OpenCritics (let's free subjective content, too!!) [ In reply to ]

dgoodmanny at gmail

Aug 30, 2009, 6:08 PM

Post #6 of 7 (774 views)

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Myself, I consider NPOV as what distinguishes an encyclopedia from
promotion and advocacy. Agreed it is hard to get there completely, but
the effort to approximate it is what makes Wikipedia a work of
reference, and conservopedia a joke. ~~~~

David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 1:51 PM, Anthony<wikimail@inbox.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 29, 2009 at 11:50 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <
> cimonavaro@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Wikinews does not adhere to the strict NPOV interpretation that is
>> inevitable for Wikipedia. Wikiversity could not even come close
>> to employing anything remotely like it. Wikispecies actually
>> doesn't have any need for anything like it. And for Wikisource,
>> just as for Wikinews, NPOV can only be considered to apply in
>> a thoroughly transmogrified form.
>
>
> Knowing very little about Wikiversity and Wikispecies, I'd be interested in
> how that can work. I mean, for the general public to collaborate on a wiki,
> you have to have some form of rule about objectivity, don't you?
>
> I understand that NPOV has a meaning within the English Wikipedia which
> doesn't apply in most of the other projects, but there is an essence of it
> that applies to all the projects, isn't there?
>
> Maybe I'm wrong. I'm really interested in your answer if I am.
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Re: Projekt: OpenCritics (let's free subjective content, too!!) [ In reply to ]

wikimail at inbox

Aug 31, 2009, 6:59 AM

Post #7 of 7 (769 views)

Permalink

On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 9:08 PM, David Goodman <dgoodmanny@gmail.com> wrote:

> Myself, I consider NPOV as what distinguishes an encyclopedia from
> promotion and advocacy.

I don't think Wales or Sanger or whoever invented the term "NPOV" discovered
the concept, so I'd avoid using that newly invented term to describe it.

Agreed it is hard to get there completely, but
> the effort to approximate it is what makes Wikipedia a work of
> reference, and conservopedia a joke. ~~~~
>

Sometimes I think Wikipedia goes too far in the other direction, though:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Objectivity_(journalism)&diff=309541103&oldid=307529219
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