Last night's CC Salon in Montreal went extremely well. I spent the time haranguing Marcus and Tina Pipers (the co-director of Creative Commons Canada) about the evils of anti-DRM clauses in licenses. (See Free content and DRM for my opinionated take on this matter.) Apparently there was a lot of talk about this at the iCommons summit in Brazil.
Amita June enjoyed the noise and attention and spent an inordinate amount of time patting one hacker's very long beard. We'll see what kind of psychological symptoms that develops into later.
tags: cc cc salon montreal marcus bornfreund tina pipers cc ca drm
Ben Macintyre on Wiki
It was kind of tiring to see Ben Macintyre's note on How wiki-wiki can get sticky in The Times Online.
- Many years ago, I wrote a book about a Victorian crook called Adam Worth, a subject so obscure that no one had ever written a book about him before, or since. When I found an entry for Worth on Wikipedia, I was at first astonished, then flattered to find the book cited in the references, and then slightly infuriated: whoever had written the entry had plainly read my book and summarised it, but added several small but irritating errors.
Wikipedia isn't perfect and contains some errors? Oh, really? Boo hoo hoo. Yawn, turn the page. Wait, though; what's that last paragraph say?
- At first, I ignored the mistakes. This was only Wikipedia, after all. But the landscape of knowledge has changed since then, and I have joined the club. Wikipedia should always be taken with a pinch of salt. But the more we contribute and revise, the less salt we will need. We are all Wikipedists now.
Huh. A mainstream journalist who realized the way to deal with errors in Wikipedia is to fix them? Am I dreamin'?