Archive for July, 2007

Cultivating your project’s page on Wikipedia

Published by Stuart Yeates on July 31, 2007 in Discussion and Community. 0 Comments

I’m a Wikipedia editor with a couple of hundred edits and I’ve seen a number of people promote themselves on Wikipedia the wrong way. Wrong ways include (but are not limited to):

  1. Cut and pasting advertising material or project descriptions to Wikipedia. This material is of dubious copyright status (hint: there are tools that automatically scan Wikipedia for text that appears elsewhere on the web) and is almost certainly written in the wrong style for Wikipedia.
  2. Rewriting an existing page from scratch. This repudiates the contributions and points of view of previous contributors to the article in favour of the contributions and point of view of a single contributor.
  3. Coping material from partisan documents into the article. Wikipedia strives to be an encyclopedia, which involves being fair, impartial and balanced where ever possible. If you must draw on partisan documents, you need to go out of your way to note their partisanness.
  4. Writing an essay-style article on the benefits of the project. Wikipedia is not a forum for original research or original writing, it strives to be an encyclopedia and has a very specific encyclopedic style. This style is only casually connected to that of an essay.

There’s a barrier to entry for all pages in Wikipedia—the subject of the article must be “notable.” Notability is a flexible concept, but if something is known to only a small number of people, is not written about by third parties or is essentially ephemeral, it may not be notable. Articles about non-notable subjects are quickly removed from Wikipedia, so it is important that the first version of the page address the reputation, impact or fame of the subject to establish notability.

If you’re writing about a standard, discuss any standardisation bodies involvement, numbers of implementations, numbers of deployments, etc. If you’re written about software, talk about numbers of installs, downloads, turnover of companies involved, etc. In all cases mention institutions involved and any organisation or person linked to the project who already has a Wikipedia page, with links to those pages.

10 steps to improving your page on Wikipedia

  1. Get a Wikipedia account. By registering for an account, you show yourself willing to be held accountable for your edits. Other editors will be more willing to help you and you will have access to more pages. Your edits will also attract less attention from the automated bots that patrol Wikipedia for spam, copyright infringements and other badness.
  2. Add your page to categories. Look at the Wikipedia pages for other similar projects and see what categories they are in. If appropriate, add your page to the same categories. Categories are an major tool in navigating Wikipedia.
  3. Examine other pages in the same categories as your page to see what your page might aspire to. These pages are the pages in Wikipedia that are most similar in nature to your page and will give you ideas as to how to improve it.
  4. Add an infoBox (table in the upper right), a standard way of representing tabular information. InfoBoxes are a key way of tabulating information about organisations, places and other features in Wikipedia. Readers expect to see them. The exact content of the infoBox will depend on the categories that your page is in, check other pages in the same category and crib as many fields as apply to your project.
  5. Add links to third party reviews comparisons and news sources. These, and links from the text to particular references, are key to quality articles and article verifiability.
  6. Add disambiguation text. Often the same word or acronym can mean several different things in different fields. Disambiguation text at the start of the article ensure that readers are where they think they are and redirects them if necessary.
  7. Add article content, broken into useful sections and navigated by a table of contents (the wiki generates the table of contents automatically). Browse other pages in the same categories for suitable subject matter for your page.
  8. Make small incremental changes, unless you really know what you’re doing. Small improvements to a page are much easier to judge the quality of than large rewrites. They’re also more likely to engage other editors (rather than merely being reverted) if you break a guideline.
  9. Add links to/from other Wikipedia pages. Links from your page allow readers to explore related concepts in more detail. Links to your page mean more readers reading it.
  10. Encourage other members of your community to contribute. A single-author page will always have problems representing multiple points of view that a multi-author page can mitigate. More authors and editors on a page mean more content, better proof reading and more links.

Exemplar Wikipedia pages can be found on Moodle, LDAP and Oxford University.

If you’ve got specific questions about specific pages you’re interested in, give us a shout at info@oss-watch.ac.uk

XCRI: standard course information

Published by Stuart Yeates on July 30, 2007 in e-Administration, Development, Standards and Community. 1 Comment

At the recent IWMW, I went to a session on XCRI. Unfortunately I was too busy listening to take detailed notes and the presentation slides don’t appear to be in the web.

XCRI is a new standard for exchanging post-compulsory course information. Universities, further education, adult learning centres, vocational agencies and continuing professional development providers can all publish information about their courses, enabling careers advisers, institutions and government agencies to find the relevant information on courses in order to encourage people to enrol in them.

Previously there was no standard format for such information and the main consumers of it all require it in different forms. UCAS is a major consumer, as are any number of different government schemes aimed at increasing the take-up of educational opportunities and regional development programs aiming to tackle unemployment by retraining and upskilling. Institutions also typically have their own course catalogue of some description too. Keeping all of these in sync, both with each other and with what students of the course actually get taught is a significant challenge.

XCRI is an XML standard similar in nature to Atom: (a) it’s plain XML (for those people who want to keep things simple) with a mapping to RDF (for those wanting generalised knowledge representation); (b) it’s got a small number of tags as possible, and where ever possible those tags reuse definitions widely used elsewhere; (c) a feed is a list of items.

To make publishing XCRI easier, the standard assumes (but doesn’t enforce) that the feed is merely a text file on a webserver representing all an institutions forthcoming courses. This is to explicitly encourage batch export and validation of XCRI from legacy systems, which is expected to the dominant form of generation for most institutions for some time.

XCRI is a new standard, and their website is still under construction, but some of the community members have websites with decent information on XCRI. Indeed the community building around XCRI is very impressive, with support from a wide variety of institutions.

If you’ve got an open source or open development project you’re trying to build a community around, why not join the new community-development mailing list that we at OSS Watch have recently started? Unfortunately, no, we can’t claim the success of XCRI had anything to do with us, but we can certainly answer your questions and give you pointers.

OSI approves new attribution-centric licence

Published by Stuart Yeates on July 27, 2007 in Legal. 2 Comments

The OSI has approved a new licence with a focus on attribution. Groklaw have a fine-grained analysis.

The key question is whether copyright holders can include a clause in their licence forcing users to display advertising for the copyright holders and the licence still get the official “open source” stamp of approval from the OSI. Such advertising directly undermines the position of any direct competitors to the copyright holders in the marketplace, but it also limits the usefulness of the software in many situations. This issue is most important to commercial companies with business models based on dual-licensing in crowded marketplaces, such as the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Content Management Systems (CMS) marketplaces.

Ironically, the SugarCRM licence which Groklaw use as a comparison, may be outdated. I posted yesterday that SugarCRM have announced a move to the GPLv3.

Moodle Moot 2007

Published by Stuart Yeates on July 27, 2007 in Development and Community. 0 Comments

Registration is now open for Moodle Moot 2007, the original Moodle gathering. Being held at Milton Keynes for the second year after a move from Oxford, the Moot is 23-25 October. Paper submission is still open.

Moodle is an pedagogically-driven open source Virtual Learning Environment(VLE). With a strong focus on the learning and single-click installation, moodle’s growth is being driven by teachers and in my recent trips to several RSC events, most further education institutions in the UK seemed to be using it.

If you’re doing anything exciting with Moodle, be it technically exciting, pedagogically exciting or socially existing, come to the Moot and tell us about it. Institutions are encouraged to send a pair of people to Moodle Moot, one techie and one teacher (or one geek and one pedagogist, to use the cant).

Register or check out pictures of last time(s).

I’m going again this year. This will be my third (or maybe my fourth ?). I’m hoping I get to present this year rather than being a dogsbody again.

SugarCRM goes GPLv3

Published by Stuart Yeates on July 26, 2007 in Legal, Discussion and Community. 3 Comments

Open source content management system SugarCRM is switching to the new version of the GPL, the GPLv3, for the next release of their software.

SugarCRM is a dual-licensed open source application, with both open source versions and propriety versions which have additional functionality, support and other benefits. By releasing the low-end community version for free under the GPLv3, SugarCRM enables users to use the software in small businesses, small projects and non-mission critical roles. When those businesses and projects grow, and when those roles become mission critical, users can upgrade to the propriety versions of the software. The community version is released under the GPLv3, forcing commercial competitors who seek to build competing products on it to release the source-code to any improvements they make, leaving SugarCRM in a privileged position over any such competitors.

The GPLv3 is a third version of Gnu Public Licence released by the Free Software Foundation. The previous two versions have been very popular open source licences.

The acrimonious debate over earlier drafts of the GPLv3 threw up questions of how popular it would be once released, but take-up by high-profile projects such as SugarCRM suggest that the GPLv3 is going to enjoy popular support as the previous versions of the GPL have.