Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2019-05-31/Recent research

This nonsense needs to be taken in the context of very successful pushes to try to come up with whole new levels of copyright or related craziness in Europe - see Julia Reda's leadership for information, or Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market for our version.

The idea that ordinary proles could speak directly to one another about events that affect their lives has become highly, highly controversial. Nonetheless, even in that awful legislation, Wikipedia was granted theoretical exemptions on account of its influence. Thus the desire of some for some kind of new prong of the assault. Every eyeball belongs to that single Master who owns the Company that owns All, and every deviation of those eyeballs from unending observance and meditation on his perfection is an inexcusable theft that can never be forgiven. Wnt (talk) 04:46, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

On the other hand, we do take expensive journalism work product which volunteers would ordinarily have no way to produce on their own, and strip it of the advertising intended to pay for it (in ways that Google generally does not but Microsoft and Apple certainly do -- but with compensation.) Journalists, their editors, and publishers aren't upset about that because they think you're a prole or that you and your peers shouldn't be talking among yourselves. They're upset about it because it cuts into their pay. Readers will prefer a Wikipedia article for breaking news not just because they know that dozens of sufficiently competent editors have already read through the commercial news and picked out all the most important parts for them, but also because they know they won't have to look at the ads that are supposed to pay for the work in the first place. I'm not saying it's legally or technically wrong in any way, but there is an unavoidable moral argument that we've been biting the hand that not only feeds us, but that was one of our strongest defenses against corruption and abuse of power. EllenCT (talk) 06:41, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

EllenCT, I think that it is an interesting point that is raised, but then we should ask ourselves: What should we do about it? I think that as it stands there is no clear solution to the problem because either we force ourselves to be out of date and inaccurate or we don't cover recent events. One solution would be to somehow pay for the use of the articles. I like this idea because it would benefit the journalists and encourage them to cooperate with Wikipedia. However, it would require a very large grant. StudiesWorld (talk) 10:46, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Every so often I propose doing something that would work to keep journalists and other content creators gainfully employed, but nobody ever goes for it, because it's not about one guy controlling all the news and all the readers in the world. It's not my fault that copyright is an unfair system that can't work, which relied only on the physical difficulty of copying things to impose taxes on the act of readership via a tax farming system. But for the record, there is no reason why we could not enact some legislation whereby a certain percent on top of a person's annual income tax had to be paid via a funding mechanism in lieu of any copyright or patent royalties. The individual taxpayer would get to choose what organizations would disburse this funding in the form of grants to content creators those organizations desire. (In theory, individuals could choose their own recipients, but to prevent back-scratching arrangements the sum going to any one recipient would have to be kept very small, making this difficult) Because copyright is almost infinitely inefficient, a mechanism where authors get paid the same as they are now would be one where people have access to vastly more information, at no added cost; indeed, at a reduced cost because a lot of bean counting and copy protection and encryption and obfuscation would no longer be "needed". My suggestion is by no means the only way to do funding, but it is workable, whereas the of copyrighting facts and individual words is not workable and will not preserve the jobs of journalists: to the contrary, it will ensure that each and every remaining journalist is replaced by a stenographer as the "marketplace of ideas" is replaced by a marketplace of licenses to write about them. Wnt (talk) 22:16, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Wnt: I'd support that and it would be great to see the Foundation pushing it. Who do we even ask? EllenCT (talk) 06:55, 1 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The WMF would have a hard time "pushing" an idea like this (or political ideas of any kind) in a general sense. However, when people talk about what can be done to save journalism, or how Wikipedians displace paying jobs in the encyclopedia industry, it is applicable incidentally.

I should add that -- though the temptation to use them could readily become overwhelming -- it is possible to hybridize the idea with more traditional politics, i.e. by imposing funding directives by sector. For example, if a congress were worried that too many individual taxpayers would choose to put all their creativity funding toward hip-hop, they could order that the allocations for popular music (or even hip-hop per se, with all the unpleasant racial politics connotations such a specific restriction might carry) would be diminished by some factor or to a specific relative or absolute level, in order that the funds be redirected to comparably expand the allocations to cancer research. The extreme case of this is of course the current situation where the government simply funds NIH and NSF certain amounts and you don't get a choice of which sector or which agency you want your money to be applied toward. This system lacks the flexibility of a taxpayer-directed system, but it can be argued that in technical sectors the voter simply wouldn't know what to fund and would fall prey to organizations that market themselves (yet despite this impression and the overall disrepute of charities in the U.S., major independent funders like American Cancer Society are strikingly honest and effective in their funding choices). In music, obviously the taxpayer knows what he likes. News might be argued to be between these extremes since people get duped every day, yet are often reasonably canny and can find good sources despite the obvious conflicts of interests imposed from above by advertiser funding in the present system. Wnt (talk) 09:29, 1 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Wnt says "we force ourselves to be out of date and inaccurate or we don't cover recent events" as if not covering recent events was a Bad Thing. If we simply deleted everything regarding any event of any kind until three days had passed and announced this new policy on the main page and any articles affected along with a suggestion to go to Wikinews for anything late-breaking it would reduce the amount of conflict and rapidly mutating pages by 80%,^{[Citation Needed]} would greatly reduce the number of errors in Wikipedia,^{[Citation Needed]} and would force the "this just in!" editing addicts to quit their habit cold turkey.^{[Citation NOT Needed]} We would simply train our readers to expect Wikipedia to be silent for three days and then to suddenly give them better information than available from any of the "late breaking news!" sources. What's so bad about an encyclopedia that is an encyclopedia instead of a twitter feed? --Guy Macon (talk) 19:05, 1 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hmmmm, I don't know. Why do you suppose it might be better to have most of the people editing the encyclopedia write about something while they are reading it and following it and interested rather than after they have forgotten about it and moved on? More to the point though, with many stories the best source is the first source, followed by hundreds or thousands of echoes, newspapers running the same thing with less facts and less attribution. Often the longer you wait to research, the harder it is to find detailed and accurate information. Wnt (talk) 17:33, 2 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree with EllenCT's assertion that we strip journalism of the advertising intended to pay for it (although I imagine this was stated as devil's advocate). How journalism (or any other media we cite) is paid for is not our concern. We have a fundamental right to be able to discuss current events without paying anyone a fee. Just as you have a right to discuss current events with the person sitting next to you without paying a fee. No one should be able to "own" the facts surrounding current events (or any events for that matter). This drum-beating about how journalism will die unless we give media companies special copyrights is both disingenuous and dangerous. Journalism isn't going anywhere (despite claims to the contrary for the past dozen years) and owning facts only gives corporations a tighter stranglehold on our ability to actually communicate with each other, which should be held as a fundamental human right more important than the survival of a particular economic model. Kaldari (talk) 15:18, 9 June 2019 (UTC)[reply]

"Generating Wikipedia by Summarizing Long Sequences"

Page 15 of [1] tells you everything you need to know about that paper. EllenCT (talk) 07:03, 31 May 2019 (UTC)[reply]