Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Wikipedia day at Madlab

[Simon Ward]

And here’s my more detailed response/diatribe (delete as appropriate):

On Fri, Jan 14, 2011 at 01:11:15PM +0000, Mark Reynolds wrote:

> As you may know it's Wikipedia's 10th birthday on Saturday.
> http://ten.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
> There are now 4 events in the UK to celebrate this, one was yesterday
> in Bristol where Jimmy Wales is giving a talk and another 2 on
> Saturday, one in Glasgow and one at the British library in London
> where they're having an editathon. Unfortunately I found out about
> them too late. I also think it's a bit of a lack lustre response
> considering there are so many Wikipedia users in the UK, so I've
> arranged one at MadLab for this Sunday from 11am to 5pm.

Good initiative, let’s hope it can be put to more deserving projects in
future.  I’d like to hope this is not just a Wikimedia Foundation
publicity and fundraising event, but I can’t get those unfortunate
banners previously plastered all over Wikipedia out of my head.

Speaking of unfortunate banners, does anyone else think the fundraising
banners on gnu.org sites are offensive to the eyes?

> As I'm sure you all know Wikipedia's very well known and relies on a
> lot of free software so it would be nice if we could take advantage of
> this to educate people about free software and use Wikipedia as an
> example of how it can be used in the real world to cope with the
> demands of, in this case, one of the most popular websites on the
> Internet

So far, so good.  This is great, and I’d love to hear how Wikipedia uses
free software.  Practical examples of using free software are great;
free software *does* have a use after all.  I wasn’t just advocating an
abstract concept all this time.

> as well as introduce people to the open source philosophy that has
> helped make it such a success.

Is this just a slip, because it looks like a conscious decision was made
to find and replace all occurrences of “open source” with “free
software”? :P

Unfortunately, there are philosophical differences between the free
software movement and the open source movement, and these are hard to
avoid, and hard to explain to the uninitiated.

The problem, free software and open source software often refer to
precisely the same thing.  The software doesn’t change, and free
software licenses are also approved by the Open Source Initiative
against the Open Source Definition as open source licenses, so there’s
no difference there.

I can try to summarise open source as lacking the values of free
software, or a marketing term to try and make free software acceptable
to those who care less about its values, and in doing so dilutes the
meaning, but I don’t think it conveys the whole story as well as the
article “Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software”[1].

[1]: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html

> I was thinking that as part of it people could do a short 5-10 minute
> talk introducing a piece of free software Wikipedia uses, what they
> use it for and why it's important. Someone might talk about PHP, then
> pass over to someone to talk about MediaWiki, for example.

What software does Wikipedia use?  I get as far as Mediawiki, which is
PHP‐based, and I presume there’s a LAMP¹ stack in there somewhere, and
lots more software running behind the scenes.

¹LAMP commonly refers to Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, but may more
genericly refer to any GNU/Linux system with web server, database
management system or other data storage, and programming language and/or
framework for creating web applications.

Simon
-- 
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a
simple system that works.—John Gall

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