Authentic language

Howard corrects his stand on storing and retrieving material by electronic means.

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Howard: You can take anything you like off the web, from the BBC, from Gutenberg, from Wikipedia, put into a digital library like Greenstone, with no worries about copyright, and then generate exercises like scrambled sentences, fill in the gaps, image guessing using FLAX.

Question: Are BBC, Gutenberg and Wikipedia all copyright free and open source?

Howard: OK, I didn’t quite mean “anything you like.” There’s a lot of stuff that you can’t, I mean it’s copyright. And I’m not sure how Greenstone handles BBC but books on Gutenberg are classics, out of copyright. Wikipedia articles are classified creative commons.
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Wikipedia vs Britannica

Hal is grumbling that Dave's report has too many wikipedia references in ti.

Hal: Your article was full of wiki references.

Dave: So?

Hal: But a wiki article can't be authoritative. It's written by unnamed amateurs. Full of mistakes.

Dave: Sometimes. But there was a study published in Nature that showed the typical Wikipedia article had 162 mistakes in 42 articles, compared with 123 in the same 42 Britannica articles. The mistakes were things like facts which weren't quite right, omissions and misleading information.

Hal: See?

Dave: Statistically there's hardly any difference. Web 2.0 collaboration by amateurs can be just about as "authoritative" as a panel of so-called "experts."

Hal: But even so, you can't rely on wikipedia articles. Their quality is uneven.

Dave: Used to be some truth in that. But more experts are getting involved, there's a "multiplier effect" occurring. And the biggest advantage is that when editing is needed in a wiki, it can be done instantly, something that it is not true of a print encyclopedia.

Joint presentation

“We have to talk for 20 minutes and leave 5 minutes for questions. So how shall we divide this up? Maybe I do the introduction and you do the rest?”

“How about you do the hard parts and I’ll do the easy bits?”

“Seriously now, look, you talk about his early upbringing, I’ll talk about his career as a lawyer and the ANC, then you talk about his arrest and apartheid in South Africa, and then I’ll finish off with his getting out of jail and becoming president and getting the Nobel.”

“I like this collaborative approach. Like a wiki.”

“Speaking of which, you know the organizer asked me who the author of that wikipedia article on Mandela was.”

“What did they need that for?”

“A reference list. One of those that goes, 1. author, 2. date of publication, 3. title, and 4. place of publication.”

“It’s a bit difficult to fit a wiki article into that frame.”

“Too darned right. Anyone can edit it. It’s a collaboration, so there’s no single author. It’s ongoing so there’s no fixed date of publication.”

“So wikis might change how bibliographies are written?”

“That’s micro. For macro think wikis could be a threat to intellectual property and copyright.

“Knowledge creation happens in social networks where people learn and teach each other.” Noel Tichy.

“The more you share, the more you win.” Brian Fetherstone.
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