Wikipedia and Creative Commons

(1)  Look at the History and Discussion tabs of several Wikipedia history entries and write about what you see.

I looked at three Wikipedia pages for topics related to my HIST 485 thesis this semester.  The articles were titled “July 20,” “Operation Valkyrie,” and “Henning von Tresckow.”  The “History” tab just appears to reveal a list of recent and older changes that have been made to the article since its creation.  I think it is interesting that you are able to click on a change, see who made the change, and see a comparison of what the article looks like currently and how it appeared prior to the update.  I did think the comparative information was a bit confusing in that I was not entirely sure what I was looking at.  When I saw that you could click to compare the changes, I thought it would give you a section of the article and then show in red where the changes were, or something along those lines.  The other tab, “Discussion,” includes comments users have made that suggest improvements to the article and also appears to be where users ask for help in editing.  In this section, people will usually focus on a certain passage of the article and then describe why they think it should be removed or altered.  This section alarmed me because people want to change information, and they state what they believe should be said, but they do not seem to offer any credible citation to support their views.  If Wikipedia is all about making quality information available to everyone on earth, as Jimmy Wales stated, then they should make sure to use appropriate source material.

(2)  Consider what Creative Commons License you might use for your own site.  What role does copyright play in the resources you are working with this semester?

Being that our site with Murray and Slaughter’s letters is being created for and is consequently affiliated with the National Park Service (NPS), I do not know how much say we have in deciding what type of Creative Commons License to use.  But, if we can choose one, I would say we would most likely use either “Attribution-NoDerivatives” or “Attribution.”  Both options allow commercial uses of the work, while the first does not allow adaptations of the work to be shared while the second does.  I do not like the idea of the work being changed, so I would most likely be in favor of “Attribution-NoDerivatives.”  Since these two men are not very well known, if known at all, by the larger historical community, any parts of their letters or the content my group includes on the site should be taken as is because they are so unique.  As far as copyright, I do not think my group will run into any issues.  Most of our resources include the letters, biographical information on Murray that the NPS sent with his letters, Murray’s possessions at the Chancellorsville Battlefield Museum, Slaughter’s grave in the Confederate Cemetery downtown, and any additional information we learn about these two men from Luisa Dispenzirie, the museum curator at Chancellorsville.  The Confederate Cemetery is open to the public and the Murray family gave the NPS George’s letters and things.  The only area we will likely have to tread carefully is on using pictures and other information we find online.  We will have to search on our own for information on Slaughter and Murray and so anything we find on other sites needs to be evaluated for use in our project.

Wikipedia and Copyright

I mostly looked at Wikipedia pages about British history. Overall, the more popular topic of history such as “Henry VIII” had more comments and the less known topic had fewer comments. Many of the conversations seem to get very heated such as the spelling of “Stewart” in the “House of Stuart” page. Sometimes the comments were very aggressive urging the writer of the edit to produce a source to back up their argument. Many of the edits and comments seemed genuine and brought up some good issues. I was happy to find that most of the edits that were not correct were rejected which I thought was good. Although details of most of the topics are lacking the Wikipedia pages I looked at provide a good overview of historical events and people.

I am not sure exactly how we could use Creative Commons for our project. We could CC our scans so that people can reuse them for educational purposes but I assume we should discuss that with the National Park Service since they own the diaries. According to chapter seven of Cohen and Rosenzweig it says that we do not need to place a copyright notice on our work which I agree with since in our about page we can clearly layout who we are and our project. One thing I could see us having a copyright discussion about is anything (images, videos, etc.) we use from the National Park Service but since we are helping them by digitizing their diaries I don’t think it will be an issue.

Wikipedia and Creative Commons

From looking at the History and Discussion tabs of many Wikipedia history entries, I never realized how much conversation when on about the content on the sites. I also never realized how frequently they are updated. Most of the pages I looked at have been updated within the month. Some of the discussion I noticed were questions regarding sections that people thought needed revision, as well as opinions on the validity and accuracy of the information. People also comment explaining what edits they made. Most of the discussion focuses on how each specific page can be improved, which is the purpose of the Discussion tab.  Because each page is so heavily discussed, I think it makes Wikipedia a more valid source of information than I once thought. Each page is constantly being red-over and improved, most of whom seem to be intelligent people. Additionally, at the top of the pages, there is a message reminding editors to use goodwill and write with non biased views while discussing the information.

The Creative Commons license that our website could use is the Attribution-NonCommercial license. According to Creative Commons, “this license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms”. This will allow others use the information and change it as they would like, without getting financial gain while still giving us credit. Due to the nature of our project, some of the information will change over time, so editing our site will be necessary. This license will allow others to edit our site, while still giving credit where it is due.

The Ever-Looming Copyright Law

Copyright is something we all run into on a daily basis. Whether it be a video on YouTube or a new album that is only streamed on a certain website that is losing a lot of money (I’m looking at you Kanye and Tidal). It is often times something that we understand is important but do not fully understand the repercussions when we break it.

Exploring the History and Discussion sections on Wikipedia is like a whole new area of Wikipedia that I had zero idea existed. The History tab is kind of boring, showing only what small phrases were changed or sometimes what things were completely taken out because of poor citations. However, the Discussion tab was the cool part. Here, the contributors communicate with one another to discuss improvements for the topic. The first page I read was the featured article of the day about Chester A. Arthur, the 21st president of the United States. In the discussion, the contributors talked about what new information that could add based on new information that has come out about Arthur. I think it is this latter point that is the most important. The new information must be backed up and cited by historians or others relevant to the field of study. The copyright comes into play because this information needs to be cited correctly.

For my project, I think the Creative Commons “Attribution-ShareAlike” would work best. This license would allow others to take the work that my groups has done and tweak it or add onto it. However, the person who decides to work on the project further must do two things. One, they must properly credit my group and the work we have done. And two, they must use the same Creative Commons license in their work. I really like the second part of this license because it ensures that the spirit of the work is moving forward as more people work on it and leave it open for others to extend on their research and work.

Wikipedia and Creative Commons

When looking at the specified Wikipedia discussion tabs on several historical pages, the first thing I generally noticed was something further specifying what the page was, and a listing of what categories and WikiProjects the page was related or relevant to. That page would also tell you if the article had been nominated for or won any good or featured article type awards within its category. Following that, what you would see is a listing of posts by various users about the article, particularly about how to improve it or fix problems. While the discussion page isn’t supposed to be for general discussion of the article’s subject, there were some examples I saw of historical debates breaking out on the page over discussions ostensibly about improving the article. One example was on the page for the Thirty Years’ War, where there was something of a debate about in what order to list the belligerents of the war, with the idea seeming to be that the importance or scale of those nations’ contributions was relevant to how they were listed. There was even some nationalism on display, as one user seemed to be arguing that the English-speaking world downplayed the French contribution. The “history” tab, which showed what edits had been made, generally showed people had made edits in order to improve the attributions and categorizations of the articles, rather than major changes to the text.

For our own group project, I feel the most accommodating CC license, that of Attribution, would be the best. Going through the Stanford guide to fair use, I feel the nature of our project, a published website which we will try to disseminate as widely as possible across the Civil War historical community, is something we should very much encourage people to visit and use material from with no fear of fair use problems.

 

 

 

James Monroe Update

After completing our team contracts, Which had our mission statement and listed all the tools and artifacts that we would be scanning. The contract also included a tentative schedule that we would begin to follow a soon as we finished writing our final draft of the contract. In that schedule we list the weeks prior to writing the contracted and listed what we did. This being said we decided to write out the rest of our schedule, by including what days we would scan items and also say which days we would edit and finish the artifact videos we decided to create. Following this schedule, that same week we met with George Meadows who is in charge of the 3D scanners that we will be using and decided to start getting a handle of how the scanners work,

Week 5: Update and Progress

We have our contract approved! Now it is time to get to work. This week our Civil War diaries group finished scanning all the transcripts we have and we started scanning the diaries. Suzanne Chase has been extremely helpful with the scanning process and helping us use the Cobra, a rare book scanner. She also made a spread sheet on the desktop of the lab computer so we can keep tract of who is doing which diary. I really enjoy using the Cobra but it took a bit to figurer out how it works but I think I got the hang of it now. On Thursday, I got through 37 pages of a diary and Ms. Chase said that I can come in next Thursday to work on scanning the diaries some more. We met with Catherine Perdue at the library and she gave us some great information about plugins for Omeka. She suggested we use the page turner plugin instead of Scripto so we will have to test that out. Ms. Perdue is also going to send us directions on how to use the page turner plugin. She also gave told us about plugins that allow the user to mass enter metadata which will be very helpful because our diary pages are all going to have similar metadata. Our main goal at this point is to get all the diaries scanned over the next two weeks so that we can upload them to Omeka and start testing out these plugins.

3D Laser Scanning Project Updates

This week we searched for  plugins to allow us to embed the  3D laser scans in our Omeka website. The only plugin we found required  the browser to be able to support it, so we’re going to continue to search for plugins and use the SketchFab website to host the  scans if necessary. Fortunately, SketchFab is free and the scans would remain the propert of the James Monroe Museum.

Dr. McClurken also asked our group to consider ways to expand the scope of our project. After consulting with the museum, we decided to make short videos of the curator talking about the objects we scan. We plan on keeping the videos basic with a very brief introduction to the museum, object, and curator before cutting to the curator discussing the object. The video will end with links to the museum’s website and our project website.

 

Project Update

This past week our group working on the Stephen W. Gordon diaries has been focusing on finishing the actual scanning of the diaries. Mostly this has involved a lot of time working in the digital archiving lab. Suzanne Chase has been incredibly helpful in answering our questions on scanning and how to properly handle the diaries.

For me personally scanning has been a really interesting act. Getting to actually pick up the diaries and flip through them. When I first started scanning this week it was also a little daunting realizing that what I was scanning and how I scanned it would be how the public viewed these diaries. It made me think more on how each scan looked and working to try and make sure that every page was as clear as I could get it and things were not as cut off. In the end though when I got to flip through the diaries and read what Gordon did on that particular day years ago it was such an awesome moment for me.

Since the project started I have also had an complicated and struggle filled relationship with Omeka. This has involved meetings with quite a few people and lots of testing out new ideas. It also included a short but spited battled with FileZilla that is now happily resolved. However I will save the full depths of the Omeka struggle for my presentation tomorrow.

HCC Website Update

This week, our group has made lots of progress in the planning of our website. We finalized our group contract, delegated responsibilities, and started gathering tools to begin creating our website. We met with Kyle Allwine, Assistant Director of Admissions, to discuss what Admissions would like to see regarding our project and how they could use it to attract prospective students. He was very enthusiastic about the project, and told us that he could help us to advertise the site once we finish, and wants to stay updated on our progress. We also reached out to the Building Manager of the HCC, and tomorrow, we are touring the building with him to learn more about its features and capabilities. We also reached out to President Hurley, and will hopefully be interviewing him on his views of the building, and what it means for him to have the building renamed after him. Right now we have a lot of work ahead of us, but it feels good to really be diving in to all of the logistics of each piece of the project this week, and finalizing the details on our contract.

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