CZ:License Essays/Stephen Ewen

The tension is between social production and the profit motive. Volunteer labor means something very different in the context of a community than it does in the context of a business. In the context of a community, it's an expression of fellowship, of the communal value of sharing. But in the context of a business...it's nothing more than a cheap input. Many of the most eloquent advocates of social production would prefer it if this tension didn't exist. But it does, and it's important.

The choice between a commercial-allowable and non-commercial license license for CZ original articles is one that will affect the quality and scope of the project as a whole. A trade-off between freedom of content and quality of content is unavoidable, given what I will refer to as simply "the realities of how the real world works". A minority of idealists notwithstanding, a license that restricts some freedoms is a necessary concession to those realities. Unless CZ makes such a concession, it is less likely to achieve the large corpus of quality of content to which it aspires. This is primarily due to two factors related to media and contributors. I will expand these points, then close with comments about a multi-licensed wiki.

Types of Media, Reusers

Ideally, CZ articles should be crafted to allow them to be reused as units. This means selecting images and other media that are licensed compatibly (not necessarily identically) with CZ text. When media exists in articles that is licensed incompatibly with CZ text, it forces re-users to treat the two separately when they go to reuse CZ content. For example, if answers.com at some point wished to be a commercial re-user of a future corpus of 10,000 approved CZ articles, most which contained some high-quality images that disallow commercial use, such media must simply be removed. This would leave glaring gaps, often crucial, in the article units, and would likely leave some with no images at all. Filling these gaps would require answers.com to undertake extraordinary labor and significant costs to fill the gaps. Knowing this, it is unlikely they would even bother. Indeed, the real value of a commercial-allowable license for CZ original articles text is that reusers can tap an easy source of whole content—articles with both text and images licensed compatibly. When this is not so, it dramatically, even radically, reduces the overall value of the project and its articles to re-users.

At the same time, privileging commercial-allowable media is tantamount to stipulating you do not overall want the best available media within your articles. Commercial-allowable licenses are largely the domain of amateur photographers, and it takes little imagination to realize why. Semi-professional and professional photographers have livelihoods at stake. They very much want to retain rights to profit from their work, for themselves and their families, and quite understandably do not wish to, in perpetuity, give that right away to those who in reality are strangers. Such photographers who do release their works under commercial-allowable license typically do so for only the rare image here and there, as an occasional added good measure "to get their name out there", or to make some use of their lower quality works with unlikely commercial value in the first place.

Of course, this is not to devalue the work of amateur photographers, or downplay that some do release some often very nice work. Still, on the whole, it is non-commercial images that are most likely to be of the best quality, for the obvious reasons stated above.

The above factors produce an unavoidable dilemma to which CZ media policy must take one of two directions:

1. Place quality first and reusers second. The quality of articles to users of the articles at citizendium.org takes precedence over the interests of reusers to reuse whole content. When non-commercial images are superior, they get placed, thus biasing quality over the interests of reusers.
2. Place reusers first and quality second. Forbid non-commercial images altogether, or at least replace all non-commercial images with commercial allowable ones if they exist, even if quality suffers. Biasing reusers and forbidding non-commercial images altogether is the path Wikipedia has taken to the chagrin and outcasting of many.

Of course, and assuming that the CZ text (only the text) is commercial-allowable, this does not stop non-commercial re-users from using CZ content as wholes, if they are crafted with non-commercial media so as to achieve higher overall quality. So what's the big issue, then?

The better question is, what then is the point of having commercial-allowable text? If we have already established it as highly unlikely that commercial reusers will reuse CZ articles as wholes because of the existence in them of non-commercial media, and that we want to allow such media, a commercial license for the text becomes quite pointless—and in fact, it has an inverse value for CZ, as myself and others (including dozens of Wikipedians, Jimmy Wales, and astute observers of both projects) have already argued. That CZ text would serve as a feeder into the dysfunctional Wikipedia system is bad for both projects--for CZ, because it strikes at our very identity and existence, and for WP, because it enables them to host in a dysfunctional system content created in a much more healthy system, thus removing any impetus to internally change brought on by competition.

And note that despite the shortcomings of this system, CZ already has many links to its articles within the External links sections of Wikipedia articles, the inclusion of which is supported extremely strongly within WP policy.

But the issue of quality and freedom is also related to contributors.

Types of Contributors, Everyday and Academics

A good deal has been up-played about CZ's need to attract hardcore Wikipedians who are ardent GFDL supporters. This is an insular view and fails to account for the real reasons of why most people contribute to a wiki in the first place. In addition, the up-play fails to recognize that most hardcore Wikipedians are not particularly inclined to join CZ in the first place, for issues unrelated to licensing.

For most everyday WP contributors, the licensing of their contributions is one of the least of their considerations. Most do their adding before they really understand the GFDL. The drive to contribute is because of the popularity of the site and the opportunity for a formerly not-enjoyed audience. Very common is the WP contributor who, 10 months and 10 articles later, realizes a first fundamental of the GFDL: it means neither "free as in beer" nor "free as in education". Yet it has been the latter working as a drive behind their contributions all along.

"Free as in education" is what holds the most currency in real world. This means non-commercial, and it is a hard reality of how most of the world works as regards volunteerism, and I daresay this will remain the case in our lifetimes and that of our children. As one who has actually lived among several impoverished peoples of the Global South, it has always saddened yet amused me to hear how commercial use is necessary to reach the poor. Without arguing at length, what it instead does is further stratify such societies, while removing the impetus to actually reach the poor who need education the most.

And what of academics on the whole? The same arguments made about semi-professional and professional photographers applies. Academics have livelihoods at stake, and it is no secret that the base pay of those in academia is rarely lucrative. Indeed, for an academic, the difference between an income around the $50,000-U.S. range and one around the $100,000-U.S. range is the difference between the ability to commercially publish one's writings or not. By the varied practical constraints in "the game of academia", CZ must safeguard the ability of academic contributors to also publish their contributions in for-profit medium, or risk losing such contributions altogether.

A Wiki with Content Under Varied Licenses is a Wonderful Thing

A few have attempted to play up how the wiki will be unmanagable if it hosts content under varied licenses. This is very overplayed and even more narrow of vision. The licensing of content should not limit the content we host. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that CZ cannot host material under the full array of copyrights and licenses. Doing so would increase both the overall amount and quality of our content, in fact.

Imagine having the freedom to start articles based upon the full range of Creative Commons licenses, plus the GFDL and others. For example, Encyclopedia of Earth articles (CC-by-sa) could be starting points, just as would the rich materials at the many University Open CourseWare projects (CC-by-nc-sa), plus all the material at Wikipedia. Limitations on allowable licenses equates to limitation on the project itself. Opening up the wiki to varied types of content under the full range of licenses—from public domain, to fully copyrighted, and everything in-between—makes very good sense. CZ has already stipulated that "signed, perhaps biased articles" adjunctive to main articles may be hosted under whatever terms the author chooses—just one of the needed concession to the real world that we either make or suffer loss in both the quality and quantity of our total content.

For those still unconvinced, consider that even the MediaWiki wiki is multi-licensed. Some time ago, the good folks at MediaWiki realized that new wikis with non-commercial licenses could not import MediWiki help pages, so they developed a solution. Some help pages are GFDL and others are now "public domain" (see just one of the many examples). What needs doing is a largely foolproof software-based solution, similar to the one devised by the MediaWiki wiki folks, augmented by template solutions plus the monitoring of new pages. The end outcome is very well worth any needed labor along the way.

Conclusion

CZ should choose a default non-commercial license for its original content. Doing so will best facilitate both quality and range of content and contributors. Those who wish their own personal contributions to be licensed more freely are free to do so on their userpages. At the same time, CZ should spearhead the idea of a well-managed wiki that hosts content under varied licenses.