My name is Jim Brown. I received my Ph.D. in English with a specialization in Digital Literacies and Literatures from the University of Texas. In September 2009, I will join the English Department at Wayne State University as an Assistant Professor. I write for multiple blogs, and you can see all of my blog writings via this RSS feed. Clinamen focuses mostly on my research interests, and its title is explained in this post from January 2008. SearchRecent comments
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Citizendium Goes With Creative CommonsCitizendium has finally picked a license - they've gone with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. This is good news. Until now, Citizendium was in a big holding pattern trying to figure out how it was going to license it's work. Citizendium articles can now be circulated much like Wikipedia articles are. So, is the Citizendium a "commons." This makes it more difficult to argue that it isn't a commons (I am making this argument in the chapter that I'm currently working on). However, Citizendium is still quite different from Wikipedia - I'm just going to have to articulate those differences very carefully.
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Obviously...
...the Citizendium is a commons. Jim, don't embarrass yourself too badly in that chapter. I mean, if you made part of your argument that CZ is not a commons rest on the fact that we hadn't made up our mind about the license, your argument was very weak indeed. I would encourage you, if you're going to write about it, actually to study what happens on the website, instead of doing what so many academics do, namely reason a priori about what it must be like, based on your abstract preconceptions.
Certainly. Citizendium is a commons.
Certainly, yes. Citizendium is a commons, but it's a different kind of commons - one that bleeds into the realm of "property." That is, while Citizendium does not allow any one person to determine ownership, it does deal with property differently. The move to attach particular writings to particular people treats intellectual property differently. This isn't wrong, it's just different. I would say the same about Wikipedia. Their choice to allow anonymous edits isn't necessarily wrong (There are certainly problems with such a policy, but it has also allowed the the text to become what it is.)
The chapter is very much in the early stages, but if there's a continuum with "property" on one side and "commons" on the other - I would (and will) argue that Wikipedia and Citizendium are at different points on that continuum.