<CPOV> The costs of knowledge

[Andreas Kemper]

Hi Andy

Identity: it's like the identity of book-authors. They can also publish the
books with a pseudonym and can get royalty from the state.
Conflicts: You're right. I think there are more conflicts as now when
main-authors get money.

Best
Andreas

2010/3/24 <andrew.famiglietti at lcc.gatech.edu>

> This is very interesting stuff! You were able to identify top editor's real
> identities? If there was money at stake wouldn't you have to deal with
> attempts to falsely claim "ownership" of an active Wikipedia account? Were
> there any concerns about the loss of anonymous speech? English language
> Wikipedians seem to have divided opinions about being identified on
> Wikipedia.
>
> I'm not surprised the Foundation declined the money, in an early post to
> Wikipedia-L, Jimmy Wales writes that he basically considers taxation
> theft... however I also wonder about practical considerations. Edit
> conflicts can burn hot enough as it is, would they get worse if the editor
> whose contributions stuck was going to get paid?
>
> - Andy
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Andreas Kemper" <andreas.erich.kemper at googlemail.com>
> To: "Juliana Brunello" <juliana at networkcultures.org>
> Cc: "cpov list" <cpov at listcultures.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, March 23, 2010 11:41:30 AM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
> Subject: Re: <CPOV> The costs of knowledge
>
> There are programs to find the main-authors. It didn't seem to be the big
> problem to find the main-authors in Wikipedia. We had in the German
> Wikipedia a big discussion about the question: should we name the
> main-authors in the beginning of a Wikipedia-article
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Umfragen/Autorennennung_am_Artikel
>
> and we had also a big discussion about VG Wort/Metis:
>
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Diskussion:METIS#aktuelle_Sonderaussch.C3.BCttung
>
> and here is my blog-article about the solidarity economy in Wikipedia:
>
> http://klassismus.blogspot.com/2009/05/zur-solidarischen-okonomie-wikipedias.html
> where I published the possibility to get royalty from the state for
> Wikipedia-articles.
>
> All this articles are in German language, sorry.
>
> The most Wikipedia-articles have enough clicks per year to get the royalty
> from VG-Wort/Metis, so Wikimedia and the German Wikipedia-Authors could get
> each year a big peace of the cake (12 million Euro!), Matthias Schindler
> spokes about 5 million Euro.
>
> 2010/3/23 Juliana Brunello <juliana at networkcultures.org>
>
>> Wow, I wasn't aware of such a possibility!
>>
>> However, I don't know how exactly this would work in the case of
>> Wikipedia. Articles are edited by a different number of authors, so how to
>> compensate them? Divide equally? Divide per word count? How should it
>> actually be measured and is it possible to automate the process?
>>
>> Juliana
>>
>>
>> > Hi Juliana
>> >
>> > Thats really a necessary question.
>> > We had in the germanspeaking Wikipedia in the last year trouble about
>> it.
>> >
>> > In Germany you can get money from the state, if you are publishing books
>> or
>> > articles. And since two years you can get money, if you publish
>> > internet-articles. If your internet-article has enough clicks, than you
>> can
>> > get 30-40 € for each article. If your article is published by an
>> organization, than you get 60% and the organization gets 40% of the
>> royalty.
>> > Each year the internet-authors in Germany get 12 million € from
>> the state
>> > (from VG-Wort).
>> >
>> > I was in contact with VG-Wort and they told me, they want also give
>> money
>> > to
>> > Wikipedia / the Wikipeda-Authors. But the Wikimedia-Foundation and the
>> German chapter didn't want to have the money. They didn't told anything
>> to
>> > the German authors. The ideology: Wikipedia-Authors have a lot of fun,
>> if
>> > they write articles for Wikipedia. It's not work, it's a hobby.
>> >
>> > If there an internet-content-organization is not part of the VG-Wort,
>> than
>> > the internet-authors can get a special distribution. VG Wort was giving
>> around three € for each article (if it has enough clicks). It's
>> not much
>> > money for one article, but some authors have written thousands of
>> articles.
>> > The German Wikimedia-Chapter knows about this special distribution, but
>> they
>> > didn't inform the Wikipedia-Authors about this easy possibility to get
>> money
>> > for their work.
>> >
>> > Best
>> > Andreas
>> >
>> > 2010/3/23 Juliana Brunello <juliana at networkcultures.org>
>> >
>> >> Hi all,
>> >> This is a two paragraph quote from a text published at firstmonday
>> called
>> >> ‘Signs of epistemic disruption: Transformations in the knowledge
>> system of the academic journal’ by William W. Cope and Mary
>> Kalantzis.
>> >>
>> http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2309/2163
>> I find their questions not only interesting, but necessary.
>> >> “Everybody who writes for Wikipedia has to have another source of
>> income. What would happen to the global scholarly publishing industry
>> if
>> >> academics assumed collective and universal responsibility for self
>> publishing, an industry supporting in 2004 a reported 250,000 employees
>> worldwide with a US$65 billion turnover (Peters, 2007)? What would
>> happen
>> >> to scholarly associations and research institutes that have
>> historically
>> >> gained revenue from the sale of periodicals and books? An ironical
>> consequence of a move to social production would, in the
>> >> much–trumpeted era of the knowledge or creative economy, be to
>> value
>> >> knowledge making and creativity at zero when coal. How do knowledge
>> workers eat and where do they live? Without doing away with the market
>> entirely, we are consigning a good deal of knowledge work to
>> involuntary
>> >> volunteerism, unaccountable cross–subsidy, charity or penury. We
>> know from experience the fate of workers in other domains of unpaid
>> labor,
>> >> such as the unpaid domestic work of women and carers. Making it free
>> means
>> >> that it is exploited. In the case of the knowledge economy, the
>> exploiters
>> >> are the likes of Google who take the unpaid work of social producers
>> and
>> >> make a fortune from it.
>> >> …
>> >> In this perspective, in this era of the new, digital media we might be
>> witnessing no more than one of the old marvels of industrial capitalism
>> — a technology that improves productivity. In the case of
>> knowledge
>> >> making, the efficiencies are so great — print encyclopedias vs.
>> Wikipedia, celluloid movies vs. digital movies posted to YouTube, PDF
>> journal articles vs. print journals — that we get the impression
>> that the costs have reduced to nothing. But they have not. They have
>> only
>> >> been lowered. We have become too dazzled by the reduction in costs to
>> notice the costs we are now paying. So low are these costs in fact that
>> we
>> >> are can even afford to make these cultural products in our spare time,
>> and
>> >> not worry too much about giving away the fruits of our labors to
>> companies
>> >> who have found ways to exploit them in newly emerging information
>> markets.
>> >> Knowledge is a product of human labor and it needs human labor to make
>> it
>> >> available. There can never be zero costs of production and distribution
>> of
>> >> knowledge and culture, theoretical or empirical. At most, there are
>> productivity improvements. Far from ushering in a new mode of
>> >> production,
>> >> the driving force is more of the same engine that over the past few
>> centuries has made capitalism what it is.”
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>>
>>
>>
>
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> --
> --
> Andrew Famiglietti
> Brittain Fellow
> School of Literature, Communication, and Culture
> Georgia Institute of Technology
>
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