- cross-posted to:
- privacy@lemmy.ml
- privacy@lemmy.ca
You must log in or register to comment.
Cool. To avoid things like wikia/fandom becoming a thing in the first place, we should remember to never contribute to profit-driven projects. With all its issues, Wikipedia has a much better model. Also taking care to make sure the content is licensed under a free license as recommended by FSF/GNU
It’s also ridiculous that the first person to make a wiki for a fandom gets to control it forever. Same with Reddit fandom subreddits. With how toxic fandom disputes can become, this is a recipe for disaster.
Example on why this is a problem: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=eYV2z0Jq0oU (to be fair, in this case the admin in question did resign and the wiki is a lot better now than it was)
we should remember to never contribute to profit-driven projects
It’s puzzling to me. I believe that without profit-driven companies there simply wouldn’t be open alternatives. In examples: without for profit encyclopedias – there would be no market for wikipedia; without Reddit – no Lemmy; without AT&T Unix – no Linux; etc
I would be interested to hear what prompted you for this arguably radical suggestion…
Indeed https://beehaw.org/post/113521
Contributing content to platforms that need to satisfy returns of interest (profit) is risky and much frustrating: most are proprietary so you are unable to freely use the content; ecomic, their intersts (profit) are above all (i.e. they do not care about users despite how much they try to fool users otherwise), so they will change the system according to their (shareholders) own interests/needs (gathering users are just a means to that, to do the hard work, to exploit and extract their data for market and similar purporses). Remember when fandom/wikia just deleted the greatest lyrics repository which users contributed many hours to without much warning and pretty fast?
Current society systems including economic systems driven by market/trade leads to unjust, very unequal society, and so much other problems… If society fixed these issues, things would be shared among people. Inovations would be free, no patents, … learning better ways and passing knowledge forward is a human evolutionary characteristic that makes humans humans; why limit evolution, improvement?
Contributing content to platforms … is risky
I do agree with that. However, I’d argue it’s because users often aren’t that mindful about their own data. Once you start “claiming” the rights for your data, it quickly becomes obvious that open source software provides much better offerings. Hence, you choose FOSS whenever possible.
Yes, companies are exploiting that lack of consumer knowledge and here it’s the place of government to step in and show that they (or we as in electorate) care about people’s rights in terms of data ownership. In fact, we can already see that data-rights-awareness is growing and in the next few years we may expect dramatic increase in openness of consumer data ownership.
Current society systems including economic systems driven by market/trade leads to unjust, very unequal society
There’s a lot of work to be done, that is true but I don’t see anything unresolvable in software industry. Yes, maybe only our children will see the solutions rolled out on the full scale… Yet, I hope they’re going to be as grateful to our generation as we’re to the lovely nerd community who brought the gift of open source to us through time.
It’s worth mentioning that content on fandom wikis is usually CC BY-SA and use a fork of MediaWiki which is under GPLv2.
I’m not really arguing with your point or anything, free culture just doesn’t really save us here.
I’m not really arguing with your point or anything, free culture just doesn’t really save us here.
arguably a bigger problem with wikia/fandom is unintentionally caused by free culture: sometimes they’ll fight you on moving your content off their service–a thing they are technically justified by license in doing–which as i understand has historically been a problem with a few wikis fleeing the site.
Do you know details on this? I don’t see how that would work under CC BY-SA, as long as they’re giving credit and are using the same license.
for example, there are two runescape wikis, because the official runescape wiki used to be hosted on fandom. they moved in 2018 because fandom is terrible, but the inferior fandom copy that is largely mothballed still exists (and still turns up 3rd if you search “runescape wiki”) because fandom basically won’t let you unilaterally close your community’s wiki, even if you want to move.
How exactly would that be different with nonfree licenses though? If each person retained control of their contributions like is typical for other user-submitted content, moving to a new one would be an absolute nightmare and basically impossible unless you got everyone who ever made a contribution on board to revoke the fandom wiki’s right to use it and then moved that onto the new one. That seems like an even worse situation which puts anyone who wants to move at a disadvantage in content.
Hell yes!