User:Jcornelius/test/Free Knowledge and Open Source
Free Knowledge and Open Source
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By Addshore, CC-0
Free Knowledge
How knowledge can be acquired, worked with and proliferated has been a key question throughout the history of human civilization. Thanks to modern digital media, particularly Wikipedia, new answers to those questions have emerged. It is only possible to thoroughly impart and increase knowledge if access to it is free, and if it can be shared freely. It is an integral part of the work of Wikimedia Deutschland and the Wikimedia movement to educate the public about this fact and to enable people to use their knowledge freely. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, is the biggest and most well-known Wikimedia project.
Wikidata, a centralized structured data repository for facts and Wikimedia’s first big new project in the last 7 years, is now feeding the foundation’s main project, Wikipedia. The Wikidata project was kicked off around a year ago by the German chapter of Wikimedia, which is still steering its gradual development.
Stats:
- 14,629,114 data items
- 109 000 000+ edits
- 4400+ active editors
- repository of the world's knowledge
- database anyone can read and edit
- multi-lingual
- designed to deal with the reality Wikipedia has to deal with
- free and open source Software
Some inspiration for what you can do with free knowledge and wikidata:
NavinoEvans, CC BY-SA 3.0
Visualizing history with automated event maps
Just as today’s online maps are being continually updated, historical maps can be automatically generated and updated to reflect our ever-evolving knowledge about the past. EventZoom is an event visualization site which accepts geolocation data combined with info about time spans of events, and renders the input as points on a map zoomable in time and space. Each such point is an object with a title, description, latitude / longitude and a time, as well as a reference back to its source. But what source should be used to fill this framework with data? All content comes from the the Wikidata API. By importing data about events that are part of larger events all defined in Wikidata, with the restriction that they contain a start or end date as well as a location, that’s all the data that’s needed for representation in this kind of dynamic historical map.
Histropedia – tool to visualise history
The interactive, which has been developed in conjunction with Geeks ltd, works by pulling data from Wikidata and Wikipedia and plotting events on a timeline which is navigated with simple left and right buttons and a zoom function.
Tree of Life
Tree of Life displays the taxonomy of all life, as given in Wikidata. You can open any of the nodes, and click on them in order to see here the respective Wikipedia article.
Open Source Software
According to the Open Source Initiative, open source software is software that can be freely used, changed, and shared (in modified or unmodified form) by anyone. Open source software is made by many people, and distributed under licenses that comply with the Open Source Definition. Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with the following criteria:
- Free Redistribution
- The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
- Derived Works
- The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.
- Integrity of The Author's Source Code
- The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of "patch files" with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time. The license must explicitly permit distribution of software built from modified source code. The license may require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software.
- No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
- The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons.
- No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
- The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
- Distribution of License
- The rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed without the need for execution of an additional license by those parties.
- License Must Not Be Specific to a Product
- The rights attached to the program must not depend on the program's being part of a particular software distribution. If the program is extracted from that distribution and used or distributed within the terms of the program's license, all parties to whom the program is redistributed should have the same rights as those that are granted in conjunction with the original software distribution.
- License Must Not Restrict Other Software
- The license must not place restrictions on other software that is distributed along with the licensed software. For example, the license must not insist that all other programs distributed on the same medium must be open-source software.
- License Must Be Technology-Neutral
- No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface.
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