This sounds like a great idea. Can you specify the type(s) of help you need?

Thanks, senioritis. There are lots of opportunities to help out! If you look at the rhetoric portal now, you'll see nothing but empty boxes. We really need to start pulling together resources and decide how we want to introduce the subject of rhetoric to fellow wikipedians. Perhaps good place to start would be the "Web Resources" box. If we had the best half-dozen or so rhetoric web resources, I bet they'd see they were being linked to and check it out.

Every few years, someone tries something like this. Look at http://rhetcomp.com/ from two years ago, for instance. Or the ARS portal from 2003, at http://www.rhetoricalliance.org/. It always seems like a good idea, because it promises to use emerging/new technologies that are much more capable than anything that's ever existed before.

But it never seems to pan out, long-term.

"Rhetoric" is too big and diffuse a field to consolidate within any single portal, unless it's a well-organized endeavor.

Don't let this one be a flash in the pan. If you want a new Wikipedia-style portal to work, do try to set up a lasting team of people dedicated to the project. A collaboration between students and faculty, with a core group dedicated to the long-term success of the project can make all the difference.

Or join one of the existing portals, to improve it, instead of building a new one very like the others that already exist.

I know what you mean geoffsauer. Someone emailed me right after I posted and asked me to use his portal instead of founding a new one. Still, I think a wikiportal is a much different kind of undertaking than a start-from-scratch approach. A wikiportal is really a way to organize and consolidate wikipedia pages (and the dozens of people working on each of them) that are relevant to the subject. I'd be much more skeptical if I had just set up a new wiki somewhere and said, "Okay, everyone, let's put our heads together and get everything there is to know about rhetoric up here!" That'd be a much different approach, and not one that I'd be enthused about.

Well, I got a taste recently of the negative side of wikipedia today (it's about time, some might say!) As part of our rhetoric wikiportal, I thought it might be nice to have a glossary of rhetorical terms that would provide succinct definitions and links to each term's full-page article. Unfortunately, someone (out of the, er, kindness of his heart?) decided to take it upon himself to move the glossary to a "list," which is merely a list of terms without definitions. I was perplexed. Now, someone else has nominated the page for deletion. What gives? No one gave any rationale for these decisions in either case.

Thankfully, a kind soul from Germany messaged me on Wikipedia and expressed his chagrin at these moves (as well as adding several terms to the glossary...er, list.)

It's easy to see why some people despise the wikipedia. I'm tempted to throw my hands into the air and take an elitist position like Larry Sanger's.

Anyway, I've messaged the folks responsible for these edits and asked for their rationale. If they don't provide good ones, I'm going to move the page back to "glossary" and trust in the wisdom of the wikipedians not to delete an obviously useful page.

Any thoughts?

Yup. I understand. Wikimedia is the cool technology this week.

But Silva Rhetoricae (http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/silva.htm) is one of the strongest websites in the field. It's been around forever. It's got the strongest glossary of rhetorical terms you could hope for. And it's not going away anytime soon.

And I fear the Rhetoric portal idea is similarly established already. Rhetoric and Composition (http://rhetoric.eserver.org/), for example, is already database-driven, with a good UI, and probably at least as flexible as Wikimedia portals.

There's so much work to be done online in this field, I'd hate to see our energy spent on projects that have already been done. I'm not posting this reply to the "Trouble at the Rhetoric WikiPortal" thread because I don't want to dissuade anyone from posting on your behalf in the Wikimedia discussion (as you'd suggested), but I'd still prefer all of us to spend our energies on the projects that haven't been done yet.

I have noticed something about these other portals you keep mentioning, Geoff. One thing I highly value about Wikipedia and the Wikiportals is the copyleft licensing. I notice this message on the bottom of eserver (the rhetoric eserver you mention):

Copyright © 1994-2005 by the EServer. All rights reserved.

Let's look at Silva Rhetoricae. Oops!:

© 1996-2003, Gideon O. Burton, Brigham Young University
Please cite "Silva Rhetoricae" (rhetoric.byu.edu)

I'm not sure what your position is on these issues, Geoff, but I'm not sure I want to donate time and resources to projects that are copyrighted by private entities. I realize that I haven't delved deeply enough into these sites to determine how they handle individual contributions, but these copyright notices do alarm me. Here, alternatively, is the Wikipedia copyright notice:

All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (see Copyrights for details).

Maybe this isn't a big deal for many folks, but it is for me.

In addition to what Matt has said, let us not forget about the ease of contributing. So when you write, "Wikimedia is the cool technology this week," I think that undervalues the authoring model of Wikimedia. Certainly, building another static HTML rhetoric resource could just be the redundant flavor of the week. But I think the completely open, commons-based collaboration model of Wikimedia offers some significant benefits.

Matt writes: "I'm not sure I want to donate time and resources to projects that are copyrighted by private entities."

Good point. Copyright issues are vitally important. I've been working in this area actively for twelve years. If you read the EServer's Copyright Statement of Principles (http://about.eserver.org/CopyrightStatementOfPrinciples/) and the copyright agreement we make with contributors (http://about.eserver.org/agreement.pdf) you may get a sense as to how we feel about this. Keep in mind that the EServer's been around for sixteen years as a free, open archive. Back when Lawrence Lessig was dismantling Eastern Europe's communist (public domain) economies, before he discovered the movements he supports now for free culture. If you'd like a more theoretical understanding of how we feel about such issues, you might look at my chapter in _Online Communities: Commerce, Community Action, and the Virtual University_, a book where Richard Stallman and I and some friends worked to set up the critiques of intellectual property law that later became visible in projects like the Creative Commons and the modern applications of the traditional GNU/GPL licenses.

But if you look through the case law, you won't find any cases in which the EServer enforced its copyrights on individuals or nonprofits -- only against commercial publishers who attempted to reuse our materials for their for-profit ventures without permission.

But the problem with the GNU license, the Creative Commons system, and the EServer copyright agreement is that none of them problematize sufficiently the underlying Lockean vision of intellectual property. Stallman actually agrees with me on this. Because they're located within a culture that considers almost all cultural production as permanently private property (treating the notion of the 'public domain' as vestigial), what all these systems do is assert that the material is private property, which the owner chooses to announce as 'shared'. But liability laws and accounting mechanisms important to nonprofit corporations like the EServer still heavily favor clear, traditional declarations of copyright -- because the case law to support the new licensing systems hasn't yet been established.

These issues become important when you're sued for intellectual property violation. I don't know whether the Wikimedia people have yet, or whether you personally have yet, but I can tell you that in the past sixteen years I've become EXTREMELY familiar with the intricacies of the legal niceties of licensing agreements and permission to redistribute contributors' materials. Laws which presently impose $10,000 penalties per violation. Before you suggest that we should use a GNU or CC license, look into the details of how a site can be legally liable for legal violations published from it, even if it's open using GNU or CC licensing, in ways that leave the publisher not free to modify the work to remedy alleged violations.

We'd prefer to do something we can believe in. The GNU license and the CC licenses are interesting. Some EServer editors have implemented them in some collections. If you wanted to work as an editor with an EServer collection, you could argue for why they should be used in sites like the Rhetoric and Composition one. Once you'd learned the legal history of the site.

But right now, we've chosen to keep our earlier notices, until we can find a system that we can support. We've been looking seriously at the Libre Commons (http://www.libresociety.org/library/libre.pl/Libre_Commons) lately, but are still looking, before we commit to changing from our (circa 1993) copyright notice.

You certainly don't have to join projects you don't like.

But don't assume that I meant you need to join such projects. That isn't quite what I said.

I just suggested that if we're going to use our energy to create new projects, we should create projects in new areas, ones that need new work. Not areas that already have large, free, open, public websites. Copying existing projects under new ones with freer licenses might be useful, but probably not for projects such as lists of definitions (which have minimal enforceability anyway) or a portal's list of links to other URLs (aren't private property anyway under current IP law).

Geoff,

I'd be curious to understand the circumstances where the maintainer or publisher of a site would be unable to modify content which is published under "the" (there is only one) CC copyleft license? In my mind, the GNU Documentation license is questionable as copyleft because it imposes restrictions on form, form being a part of self-expression, thus taking a step away from the ideology of free software which I believe underlies copyleft, so I'm not a big fan. The GPL, while suitable ideologically, is designed for licensing software and not text (thus not a good choice). But the copyleft CC license would allow the site maintainer complete control to modify any text on the site as long as they did not include non-copylefted material and continued to publish a revised version with the license (and with attribution, of course).

Furthermore, when you say that CC and GNU licenses still "assert that the material is private property, which the owner chooses to announce as 'shared'," I question how much this analogy holds up under economies of scale. Intellectual property products which are collaboratively produced by very large groups effectively negate the individual's ownership rights. It becomes practically impossible for an individual to assert their individual rights under the law which allow for individual control. Even the community of creators as a whole will find it nigh impossible to assert their rights as a whole outside of what is covered by the license. Ever see what happens when you try to get a large community to change the licensing terms for open source software? LOL

So one can use the work under the rights of the license or violate the rights stipulated by the license, but individual copyright owner's rights become essentially valueless in connection to the work.

BTW: I find interesting your remarks about eserver's interest in using Libre Commons "anti-licenses" for they seem even riskier in terms of potential liability and other legal complications. Nor are they going to be an especially easy sell to potential contributors.

Hi Charlie,

I wish I had time to reply fully. I'm afraid I have to go to bed, as I had a long day of meetings today, and have a full day of teaching tomrrow.

But I'll take a few minutes to do the best I can. You ask:

"I'd be curious to understand the circumstances where the maintainer
or publisher of a site would be unable to modify content which is
published under "the" (there is only one) CC copyleft license?"

"Copyleft" is an informal catchall term for the whole category of free content licenses, created by the Free Software Foundation some years ago. But to take the specific example of Creative Commons: CC has a variety of licenses (see http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/meet-the-licenses). The Wikimedia Commons system allows you to choose from an even wider range of licenses you may wish to govern your content (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Licensing). The practical implications of the differences between these licenses are important, even though they sound similar.

When publishing content online, the CC family of licenses tend to imagine an individual author posting his or her work on his or her own website. But when you publish content using an organizational website, there are usually two separate agreements: one between the copyright holder and the publishing website, and the one between the copyright holder and the readers.

What happens, for example, if the EServer director is contacted by the attorney for a client who contends that a work the EServer put online in 1994 dilutes the trademark of a client? If the author had chosen to use a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives license, that wouldn't permit the EServer's editors to modify the work to remove the alleged infringement. And the contact information for the author may well be (often is) out of date. (The EServer publishes over 35,000 works, and though we have up-to-date contact information for thousands of them, we don't for everyone. Not everyone who uses our site keeps their database entry current.) At this point, the EServer can't legally make even minor changes to the work, to remove the alleged infringement (if the editor of the collection feels the concern is valid) -- unless our agreement with the original contributor permits this. All we can do is ask our lawyers to represent us, or possibly remove the work from our site (though that may implicitly acknowledge a validity of the plaintiff's contention, and there's no legislated upper limit to the value of a trademark dilution, the way there is to limit copyright violations to $10,000 apiece). We will certainly have lowered the Google PageRank of our site and violated W3C standards by breaking a URL, which may have been worse than never having published the work.

What if you post your information on your employer's (university's) website? Even if you post a CC license on the site, the contract between you and your employer is separate and distinct from that, and usually prior and binding. The contract between universities and their students and employees tend to establish very complete policies for appropriate use and for intellectual property rights to content. These supercede what you post. Don't assume that because you post a CC image on your page, you've settled the legal implication.

So in our case, the "Copyright (c) 2006 by the EServer. All right reserved." notice, while problematic, might save us a lot of work. Particularly when we have (in the Rhetoric and Composition site) 84 volunteers, all working together to publish what content we have. We're very interested in a better system. But I haven't found one yet.

Charlie writes: "So when you write, 'Wikimedia is the cool technology this week,' I think that undervalues the authoring model of Wikimedia." Certainly, building another static HTML rhetoric resource could just be the redundant flavor of the week."

So static HTML somehow creates redundancy? I don't see it. A better, more flexible authoring system can help to establish vitality. But not to assure it, any more than traditional HTML is quintessentially static. Ontology seems a poor tool to judge website quality, I'd think.

Charlie goes on to say: "But I think the completely open, commons-based collaboration model of Wikimedia offers some significant benefits."

No question. That's the model you use here on kairosnews.org. It's the model we use on the EServer, in collections such as the Rhetoric and Composition site (http://rhetoric.eserver.org/), the Orange Journal (http://orange.eserver.org/), and the Tech Comm Library (http://tc.eserver.org/). (There are minor variations in what we mean by 'commons', but we can debate using your terms, if you like.) I've been building with this sort of model since 1990, with collaboration that was free to readers and open to group-editing. And with database-driven web architectures since 1996 (when our Calls for Papers site first went online). It's the model which has underlain peer-reviewed scholarly publication since 1948. And it's been more important in computer science since the "rationalization" of the industry in the late 1980s changed the experience of software development in the workplace so dramatically. It has virtues for rapid collaborative production, particularly in those disciplines which are already heavily infused in professional collegiality.

But if you were recommending to a student or colleague to build a new website, would you *really* advise her or him to build one that copies something that already exists? Are the significant benefits of commons-based openness that significant? Or does that just undermine the collegiality upon which the CC culture relies?

Maybe it'd be okay. If the existing site of record failed in particular ways. If it weren't accessible, for example. Or if it was closed to paid users only.

But while I've recommend to students and colleagues that they build new sites on database-driven open collaboration models for (doing the math in my head) ten years now, that doesn't mean we should start with the areas where sites already exist. Unless there's a particular reason: something lacking in the existing resource (which I simply haven't heard yet).

From the FSF website,

Copyleft is a general method for making a program or other work free, and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free as well.

Of the choices offered on the choose a license page, only the Attribution-ShareAlike license meets the qualification of copyleft. This is the license you want to use to avoid the situation described (or, you could add the non-commercial clause, but then it is not truly copyleft). At the same time, I would suggest researching whether or not, since EServer acts as an internet service provider of sorts for these projects, whether you would be entitled to protection under the DMCA for pirated or misued IP (just a shot in the dark with this). Of course, if you retain copyright, I don't imagine that would be possible.

EServer might not qualify. Someone like Blogger might be able to since they only provide server space.

Actually, Kairosnews and Eserver don't fit the "open, commons-based collaboration" model that I am thinking of (and I believe what Matt is looking for, too). The proper license, one with FOSS principles concerning the right to copy, modify, and redistribute a work, are important for open, commons-based collaboration. I'm looking for "free" in the free software sense, not "free" as in free just to read. And personally, I prefer copyleft over BSD style licensing, but I am willing to concede the benefits of the latter.

Charlie quotes the Free Software Foundation to say: "Copyleft is a general method for making a program or other work free, and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be free as well."

And he's right, the FSF does say that the term is specific. Though their language is unlear (they call it "general" when they seem to mean "narrow", for instance). But what's interesting is that this is new, and not their original usage. The way they used to use the term (when I first read their site, for instance) was more general: look at earlier versions of the same URL, archived by the Wayback Machine (see http://web.archive.org/web/19980126185526/http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/co...) The newer, narrower definition is probably the result of the range of licenses currently available to us.

See, for instance, the definition that found its way into Wikipedia:

Copyleft describes a group of licenses applied to works such as software, documents, music, and art. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft)

I'd concede that because Stallman's FSF first coined the term, they have more right than most to redefine it narrowly -- if that weren't against the very spirit of copyleft. But I'm not sure the FSF really has the *power* to redefine the term so definitively -- look at the Google definition, for instance, to see how its used differently than the FSF intends. (http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Acopyleft)

So perhaps we both have a point?

Charlie goes on to ask: "At the same time, I would suggest researching whether or not, since EServer acts as an internet service provider of sorts for these projects, whether you would be entitled to protection under the DMCA for pirated or misued IP (just a shot in the dark with this). Of course, if you retain copyright, I don't imagine that would be possible."

Right. That provision in DMCA is a "common carrier" provision, designed to protect servers that transmit all information submitted across them. These laws date back to the eighteenth century to protect printing houses that copy all works brought to them. But historically, publishers that exercise judgment over which works to publish don't qualify for these protections. I wish we did; it would make life simpler.

In the meantime, I'll keep hoping for a viable system that serves everyone's interests. I'm still skeptical that any one panacea could work to solve everything; I like open licenses, because commercial copyright holders have become so very obnoxious since 1979, and I personally stand to the left of almost everyone I know. But I can't quite agree that they're cure-alls that will work for everything -- I wish I could.

Charlie writes: "personally, I prefer copyleft over BSD style licensing." Me, too. But my point has been that my personal preference isn't the only factor involved in the best choice for (even progressive) publishing organizations.

Even though the definition is rewritten slightly in the newer version, the meaning is still the same in the page that you are referencing via the Wayback Machine:

To copyleft a program, first we copyright it; then we add distribution terms, which are a legal instrument that gives everyone the rights to use, modify, and redistribute the program's code or any program derived from it but only if the distribution terms are unchanged. Thus, the code and the freedoms become legally inseparable.

The core of this definition which separates copyleft out from being lumped into a wide range of licenses is that the work must be redistributed under the same license. The Wikipedia page you are linking to states this, too:

These three freedoms, however, do not suffice to ensure that a work that is derived from the creation will be distributed under the same liberal terms; in order for the work to be copylefted, the license has to ensure that the owner of a derived work may only distribute it under a license of the same type.

Stallman also has a good definition and description of the creation of the term in his chapter in Open Sources: Voices from the Open Revolution (1999). I particularly like the clarification given there of how copyleft works

Copyleft uses copyright law, but flips it over to serve the opposite of its usual purpose: instead of a means of privatizing software, it becomes a means of keeping software free.

So copyleft is not a "an informal catchall term" but has a very specific definition. This all considered , only the "ShareAlike" licenses at CC are copyleft. And if we take into consideration the emphasis on "free" in FSF writings and Stallman's description in Open Sources, then only the Attribution-ShareAlike license (or perhaps, ShareAlike alone, even though this is not offered as a choice on CC anymore) is copyleft.

If we can move back to my original question which you responded to here. Maybe I was misunderstanding your interpretation and we are just going in circles :) But I'm still curious. Why would a copyleft license not provide the site maintainer or publisher the ability to change content which is published under a copyleft license? In reference to my question, you referred to non-copyleft licenses. This is one of the big advantages of true open source style licenses (not some of the no derivative CC licenses), that anyone can change the text. And with copyleft, we can guarantee that this will always be the case.

Charlie writes:

Maybe I was misunderstanding your interpretation and we are just going in circles :)

This thread is already eighteen posts long, so maybe we have both been misunderstanding each other. :)

It seems, though, that you want to give Stallman the right to define narrowly, for everyone forever, a term he coined last decade to promote a culture in which we don't define cultural productions narrowly, by anyone, for anyone. I'm not certain that control over future definitions of a term would be within his prerogatives, even if he wanted it. But we can discuss the issues within that narrower definition here, for clarity, sure. So long as you understand that, like Gadamer, I don't see hermeneutics as quite so 'closed.'

Why would a copyleft license not provide the site maintainer or publisher the ability to change content which is published under a copyleft license? In reference to my question, you referred to non-copyleft licenses.

Now I understand your meaning. And I think you're right -- if authors were to offer a license that concedes to everyone rights to copy, perform, redistribute and sell work and permits everyone (including site managers) to copy and/or modify the work, there's no legal reason I can see that would hamper maintainers/publishers from changing content as needed by unexpected legal contingencies. It offers the promise of the individual being about to decide, rationally, how to permit the future distribution of his/her work.

But it lacks the nuance of the two-tiered model used by the EServer (and commercial presses). The EServer model has one agreement between the author and the publisher, and a second between the publisher and reader. The one between the author and EServer lists things that the author assures the EServer are true of the work (that we have appropriate legal permission to redistribute it and that it does not violate specific laws), and the EServer promises things too (never to charge readers to read the work or to sell it in any form, or add advertisements, or do a variety of other things explotative of the contributor). In its agreement with the reading public, the EServer reserves all copyrights (and the right to enforce them in the event that someone misuses the works the author and publishing team labored to publish online).

If you want to argue for the virtues of an anarcho-libertarianism, please feel free. But please don't suggest that the CC Attribution 2.5 reorganizes ownership and control of the means of production in more substantive or theorized ways than any conceivable alternative. They still enable production of an 'author-function' for the publishing agency that, in our culture, credits the publishing organization with much of the credibility for the surplus-value in the exchange. That's Foucault and Baudrillard 101. Wikimedia gets 3/4 of the credit for works posted there, because we don't think of the individual authors much, if at all.

This is one of the big advantages of true open source style licenses (not some of the no derivative CC licenses), that anyone can change the text. And with copyleft, we can guarantee that this will always be the case.

But it's easily possible under the EServer model, or many other two-tiered agreement models. The 'copyleft' doesn't accomplish more than any common "appropriate use" model I'm familiar with. It's certainly not unique in permitting users to read, or authorized users to modify a work.

But the EServer agreement specifies things that the publisher may not do with the work in the future. Do all copyleft-based organizations make such legally-binding agreements to protect authors' interests? CC Attribution 2.5 doesn't seem to. It would seem to me that for an author who's thought through these issues, it would be important to know.

This is one of the big advantages of true open source style licenses (not some of the no derivative CC licenses), that anyone can change the text. And with copyleft, we can guarantee that this will always be the case.

The agreement you're advocating seems well-suited to blog posts, or other genres in which the majority of contributors are willing to concede their rights to their work (usually, because we don't believe they're particularly valuable, or because we find ourselves interpellated by the narratives used by the publishing organization. It seems well-suited to nonprofit sites where the author implicitly trusts the publisher. But it seems to me that if you believe we're living in a culture in which traditional (corporate publishers would say 'vestigial') public culture must be supported through contractual agreeements, then why not articulate them fully on both sides?

In fact, I think, because that would require signatures from representatives of both sides. And that's a little too complicated for the very simple CC models.

Is it enough for you if I'll concede that the copyleft license you advocate is an excellent way of popularizing progressive publishing practice, in an easy-to-use format? Even if I don't personally believe that they're perfect for all publishing, mostly because they're not sophisticated enough to help authors theorize their position in relation to complex organizational interests?