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==Classroom Edition==
Is anyone willing to consider a more immediately available, dumb-terminal version of the device which would have nothing more than a touchscreen and an ethernet port? This might get rid of that big white space on your map (USA)!


This page is for the discussion of this wiki and how to better inform those interested in the OLPC project. Wiki technology and etiquette are also the subject of [[How to use a wiki]].
This project is beyond compare and all I can say is God bless Negropnte and his team. A project of this magnitude could only have been conceived by people of God and pure in the heart with love rnning in there blood. May this never get into the hands of Greedy 3rd world leaders and civil servants who may again treat it like they have ALL other Aid project that never trickled down yet swelled the debt profile of countries like mine. Long may You (OLPC) run! (Chima Okereke - Nigeria March 25, 2006)


* For ideas and general discussion about or feedback from the community, see the [[OLPC:Village pump]]
<b>Q: Where's the TOC (table of contents) or index of the site? (I can't find my way around...)</b>
* For questions, see [[OLPC FAQ]]; or the [[Ask OLPC a Question]] Page. The wiki is an evolving effort; there is lots of work to do: Please help!
* discussion: see the [[OLPC talk:Community Portal|Talk page]] for general discussion about this portal and organization of ideas. Organized, concise entries are for the portal itself. Please sign your posts.
* Problems with the Wiki itself: the [[Wiki]] page.


Discussion also occurs on [[IRC]].
<b>A: Try either [http://wiki.laptop.org/wiki/One_Laptop_per_Child One Laptop per Child] or [http://wiki.laptop.org/wiki/Special:Allpages Special pages: All Pages] for a start...</b>


== Overviews and lists ==


For links to many relevant pages on the site, see '''[[Table of contents]]'''.
A fascinating effort... good on ya! (all)
<br>(dharma -- March 18, 2006)


Certainly, as the '''project''' develops more and more content is going to be posted. But in order to make that content accessable and easy to use, a lot of work is going to have to get done.
==Copyright Licence for this wiki.==


'''Categorization'''
I had forgetten to put the creative commons license glue in the Local Settings file. It is there now: Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5. --[[User:Walter|Walter]]
: Every page should have at least one category. If you find [[Special:Uncategorizedpages|one that does not]], please try to find one for it and categorize it by adding a <tt><nowiki>[[</nowiki>Category:''some category''<nowiki>]]</nowiki></tt> to the bottom&mdash;preferably an [[Special:Categories|existing category]].


:<b>How to categorize a page:</b> Note that pages whose names begin with "Category:" ''cannot'' be directly altered to add additional cited pages in that category by clicking on the ''edit'' tab and proceeding. The ''actual method'' of categorizing a page is to add an appropriate tag at the bottom of ''that'' page which looks like <nowiki>[[Category:categoryname]]</nowiki>. (Note that ''preview will not'' show the effectiveness of this action, but it will work.)
The link from the bottom of the page leads to the http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/ and
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/legalcode web pages.


Check [[:Special:Categories]] and [[:Special:Unusedcategories]] to see what categories already exist. It can be difficult to find categories though, so if the situation permits, you can make a redirect page which will point to the category. For instance:
I am wondering quite why the project uses that licence, as it seems that it could, in some circumstances, work against the interests of the project. For example, suppose that someone starts a page "The laptop song" and various people, within the wiki, gradually put together a happy, sing-along song which publicises the laptop idea and the good which it can do. The licensing system at present in use for the wiki would mean that someone could record the song for their own profit, whereas if the licensing were different then licence fees could be collected by the project and used to support it.


:There is a category "Category:File formats" which has a collection of different kinds of File formats "JPEG, Ogg, PDF, etc." and there is growing number of pages about these file formats being created. It wouldn't make sense to have a page dedicated to file formats, because there is already a collection of them in [[:Category:File formats]], and it gets updated automatically. So instead, create a redirect to the "Category:Xyz" page. This will make the whole collection searchable. Just remember- the redirect automatically becomes part of the category it's redirecting to unless you put a colon in front of the Category, so format the names carefully!
As the One Laptop per Child project is a non-profit project, would it be a good idea to ask Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/ whether they would produce for you a custom licence, which they would host within their webspace and administrative system.


'''Consolidation'''
Creative Commons has the following web page with a list of licences.
* Sometimes writers ramble on or they pull together content from several authors with a few glue words. For instance: there's a lot of information on the [[Software Ideas]] page that can be moved to other pages in Category:Software ideas If you see pages like these, Please do what you can to consolidate them. If you see such a page on the Wiki, add a link to it here so that someone can go and rewrite the page in a more condensed and understandable fashion. Check out the [[Special:Long pages]] for more ideas.


http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/meet-the-licenses


'''Formatting'''
If they agreed to produce a custom licence for the One Laptop per Child project it could perhaps be something like their http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ and http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/legalcode licence, with the commercial use parts of http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/ and http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/legalcode added in solely for use by the One Laptop per Child project and its licensees.
*This may seem nitpicky, but it really isn't. Pages need to be formatted in a logical, consistent manner. Otherwise it becomes very difficult to navigate and find information, and we end up with pages which aren't categorized and/or need to be consolidated. This results in a lot of extra work for everyone involved. More importantly even, is the correct capitalization of page and category titles. Unless there is a proper name or acronym in the title, the only capital letter should be the first letter. "Kinds Of Laptops" is not correct. "Kinds of Laptops" is also not correct. "Kinds of laptops" is correct. The reason for this is that if the title is "Kinds Of Laptops" and someone searches for "kinds of laptops", the search won't turn up any results. In a similar vein, if there are capital letters in the middle of the title and there isn't another potential article without that capitalization style, you may want to make a redirect. For instance:


This could be something like the Attribution-NonCommercial-Commercial_only_for_the_One_Laptop_per_Child_project_-ShareAlike 2.5 licence. That would be quite a long title: maybe something shorter could be devised like Attribution-NonCommercial-Commercial_only_for_olpc-ShareAlike 2.5 or whatever.


:"Ancient Polynesian laptops" might necessitate a redirect titled "Ancient polynesian laptops". This is solely because not everyone who searches is going to use the proper capitalization. NOTE- this is not appropriate where there may be a unique page with the alternative capitalization ie "List of Free software" would NOT require a redirect titled "List of free software" because there may potentially be a page with that title.
I made this suggestion in relation to a song, but there are other implications. For example, if someone uploads a font into the wiki, with the intention of it being free for use on the laptop. The present licensing would mean that anyone could market the font commercially with no royalties payable, even for wholly commercial projects nothing to do with the aims of the laptop project.


Also, people are asking if the laptop will be marketed at a premium in the developed world, asking with the idea that the premium could be used to help fund the providing of laptops in the poorer developing countries. In order to do that the One Laptop per Child project needs to be able to license the design so that the premium is payable to the project.


Furthermore, try to keep the number of headers to a minimum. Wiki authors love putting in unneeded headers. If you need to make an addition to an article, try to see if you can fit it in a preexisting header. You might have to rename the header to make it more appropriate for a more general topic. The goal of this is to give the article flow, and keep it from getting all chopped up and disorganized. If you have to make a new header, make sure to keep it in the style of the rest of the page.
I may have misinterpreted the effect of the licence presently being used. Indeed I hope that I have. Yet have I? Intellectual Property is a very valuable thing and royalties and licensing fees from any commercial exploitation of the intellectual property which people put into the wiki could be a valuable source of income for the project.


== So you want to create an article... ==
I am not a lawyer: I am simply writing down in this wiki some concerns which I have. Maybe I have got it wrong.
several things to keep in mind.
#make sure the page is not redundant.
#make sure other pages link to it. In particular make sure you can find it through one of the categories under navigation. If no one can find your page no one will go to it.
#make sure that your title is formatted correctly. If there are unnecessary capital letters, the search will not always turn it up as a result.Please see the formatting conventions on [http://www.wikipedia.org|Wikipedia] for formatting conventions, particularly [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_%28capital_letters%29 Wikipedia:Manual of Style (capital letters)]. There are a lot of pages being made with a nonstandard capitalization convention, and this needs to be remedied. Titles of pages without a proper noun or acronym should only have ONE capital letter at the beginning of the title. The pages for which this is not the case need to be changed.


William Overington


== Copyright License ==
1039 BST 0939 GMT 27 March 2006


Note that all material on this Wiki is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license. If you are not the copyright holder of any contributions then please clear it with the copyright holder. Every page has a link to the license at the bottom.


* http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/
* http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/legalcode


[[Category:Common Room]]
Who owns the copyright to material posted here?

Are all contributors required to hand over their copyrights to OLPC?
This would mean OLPC could commercialise the info and would not have to share it if they didn't want to.

Is it under the GFDL?
This is the license used by Wikipedia. If we have the same licence then it is easy to share stuff with them.

We could use the Creative Commons Wiki license (attribution/share alike). This is said to have some advantages over the GFDL. Wikipedia has a page discussing this. [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Multi-licensing]]. Then we couldn't accept Wikipedia contributions.

What is the OLPC policy on Intellectual Property? This needs to get sorted before we have a bunch of stuff here we can't use because we didn't get permission from the contributors. Once decided we lock the project in to that license forever because of the difficulty of getting permission from previous contributors for changed conditions. (contributed by [[User:Filceolaire|Filceolaire]] 13:58, 25 March 2006 (EST) before I got a login)

=== The present situation 1212 GMT 25 March 2006 ===

When editing this page it has at the bottom of the editing page.

quote

Please note that all contributions to OLPCWiki may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then don't submit it here.
You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Project:Copyrights for details). DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION!

end quote

The item Project:Copyrights is as active link to http://wiki.laptop.org/index.php?title=OLPCWiki:Copyrights&action=edit

That page is empty as such and has the following message surrounding it.

quote

You've followed a link to a page that doesn't exist yet. To create the page, start typing in the box below (see the help page for more info). If you are here by mistake, just click your browser's back button.

end quote

The help page is an active link to http://wiki.laptop.org/index.php?title=OLPCWiki:Help&action=edit yet that page is at present empty as well, surrounded by the same message.

My own view is that if someone wishes to contribute their own work and is prepared for it to be "edited, altered, or removed by other contributors" then that is one thing, requiring assignment of copyright would be quite another. For example, I make fonts. For many of them I would be quite happy to upload a copy into this wiki and for it to be distributed with the laptop and people use it. I am quite happy, in the interests of the potential for good that the laptop project can achieve, to allow that any such copy of one of my fonts uploaded here be "edited, altered, or removed by other contributors" as that may allow things like rarer accented characters to be added and so on though I accept that other editing and alteration could ruin a good font. However, I would be unwilling to assign copyright in a font just because I uploaded a copy here. Free licence, yes, assign copyright, no. This is simply because by assigning copyright one no longer has any rights to use one's own work. Assigning copyright and receiving a free licence back (as some "publish on demand" facilities require) is not good enough for me. I would want to be able, if I so wish, to later produce, say, a book of fonts with an accompanying CD of font files and if I, say, went to a commercial publisher and was asked who owns the rights to my fonts I feel that I would not want to say that the copyright had been assigned but that I had a free licence.

The above example is in the context of fonts, which is one of my particular interests. It could well apply to all sorts of other things.

I feel that the key thing is that just because something is supplied free for use in the wiki or the laptop project that that does not mean that it is necessarily intended by the contributor for it to be used exclusively in the wiki or the laptop project. If this were the font context of the example, if that were the case (and there is no suggestion that it is the intention that it is to be the case) then I would perhaps try to make one font specially for the project under those conditions, thus the project not having what it otherwise would have had.

The issue of copyright and intellectual property is an important one. It is a matter of producing a system which allows the laptop project to gather in lots of items to within its own "editable open source" way of working environment without producing a "reflected-back wave of problems" for contributors of those items if they wish to use other copies elsewhere.

William Overington

25 March 2006

===Creative Commons Attribution License===
[http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/ cc-by] rather than [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/ cc-by-sa] would be preferable since it would then be compatible with the Wikimedia projects that mostly use GFDL (Wikinews uses cc-by). I would strongly advise against using [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ cc-by-nc] on this, or any, wiki, for all the reasons Erik outlines at [http://intelligentdesigns.net/Licenses/NC "The Case for Free Use: Reasons Not to Use a Creative Commons -NC License"]. [[User:Angela|Angela]] 23:40, 31 March 2006 (EST)

:I agree with Angela in most points. I intend to contribute to this wiki by the current chosen license. Altering the license afterwards would lead to a conflict in the license. It is the stated position of the CC people to make CC-BY-SA compatible to GFDL, so this point from Angela might disappear in the (hopefully near) future. -- [[User:Mathias Schindler|Mathias Schindler]] 04:24, 1 April 2006 (EST)

::It might be the stated position of the CC people but it isn't the position of the other side, especially Stallman. I don't expect the two to become compatible any time in the near future. [[User:Angela|Angela]] 04:29, 1 April 2006 (EST)

::: Correct. However, the CC does not need to cooperate with the FSF or RMS to make one of its licenses compatible. One-way-compatibility requires only the will and the comptence of one side. This theoretical construct is more or less irrelevant for this debate here, I just mentioned it. -- [[User:Mathias Schindler|Mathias Schindler]] 11:30, 1 April 2006 (EST)

:Thank you for putting that point of view. Quite apart from the general case, what would you advise for the situation of possibly having a wiki page where people could write "The Laptop Song" with a view that someone or some group who so chooses could record it with all royalties going to the One Laptop per Child project. If the page with the lyrics is licensed with [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/ cc-by-sa] then surely that would open the door to anyone recording the song with no royalties going to the One Laptop per Child project, thereby spoiling the idea: or am I misunderstanding something? William Overington 1826 GMT 1 April 2006

::First of all, I am not a lawyer and your local law may or may not give you some rights that others don't. If someone wrote a "Laptop Song" under the cc-by-sa, someone else could perform this. Or could add vocals to it or another part. He could sell this song on a website or on a CD-ROM. However, he/she had to license this song under the cc-by-sa as well. That means that everyone else would be able to use (...and modify, translate, re-record, perform) it, including the OLPC project.
::Let's go to a second situation: Red Had releases a CD-ROM that contains some Live-CD with QEMU and all the stuff you need to test the OLPC and its special hardware. If content from this web site (or content that would be later considered to be put on this OLPC) would be under a -nc-License, Red Hat would be forbidden to sell this CD-ROM, even if it was just a fee designed to keep the shipping costs moderate. "Non-Commercial"-clauses are very effective in prohibiting the distribution of free content. (Again, IANAL). -- [[User:Mathias Schindler|Mathias Schindler]] 00:44, 2 April 2006 (EST)

:I can strongly recommend [[OLPC on open source software]] to everyone. The argument presented there should apply to content as well. -- [[User:Mathias Schindler|Mathias Schindler]] 04:15, 2 April 2006 (EDT)

Latest revision as of 06:32, 21 November 2008

This page is for the discussion of this wiki and how to better inform those interested in the OLPC project. Wiki technology and etiquette are also the subject of How to use a wiki.

  • For ideas and general discussion about or feedback from the community, see the OLPC:Village pump
  • For questions, see OLPC FAQ; or the Ask OLPC a Question Page. The wiki is an evolving effort; there is lots of work to do: Please help!
  • discussion: see the Talk page for general discussion about this portal and organization of ideas. Organized, concise entries are for the portal itself. Please sign your posts.
  • Problems with the Wiki itself: the Wiki page.

Discussion also occurs on IRC.

Overviews and lists

For links to many relevant pages on the site, see Table of contents.

Certainly, as the project develops more and more content is going to be posted. But in order to make that content accessable and easy to use, a lot of work is going to have to get done.

Categorization

Every page should have at least one category. If you find one that does not, please try to find one for it and categorize it by adding a [[Category:some category]] to the bottom—preferably an existing category.
How to categorize a page: Note that pages whose names begin with "Category:" cannot be directly altered to add additional cited pages in that category by clicking on the edit tab and proceeding. The actual method of categorizing a page is to add an appropriate tag at the bottom of that page which looks like [[Category:categoryname]]. (Note that preview will not show the effectiveness of this action, but it will work.)

Check Special:Categories and Special:Unusedcategories to see what categories already exist. It can be difficult to find categories though, so if the situation permits, you can make a redirect page which will point to the category. For instance:

There is a category "Category:File formats" which has a collection of different kinds of File formats "JPEG, Ogg, PDF, etc." and there is growing number of pages about these file formats being created. It wouldn't make sense to have a page dedicated to file formats, because there is already a collection of them in Category:File formats, and it gets updated automatically. So instead, create a redirect to the "Category:Xyz" page. This will make the whole collection searchable. Just remember- the redirect automatically becomes part of the category it's redirecting to unless you put a colon in front of the Category, so format the names carefully!

Consolidation

  • Sometimes writers ramble on or they pull together content from several authors with a few glue words. For instance: there's a lot of information on the Software Ideas page that can be moved to other pages in Category:Software ideas If you see pages like these, Please do what you can to consolidate them. If you see such a page on the Wiki, add a link to it here so that someone can go and rewrite the page in a more condensed and understandable fashion. Check out the Special:Long pages for more ideas.


Formatting

  • This may seem nitpicky, but it really isn't. Pages need to be formatted in a logical, consistent manner. Otherwise it becomes very difficult to navigate and find information, and we end up with pages which aren't categorized and/or need to be consolidated. This results in a lot of extra work for everyone involved. More importantly even, is the correct capitalization of page and category titles. Unless there is a proper name or acronym in the title, the only capital letter should be the first letter. "Kinds Of Laptops" is not correct. "Kinds of Laptops" is also not correct. "Kinds of laptops" is correct. The reason for this is that if the title is "Kinds Of Laptops" and someone searches for "kinds of laptops", the search won't turn up any results. In a similar vein, if there are capital letters in the middle of the title and there isn't another potential article without that capitalization style, you may want to make a redirect. For instance:


"Ancient Polynesian laptops" might necessitate a redirect titled "Ancient polynesian laptops". This is solely because not everyone who searches is going to use the proper capitalization. NOTE- this is not appropriate where there may be a unique page with the alternative capitalization ie "List of Free software" would NOT require a redirect titled "List of free software" because there may potentially be a page with that title.


Furthermore, try to keep the number of headers to a minimum. Wiki authors love putting in unneeded headers. If you need to make an addition to an article, try to see if you can fit it in a preexisting header. You might have to rename the header to make it more appropriate for a more general topic. The goal of this is to give the article flow, and keep it from getting all chopped up and disorganized. If you have to make a new header, make sure to keep it in the style of the rest of the page.

So you want to create an article...

several things to keep in mind.

  1. make sure the page is not redundant.
  2. make sure other pages link to it. In particular make sure you can find it through one of the categories under navigation. If no one can find your page no one will go to it.
  3. make sure that your title is formatted correctly. If there are unnecessary capital letters, the search will not always turn it up as a result.Please see the formatting conventions on [1] for formatting conventions, particularly Wikipedia:Manual of Style (capital letters). There are a lot of pages being made with a nonstandard capitalization convention, and this needs to be remedied. Titles of pages without a proper noun or acronym should only have ONE capital letter at the beginning of the title. The pages for which this is not the case need to be changed.


Copyright License

Note that all material on this Wiki is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license. If you are not the copyright holder of any contributions then please clear it with the copyright holder. Every page has a link to the license at the bottom.

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