[GOAL] Wikipedia, open access and CC-BY

[Heather Morrison]

The Wellcome Trust's Robert Kiley, a long-time open access advocate, raised a common rationale for a default CC-BY license in a comment on Richard Poynder's interview of Mike Rossner.  These are my comments. 

A scholarly CC-BY is not compatible with the Wikipedia conception of attribution, which involves anonymity. Permitting open re-use in Wikipedia with attribution (assuming the problem of Wikipedia anonymity is overcome) means that any Wikipedia editor can change the words of scholar, a situation that seems highly likely to result in scholars being incorrectly cited due to the edits of others. I am a fan of Wikipedia, have contributed as an editor in the past and may do so in the future, and am in favour of increasing the scholarly content in Wikipedia. However, I argue that what needs to happen is that Wikipedia policy and practices need to be more flexible to accommodate the needs of scholars and their works, rather than all scholars being required to give away all of their work for blanket commercial rights to any third party to suit the preferences of the current Wikipedia team. 

Full post:
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2013/03/wikipedia-scholarship-and-cc-by.html

best,

Heather Morrison, PhD
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com