Talk:Digital Universe/Archive 1

License?

I couldn't find anything telling me what the license was. I see some content will be free and some may be paid access for copyrighted material. But what license will the free material be under? - Taxman ^Talk 17:08, 20 December 2005 (UTC)

Your answer is at the bottom of each page: "© Copyright 2005 Digital Universe" Ashibaka tock 01:35, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Apparently, only free as in beer. bogdan 12:19, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Well I never saw an actual content page, so thanks for the answer. I'm not sure how they think this is going to work, but that's for them to figure out I guess. - Taxman ^Talk 20:46, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

I don't think they'll pay millions to experts just to make free to everyone, so other projects, like Wikipedia, could use it. bogdan 22:20, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Reply to a query of how the non-subscription material on DU will be licenced: "It will be some form of creative commons license. We are still mulling over various possible versions, Bernard Haisch". — Jeandré, 2005-12-25t11:16z

The ManyOne browser is supposedly under the Mozilla Public License and is listed in the Mozilla Hall of Fame, but I can't find the source code.

Registration $8/month

When I installed ManyOne, it says I must register and pay some $8/month to access their "advanced features" or to register their High Speed DSL "Up to 1.5 Mbps" for only $39.95. I don't get this: is it a non-profit organization or a for-profit organization? bogdan 12:30, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

It's a non-profit, but this is one of their forms of fundraising. -- user:zanimum

ManyOne is a for-profit corporation. So basically, only Digital Universe, which is supposed to be some kind of department of advertising, is a non-profit entity. bogdan 20:49, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

You can register for free.

AOL clone?

Hm... it seems that they're linked with a for-profit ISP who funds them. So, basically they're an AOL clone that is going to use their encyclopedic contents to advertising their ISP business. So much for their altruistic nature. :-) bogdan 12:34, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Not to debate the merits of their organizational model, but the ISP portion isn't necessarily for-profit just because it costs money. Being a non-profit is a statement about what is done with the organization's income; specifically, that it will not ultimately be paid out to shareholders who have invested capital in the company, because nobody receives an ownership stake in that fashion. Since funds are needed in order to operate, however, non-profits sometimes sell products or services commercially, unless they rely on grants or donations. --Michael Snow 00:16, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

ManyOne *is* a for-profit, however, part of the proceeds from ManyOne go to the non-profit, and the non-profit will eventually use those proceeds to buy out the for-profit.

Michael Snow is correct here. I won't go into the details, which will be made public in due time, but suffice it to say that ManyOne Networks is answerable to the nonprofit ManyOne Foundation, and the entire operation is in the service of creating a free, noncommercial Web service. --Larry Sanger 07:51, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

$10 million

User: 69.107.144.172: "Removed reference to $10M fund for stewards since that information is inaccurate"

The experts will be paid from the fund of about US$10 million gathered from angel investors in the last three years.

Does anyone has any reference about this? Register says:

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger is to launch an alternative to the utopian, all-comers, anything-goes web site, and has raised $10m to hire experts to help edit it.

bogdan 10:59, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

U.S. centric from the start

Their key promotion line seems to be that they want to be the "PBS of the web" - which means precisely nothing to 99% of the 95% of people who are not American! 62.31.55.223 02:51, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

Encyclopedia will not launch Jan. 2006

This launch date is incorrect:

Part of the Digital Universe project is an online encyclopedia which is to be launched in January 2006

The platform--the browser and some prototype portals--should launch Tuesday. No encyclopedia is planned to launch in January. I'm not sure where this idea came about. Possibly the Register article--which was completely full of mistakes. Don't rely on it for anything. I did not raise any money for the DU--that was done by Joe Firmage, a brilliant fundraiser and my new employer--and what money has been raised has been put toward building the platform and a truly professional organization. --Larry Sanger 07:49, 16 January 2006 (UTC)

Focus

This whole article is focussed way too much on Sanger and the Encyclopedia. The Encyclopedia is only one part of DU, and Sanger is only one employee. The founders should be listed first, and the portals should be discussed first.

That's probably true, but having looked at the site, it's damned hard to work out what the focus is. It tells you its going to be intuitive, but there's little sign that it will actually be so. Even the headings at the top of the main page "Understand", "Experience", "Create", "Participate" are overlapping and confusing. It's hard to tell what is supposed to be there at the moment - if anything without downloading something. Is Digital Universe the name of the main project (its only a "pilot program" after all), or is that Manyone, or it something else? They need to sort it out. Merchbow 15:34, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

We should focus on what the general "world understanding" of the Digital Universe project is. A lot of press coverage to date makes a comparison between Wikipedia and the DU encyclopedia component, so it's not unreasonable for us to do so. — Matt Crypto 15:52, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

This will be a biased project, so wikipedia will still be needed

A project controlled by American academics will have a liberal bias as sure as night is night and day is day (and as sure as Encarta does). Wikipedia is still needed to at least attempt to cover diverse points of view neutrally. Merchbow 15:28, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

What?

Other than the bit about the encyclopedia, this article is so vague (as is the site, mind you) that I can't tell if the DU is anything but a fancy name with a bunch of words describing it. I don't know anything after reading this article. Canaen 03:49, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

If you don't like the quality of the article, feel free to edit it. There is certainly a lot of information out on the web about Digital Universe. John Broughton 18:14, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

Is this still active?

It seems Sanger's last blog post was the 20th of January, and there hasn't been much content update to the site. Has it hit snags? Has it admitted defeat? What's the deal? -Mysekurity 23:51, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

I'd also like to know. It seems that the project might have died, more's the pity. - Ta bu shi da yu 14:52, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

There seems to be some significant activity on the Encyclopedia of Earth[1], which appears to be a beachhead for the Digital Universe project. A news article from 9 May suggests that the launch date is now June 2006 for the EoE[2]. I hope it does launch, and not least because it can only be good for Wikipedia (in the sense that we can then use a free, online-available, expert-authored encyclopedia articles to fact check and source our own articles). — Matt Crypto 16:39, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Can I moved my contributions from Wikipedia to Digital Universe

Ditto. Mandel 11:01, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Dunno. Are you a professor? — Matt Crypto 11:48, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

No. I just want to know if it is legal. After all, Wikipedia is free and copyleft, but Digital Universe offers the potential of people with expertise giving this a vet. So why not? Mandel 20:47, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

Well, IANAL, but there's a couple of issues, assuming that DU would accept your contribution: 1) Despite being licenses which provide roughly the same freedoms, the GFDL is not, I'm given to understand, compatible with cc-by-sa at present, so you couldn't generally copy articles in either direction without additional permissions; yet 2) If you own the exclusive copyright to a piece of work, then you can do what you like with it. Specifically, you could dual license it under both the GFDL and Creative Commons licenses, so it could be used on both projects. Indeed, many people already do that on Wikipedia. — Matt Crypto 23:27, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

This kind of question should be moved [[3]].---CH 01:03, 14 June 2006 (UTC)