madisen

What is at stake is the design of a new content production and distribution ecosystem that will shape the entire digital environment and our societies. As has been the case in the past, a strong actor committed to the values of openness and free knowledge has a chance to tip the balance away from closed ecosystems controlled by commercial... See more

The key is that knowledge is a human endeavor, and the development of Wikipedia and its sister projects depends on human collaboration and consensus. Machine learning tools can augment the process, but AI cannot replace volunteer Wikimedians.

Over the past decade it has become a kind of factual netting that holds the whole digital world together.

opening assets is just one part of a broader goal to enable and nurture creative communities. And that this perspective gives a different way of viewing the largest digital platforms, and a more targeted response to their dominance.

cases of obvious harm should be distinguished from those in which there is a sense of potential harm, or the issue is one of the unexpected uses

The old ideals of free flow of, access, and sharing of information that propelled the open movement in the early 2000s are ill-equipped to address the challenges of the modern internet related to the surveillance and profiling of users and the add-based business model of companies that dominate the internet landscape. Because of the evolution of... See more

Maybe we should be spending more time and effort within academia, within government, within our general lives to go and invest in things that aren’t going to end up putting us in a cage that we’re going to regret later. Is that a bit of a plea and a cry? Yes, it is. But Wikipedia is the No. 5 most popular website of all websites. That’s pretty... See more

If we want to understand what AIs are going to look like, I think the proto AI that we have are corporations. Corporations are sort of these funny little beasts. They’re not small. I guess they’re not little beasts, but they’re strange. It takes special training to have humans be able to fit within them. They’re made out of humans mostly but... See more