Our friends at Creative Commons have informed the Internets that there’s a very important vote being called at Wikipedia. It’s about licensing Wikipedia under Creative Commons.
This is very important, even if you’re not up on the whole free culture commons creativity stuff, and I will explain why. Currently, Wikipedia is licensed under something called the GFDL, which stands for “GNU Free Documentation License”, where GNU stands for “GNU’s Not Unix”, and GNU stands for “GNU’s Not Unix”, and GNU stands for “GNU’s Not Unix.” Ridiculous nomenclature notwithstanding, this license is intended for “free” documents, which can be distributed and reproduced freely. However, it has quite a few quirks which allow it to work very well for software manuals, and not very well for Wikipedia.
“When I started Wikipedia, Creative Commons did not exist,” says Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, and the GFDL was the only thing around back then which seemed like it worked. But it doesn’t. Wikipedian David Gerard notes that, “Even cutting and pasting text between two Wikipedia articles is technically a violation unless the full author list for that piece of text is attached. This is not workable on a wiki.” The Wikimedia Foundation hasn’t been enforcing some of these troublesome rules, but the fact that it’s part of the license is, legally, not great.
So, in other words, Wikipedia needs to switch to a better license, and they’ve found it in CC-BY-SA. Wikimedia, the Free Software Foundation (maintainers of the GFDL), and Creative Commons have all worked together to make it legally possible, under the latest GFDL, for wikis (such as Wikipedia) to switch to CC-BY-SA. Yes, even the GFDL’s creators want Wikipedia to drop it. All that’s left is you.
Yes, you.
Wikipedia is ridiculously democratic, considering it’s by EVERYONE, so the license change isn’t going through unless the majority agrees that it should happen. Which you should. Otherwise you hate America. And kittens.
Now, the title of this post is a bit misleading, because technically this vote is only open to people who have made 25 edits or more to Wikipedia before March 15th of this year. However, every time you fixed a typo or something counts, so if you’ve ever clicked “edit this page” on Wikipedia and actually pressed the “submit” button when you’re done, just log into Wikipedia and go to the voting page to see if you’re eligible. If you are, please vote yes.
Go vote here in case you didn’t catch the link on the last paragraph. Also, here’s another link to the vote page.
Matthew Ebel: You Want Him In Your Ears
Gratuitous picture of Matthew Ebel's FACE.
I’d heard of Mr. Ebel before, having encountered a song he did back in 2001 called “In the MUCK” (MP3). It’s about how the real world is annoying, so let’s all turn ourselves into furry animals because that’s more fun (specifically on FurryMUCK, but subtly enough so that people who have never heard of or joined it can relate to the song. I loved the song, but for some ridiculous reason I’d never bothered to do more research into him. Until now.
Despite being active in the furry community as an osprey (you see, even though ospreys have feathers, we still say they’re “furries” with “fursonas,” because “featheries” wouldn’t imply the same group, and “anthropomorphic animal enthusiasts” is too long, and oh whatever), most of Ebel’s music isn’t as overtly animalistic, but that’s probably a good thing because having to throw in an obligatory animal reference in every song would get old. All of it is just as catchy and awesome, with a style that’s like Jonathan Coulton meets Dangerous Kid and hints of Banooba; comparing him to a signed artist would be so corporate and anti-indie of me, as well as less accurate, but let’s say Jack’s Mannequin with some Ben Folds-y wit if you insist. And he’s awesome.
I got his latest album, Goodbye Planet Earth, which mixes in a good deal of electronic stuff and Hitchhiker’s Guide references. The second track, “I Just Want To Fall In Love” (MP3) is ridiculously catchy and will not get out of my head. Gahhhh. =D
He’s also taken a page from Jonathan Coulton and written a song based on one of Valve‘s games (although his effort wasn’t actually commissioned by Valve for use during their end credits), a Team Fortress 2-inspired song called “I Blame The Spy”. As of this writing, unfortunately, the full version of the song is only available to people who subscribe to his premium music. Kind of an odd decision given that he could get several zillion new fans if video game blogs pointed towards it, something they’d be more likely to do if the whole song were free. Matthew, I know you’ll read this eventually because you follow me on Twitter, so fix that.
But all in all, you want Matthew Ebel in your ears. He gives very good aural pleasure.