Re: [Bug-gnupedia] A Detailed Proposal - Mk I

[Imran Ghory]

On 19 Jan 2001, at 4:31, Simon Cross wrote:

> Preliminaries
> -------------
> 
> Peer review:  The idea is that articles are not moderated (in the
> Slashdot / Kuro5hin sense) but rather that a reviewer reads an article
> and gives it his/her approval by digitally signing it.  If the
> reviewer does not approve of the article for some reason or feels the
> article needs corrections then he/she does not sign the article. 
> Authors will be responsible for having people review their articles. 
> When searching the encyclopedia a user can then specify that only
> articles reviewed by a particular set of reviewers (or teams of
> reviewers) should be searched.  Or the user could ask that articles
> reviewed by a certain set of reviewers be shown first.  Ideally the
> core of the encyclopedia should eventually all be reviewed by
> well-known review teams.

I'd think that the filtering be kept seperate from the actual articles, 
i.e the server could keep a copy of who has signed what, this will 
allow for other servers setup which could allow different systems of 
peer review.

> Digital signing:  Peer review is worthless unless the reader can be
> sure that the article has been written and reviewed by the people it
> claims it has.  Once the authors have completed a draft of an article
> they sign the article with their GPG Private Key and put their public
> key and author information below the article text.  The reviewers then
> read the article and do the same (if they feel the article is good
> enough).

If we do this we really need to have a better implimentation of gpg 
for windows to avoid putting authors off.

> An Outline of the Proposal
> --------------------------
> 
> I propose that two types of servers be setup by the project.  The
> first server type will store a list of authors and reviewers.  I will
> refer to this as an author/reviewer server.  The second server type
> will store the actual articles of the encyclopedia.  I will refer to
> this as an article server.
> 
> In actual fact the author/reviewer will only store a list of
> virtual identities.  The function of the author/reviewer server will
> be to allow the article server to confirm that a particular virtual
> identity has signed a particular article.  The author/reviewer will
> store the following information for each virtual identity:
>  - virtual name (account name)
>  - a valid email address (for contact purposes)
>  - GPG Public Key
>  - date of creation of virtual identity (date of birth? *hehe*)
>  - the review teams of which a given reviewer is a member 
> Virtual entities can then be uniquely identified by a combination of
> the author/reviewer server name (e.g. gnu-authors-> 
reviewers.gnu.org),
> and virtual identity name (e.g. virtual-simon).
> 
> Let me stress at this point that there will be more than one
> author/reviewer server.  Preferably lots.  Each author/reviewer 
server
> should be free to decide who they give virtual identities to.  I would
> suggest that the encyclopedia start a server which gives out
> identities to anyone who wants one (they go to a website, fill out 
a
> form and get an account / virtual id).  This author/reviewer server
> could also allow people to group themselves into review teams.

We could also allow teams of teams so layers of trust could be 
created.

> Moving on to the article server. The task of the article server is to
> deliver the articles in an HTML format to the reader's browser.  Any
> article on any GNUPedia server can be uniquely identified by the
> following information:
>  - the article server to which the article was originally submitted
>  - the server name of the author/reviewer server which holds the
>    virtual identity which submitted the article (publishing author)
>  - the virtual name of the publishing author
>  - the article name as given by the publishing author
>  - the article version number
> Lets imagine that an article server has just sent an article to a
> client's browser.  In this article is a link to another article which
> looks like this:
>  <a href="/cgi-bin/
>  findarticle?
>  articleserver= articleserver.gnu.org & 
>  authorserver= gnu-authors-reviewers.gnu.org &
>  authorname= joesoap &
>  articlename= whales &
>  articleversion= 2.1
>  "> 

As I said elsewhere we really need to a have a unique key, 
preferably something like MD5 fingerprinting.

Also maybe we should give each article a directory like structure 
for instance a linux related article could be in,

 /tech/comp/software/os/linux

This would allow users to navigate thorugh similar areas rapidly, 
and also to break off seperate areas into their own encyclopedia 
(for instance, for an computer encyclopedia we create a data set 
which jsut contain /tech/comp/* articles).

I think we should also allow for editorial alternations on a server so 
all the articles can have a unified style. This could be achieved by 
having the alterations stored as diffs from the originals, this would 
allow for the original article to be verified and at the same time 
allow a overall editorial style to be overlayed.

Also I think we have to consider that every article server probably 
won't have every article, they're more likely to have a subset of 
articles either chosen by subject or by how the articles were 
reviewed.

 
> Specific Issues
> ---------------

> - An example article:
> 
> I imagine an article would look like this:
> 
>  <header stuff>
> 
>  <begin the article>
>  <title>Whales</title>
> 
>  blah ... blah ... blash
> 
>  <a href="/cgi-bin/findArticle? ...>

I disagre (I'll explain later), it should just be article ID, it will be upto 
the server to convert this into <a href="/cgi-bin/findArticle? ...> or 
whatever else.

> 
>  <reviewer info>
>   ... same info as for author
>   but with signature included
>   Might also include any
>   review teams the reviewer belongs to
>  </reviewer info>
>  ... more reviewrs

Again this shouldn't be in the article but rather held seperately and 
maybe put into the article by the server. But what do we do when 
an articles been signed by say 500+ people ?

> - Non-HTML content
> 
> Provision will have to be made for images, video clips, sound files
> and other media to be included in encyclopedia articles.  These also
> need to be signed by the authors and reviewers if possible.  Some
> standard method for doing this needs to be divised.  

Fingerprinting the images/sounds/etc. and incluing them in the 
article should be sufficient.


> Unrelated Points
> ----------------
> 
> - Copyright problems:  If we run into copyright problems we remove any
> articles which we agree have infringed on someones copyright.  If we
> feel the person claiming copyright is in the wrong we keep the
> article.  Problem solved.

We should require submission into the encyclopedia means that 
the author should accept full responsibility if it is found that the 
article contains copyrighted information and that the encyclopdedia 
as a whole is in no way responsible.

> - MathML: W3C endorsed the MathML 2.0 specification a week or two
> back.  Do any browsers support MathML 2.0 ?  What is MathML 2.0 like? 
> Will it suit the needs of GNUPedia ?  Bare in mind that we probably
> won't need too many formula in encyclopedia.

<splutter>

Physics and maths sections would be almost usless without 
formulas(formulae ?) and other sciences and engineering topics 
would also suffer.

(Maybe we should just have latex -> graphics)

I think we should support a plugin system, allow for any data, as 
long as we can convert it into html.

We also need to consider that we may not want to make this 
project web only. What if sometime in the future we wanted a 
physical book copy of this encyclopedia (This would mean articles 
that only work on the web should contain information saying as 
much in their headers). Or more likely a CD version, this would the 
server system would have to be such that it could be recreated as 
a stand-alone system.

Also, what about the possibilty of having users run local clients 
which grabs indexes of encyclopedia articles and when the user 
wants one of these articles it gets it from a server and keeps it 
stored locally.

Imran Ghory