Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-01-14/Special report

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Great article, touching and very informative at the same time.

Signpost readers interested in Aaron's involvement in the Wikimedia movement might be interested in the 2006 Signpost interview with him, too. There, he also mentions his "first web application [that] "was basically the same idea as Wikipedia". As mentioned in the WMF blog post, it won him a finalist entry in a teen website competition in 2000, described in a newspaper article at the time as follows:

"an ever-growing encyclopedia-like site filled with "a vast repository of human knowledge" focused on content -- real information for people to use, as [Swartz, then 13 years old] calls it.

The site works like this: Anyone can submit information about what they know in a totally open environment, which means they can add to the information freely.

"In the style of the popular GNU/Linux operating system,"Swartz added."

Also note that he is listed as donor in the last WMF annual report.

As a minor nitpick, it's not quite true that the entire 2006 "six-part series ... was translated into Japanese, Spanish, German, and French" - only the "Who Writes Wikipedia?" part was (at least I'm pretty certain that that's the case for German, having helped a little with the German translation myself at the time).

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 14:39, 16 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the links, Tilman. I've fixed the nitpick you identified—that was an editing error, caused by me confusing Tony. Ed ^{[talk] [majestic titan]} 14:58, 16 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This tragedy shows that many US laws are incredibly stupid, as is the philosophy of putting a large percentage of your population behind bars for reasons that are more often than not ridiculous. Threatening to put somebody in prison for 50 years for downloading files, which didn't hurt anybody either personally or financially? How stupid can you get? --Rosenzweig (talk) 15:46, 16 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This is sad, sad and stupid. It's a story about knowledge, money, power, and system failure. Aaron wanted to do what was manifestly right, in the case of public domain knowledge, and increasingly academic publishing is moving, or being pushed, to an open model. But it was not, mostly, those with vested interests in selling knowledge who are responsible for this tragedy, it is the people who set up as system which rewards the most prosecutions for the most charges for the maximum penalties. Rich Farmbrough, 19:11, 16 January 2013 (UTC).[reply]

I read somewhere that he could have accepted a plea deal (but didn't) that involved just 6 months in prison. Can someone verify that? 74.202.39.3 (talk) 20:11, 16 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]

This is so sad! Since Jstor had decided to make the information public, it was ridiculous for prosecutors to have taken such a hard line. Also, MIT should be ashamed of itself. I hope their investigation leads to some soul searching by universities and other institutions about the free content movement. -- Ssilvers (talk) 01:16, 19 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]