Comment author: [deleted] 29 September 2014 07:07:37PM -1 points [-]

Plenty of people will work on things that are in legally nebulous territory. That's the entirety of the WINE project, ReactOS, and a large number of modding communities.

In practice, it's impossible for any of these projects to die, because the material they hack on is distributed between all their members and there's no single point of failure.

Comment author: dvf 30 September 2014 08:51:04PM 1 point [-]

The more nebulous, the fewer contributors. I certainly would prefer to contribute to properly licensed projects; I've had the fun of putting work into a project that for silly license reasons couldn't get into Debian/GSOC/... I'm willing to forgo it in the future.

I haven't done any deck making, so give this low weight, but I imagine a truly collaborative and creative joint project where making up, say, fallacious arguments -> fallacy name notes that are actually challenging is half the fun, and the benefit of copy-pasta is small anyway.

Comment author: [deleted] 29 September 2014 07:17:39PM -1 points [-]

The problem is that the Space file format is intended to be human-readable plain-text. I'm not willing to compromise on that personally; I want to have plain-text files that I can check into a repository.

Without this, I think the best thing you could do is fuzzy matching on the content, but I'm not sure how well this would work in practice.

That said, you could adapt the markup language for use in Anki's editor, storing it in something structured like XML or JSON that would have UUIDs of the type of propose.

Also, thanks for trying space! It's not really polished or even finished and portable, but it's really gratifying to see people touching things I've made.

Comment author: dvf 30 September 2014 08:41:24PM *  0 points [-]

My proposal doesn't seem to me to compromise human readability and editability (and certainly doesn't compromise version control) so just to make sure we mean the same thing, an example:

space update mydeck.spc

where mydeck.spc = "

The [quick] brown fox jumped over the [lazy] dog.
;UID=SDFGHJKERTYUICVBN;
Three commonly-used nonsense variable names:
1. foo
2. bar
3. baz
;;
OCaml :: A fast, functional, strongly-typed programming language.
;;"

would find in the deck the first note using the NID, and then add the second and third (having no NIDs, they cannot be found), generate new NIDs, and update mydeck.spc to something like = "

The [quick] brown fox jumped over the [lazy] dog.
;UID=SDFGHJKERTYUICVBN;
Three commonly-used nonsense variable names:
1. foo
2. bar
3. baz
;UID=LUKAGSDSDFGHJKEE;
OCaml :: A fast, functional, strongly-typed programming language.
;UID=HJKERTYUIVHBFJVBN;"

which you can then checkin. The only edit we would expect users to perform on an NID is to delete it when copy pasting to assign a new NID to the edited version, and that is certainly feasible. Do you still find this objectionable?

Comment author: [deleted] 14 May 2014 07:20:52PM -1 points [-]

Right now, I just make multiple Space files. It works very well for things that have a natural delineation point, like lectures or book chapters.

I can think of a few ways to do updating from an already-compiled Space file, but none of them are very elegant which is why I never tried to do it before.

Comment author: dvf 16 September 2014 10:33:03AM 0 points [-]

I've tried space. About sharing: how about having unique textual IDs (say, UUIDs) for each space entry, that get carried around in cards and used to update cards in place?

Then space entries.spc deckname would update the entries in deckname, but also invent and add such IDs to any entries in entries.spc that are missing them. Then all we need to take care with is to only check in spc files that have IDs for all entries, which also serves to ensure the spc file is used at least once before checking in.

Since the ID is per space entry, not per card, need to figure out how to deal with intervals. Inheriting the smallest interval in any related old cards for all new cards seems just-workable, but not elegant at all.

But I think the proposal of this page is great, and update would be necessary, so why not. The other approach that might be better would be to change anki itself to use textual sources natively, but that would probably be a much larger change.

Comment author: [deleted] 08 May 2014 10:36:48PM 0 points [-]

Someone learned in IP tell me what kind of licensing or copyright applies here. Should people post these with a Creative Commons or a GPL? Obviously we don't want to start plagiarizing or copyright-violating in the process of making this work. We don't want to abscond with other people's decks and start building on them, I think.

IANAL.

It probably makes the most sense to go with a CC-BY-SA license. That gives MIRI/Less Wrong attribution and linkback, and it keeps the decks freely redistributable.

Adding NC will piss off free culture advocates, won't stop it from being stolen and put on Amazon by chinese bots, and will limit the ability of people to distribute them in weird circumstances. Adding ND prevents them from being improved on.

Though, honestly, what matters more, copyright law or raising the sanity waterline? If you're associated with MIRI/CFAR/a liable legal fiction you shouldn't jeopardize that, but if you're just a person on the Internet making an Anki deck that violates some copyright is pretty safe to do.

So to me the thing that makes the most sense is to use CC-BY-SA if you're very serious about this, but just steal shamelessly if you just want people to learn.

Comment author: dvf 16 September 2014 10:26:48AM *  1 point [-]

Though, honestly, what matters more, copyright law or raising the sanity waterline?

The choice you offer is false, in my opinion. If you violate copyright law, you will never gather a community effort, because who wants to work on something that can get DMCA'ed out of existance at any moment?

I think CC-BY-(maybe SA) will work fine, and just use appropriately licensed basic sources like wikipedia.

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