Joseph Reagle finally published his book Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia (2010, The MIT Press). It has a foreword by Lawrence Lessig and praises by Jonathan Zittrain, Clay Shirky and Jimmy Wales. Wow!
The first chapter is titled “Nazis and Norms” and start with the following epigraph:
Show me an admin who has never been called a nazi and I’ll show you an admin who is not doing their job. —J.S.’s Second Law
which sort of resembles Godwin’s Law:
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
Note for myself: it is good to start a book with a strong, emotional point (in this case Nazism) in order to get a grip on the reader from the very first lines.
Ok, now I need to reserve some time to read the book by Joseph Reagle. A pity the book is not released under Creative Commons so that I could download it and print it straight away.
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I’m happy to report that I will be able to release an online version under a CC license one year from now. I will say more about this in the future, and hope it will prove to be a model that benefits the author, publisher, and readership at large.
This is great news Joseph, now I need to decide if it would be savvier to wait one year or try to get the book sooner! ;)