Quote from: giftculturewriting on December 23, 2013, 01:12:02 AM

I'm kind of confused by why this project would exclude a musical equivalent of Devtome. The equivalent of what you're describing for writing would be an AI that can output readable and uniquely stylistic prose, but that's not what Devtome asks for. It relies on human generated content and the ability to share and remix that content. How are people going to crawl into my closed source brain to see how I think of topics, conceptualize storylines, and string sentences together? Would there be a category that said, "I want a low-sci-fi voice tagged first-person and dark humor vs an academic voice tagged archaic english lexicon?" (Definitely an interesting concept that I wouldn't have thought of without this discussion). It seems more practical to put the writing up, and also put explain the writing process if there's enough interest for it.

Well at the very least, remember that in a wiki anyone can edit anything.

Devtome articles can be spelling-corrected, grammar-corrected and so on by anyone.

So at the very least the same should be the case with a devtome-equivalent for music or images or movies or 3D models or whatever.

So for example if someone posts an item of pixel-art purporting to be an image of a certain object as seen under a certain light, and they maybe didn't get quite the right hue or shade or tint or whatever on a certain pixel, someone else, maybe someone who has the actual model and the actual light-source the image supposedly depicts, could correct that pixel.

The scope for auto-generated "spins" and "spam" and "drivel" seems to me potentially massively higher in imagery and soundtracks because it is so very easy to generate trillions upon trillions of images, as compared to generating trillions upon trillions of text articles that are grammatically correct and actually seem to have something to convey.

(For sound for example one could set oodles of noisemaking models moving around making noises, maybe in reaction to each other, or you could run Battle for Wesnoth with sound and record the soudns of a massive battle, and by varying which units you deploy you'd get different soundtracks, so you could make a track of elves versus goblins, another goblins versus loyalists, and so on and so on and so on.)

Though admittedly maybe I just have not been following the development of constructive grammars, article spinners and suchlike spammer-tools closely enough lately. Is it still the case that when you generate trillions of articles using a constructive grammar the resulting articles seem to somehow lack internal sense and consistency and such?

For imagery one could fairly easily zoom cameras around OpenSimulator environments, having scripted objects walking around, random placement of trees and shrubs and buildings and so on and so on and generate insanely huge numbers of images, and each would have an internal sense and consistency because each is simply one possible angle of view of one possible configuration of three dimensional models.

Quote from: giftculturewriting on December 23, 2013, 01:12:02 AM

I think the CC BY-SA license and opensource are highly compatible concepts, but they're not strictly the same thing. There might be a demand for open-source voice synthesizers and that is a very different project than human generated content that is not locked away by copyright. Both are valid, and the degree of their implementation will depend on the demand.

Well we already have, in the software development side of things, a distinction between "any old crap you choose to come up with" and "stuff we actually need".

So maybe we could do the same with other media?

Actually it is already maybe not only in programming, but in "being a developer of free open source stuff" in general.

In general you have to be a person who works at least ten hours per week on free open source stuff in order to qualify as a developer to get onto the receivers list.

(That is, in order to get one "share".)

I am not at all convinced that it takes forty hours to write 1000 words for Devtome, which is why Devtome author pay seems out of scale with everything else.

But, also in general, if what it is that you work on in the way of free open source stuff happens to be something we really need, such as bitcoin, or Open Transactions, then you only have to be a person who spends at least ten hours per month working on such stuff.

So I would imagine that at a bare minimum random images or sounds or music that someone feels like making should pay no more than 1/4 as much as images and music that are specifically required.

For example if it is decided that the devtome site or the devcoin site or whatever needs a soundtrack, maybe because websites without sound earn less money, attract less visitors and so on, then presumably making such soundtracks ought to pay at least 4 times as much as just submitting random tracks just to get your pay per byte or pay per run-length minute or whatever a devtome-like site for music would use as a metric in calculating pay.

If it does become necessary to have a soundtrack for Devtome, then maybe it would turn out to make sense to have a distinct separate soundtrack for each article, based on the contents of the article and maybe also carrying on the general musical theme that relates all the tracks of all the articles together so on hearing one you can guess it is probably the soundtrack of a Devtome article and maybe - maybe even "hopefully" - also what category of article it is the soundtrack for...

Battle for Wesnoth needs soundtracks for scenarios, and maybe also grouped soundtracks, so that a campaign can carry a theme throughout a whole bunch of scenarios with the track reflecting the mood of the individual scenario as well as the overall theme all the tracks of all the scenarios in the campaign have in common that relates them all together. If Battle for Wesnoth becomes a mission-critical component of the overall devcoin vision / roadmap, then presumably making soundtracks for those campaigns and scenarios that are needed for Devcoin's purposes ought, again, pay four times as much as just random stuff that was not designed specifically to fill a particular need that the Devcoin project has.

I do think that Devtome author pay is probably way out of scale with everything else, and I still think that should be corrected.

In fact it seems to me that ideally we should at some point no longer need to pay authors by the word, because, hopefully, we will eventually be able to do authors the same way we do any other developers of free open source software, which is to say, if we find a good author who habitually as a lifestyle spends ten hours per week creating free open source stuff they should be able to get onto the receivers list as a developer of free open source stuff.

Notice that they get the same one share regardless of whether they only spend the absolute minimum - ten hours per week - working on such stuff or they do such stuff 40 hours a week or 60 hours a week or 80 hours a week or whatever.

The idea was we are looking for those people who already naturally as a lifestyle contribute their time freely to free open source development.

We seem to have gotten sidetracked from that, with Devtome suddenly we started trying to bribe people to develop free open source writings or to release their existing writings as free open source, and in fact I do not even recall our having even tried to go out and find authors who already have been freely contributing at least ten hours of writing per week to free open source projects...

-MarkM-