iCosmo Wikipages (background cosmology)

Use of Cobaya. camb, CLASS, cosmomc, compilers, etc.
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Adam Amara
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Joined: September 25 2004
Affiliation: ETH
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iCosmo Wikipages (background cosmology)

Post by Adam Amara » October 06 2008

As part of the iCosmo initiative we have created a set of wikipedia pages that contain background cosmology material. The resources are designed to be useful to both newbies (e.g. new PhD students) as well as seasoned professionals. Due to the wiki nature of this resource, the content is also likely to grow with time.

This repository can be reached from the iCosmo website: http://www.icosmo.org, under the 'resources' tab.

Topics currently covered are:

Gravitational lensing (inc. weak lensing, strong lensing and micro lensing)
Galaxy Correlations (inc BAO)
CMB Correlations (inc ISW)
Modified Gravity (currently under lensing)

Boud Roukema
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Joined: February 24 2005
Affiliation: Institute of Astronomy, Nicolaus Copernicus University
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Re: iCosmo Wikipages (background cosmology)

Post by Boud Roukema » November 17 2008

Adam Amara wrote:As part of the iCosmo initiative we have created a set of wikipedia pages that contain background cosmology material. ...

Gravitational lensing (inc. weak lensing, strong lensing and micro lensing)
Galaxy Correlations (inc BAO)
CMB Correlations (inc ISW)
Modified Gravity (currently under lensing)
Do you really mean the Wikipedia, or rather wiki pages? It looks to me like you mean wiki pages, not wikipedia pages, e.g. the galaxycorrelations pbwiki page is a wiki page, but not a wikipedia page.

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia created using a wiki, but most wikis are not part of the wikipedia, i.e.

Wikipedia [tex]\Rightarrow[/tex] wiki

but

wiki [tex]\not\Rightarrow[/tex] Wikipedia.

If you want to make the icosmo material available for integration in either the Wikipedia or Wikibooks, which is also one of the Wikimedia wikis, then you'll need to make sure that the material is clearly licensed under at least the GFDL, in order to guarantee that the text remains free "as in speech". It's also possible to multi-license the material, so that people can copy it under either one or several of the licences according to their own choice. Better think about this quickly, since once you have several authors to a wiki text (or any text, in fact), all of them will in principle need to be contacted and agree to any licence changes.

Adam Amara
Posts: 18
Joined: September 25 2004
Affiliation: ETH
Contact:

iCosmo Wikipages (background cosmology)

Post by Adam Amara » November 25 2008

Yup, thats right. Sorry about the incorrect information. The teaching material is indeed hosted on a wiki (in fact pbwiki) and not wikipedia. That said we are cross referencing with wikipedia.

Also, thank you for raising the issue of licensing. This is something we have talked about and further input is always welcome. Under the pbwiki terms of service copyright is discussed. That said we are happy to revisit this and we will look into GFDL.

In general we would ask that if you use material from the iCosmo site, please site the iCosmo papers. At the moment this is Refregier et al (2008) http://arxiv.org/abs/0810.1285

Thanks

Adam

Boud Roukema
Posts: 87
Joined: February 24 2005
Affiliation: Institute of Astronomy, Nicolaus Copernicus University
Contact:

Re: iCosmo Wikipages (background cosmology)

Post by Boud Roukema » December 01 2008

Adam Amara wrote:Yup, thats right.
:)
Also, thank you for raising the issue of licensing. This is something we have talked about and further input is always welcome. Under the pbwiki terms of service copyright is discussed. That said we are happy to revisit this and we will look into GFDL.
I guess you mean this url. Well, i'm not a lawyer :), but my interpretation of that is that each user/author owns his/her own contributions, without any obligations on the licence that the author must apply to the contributions. That means that if 20 cosmologists have contributed to one page of documentation, then it would (in principle) be illegal for one author to copy that page to any other site unless s/he gets authorisation from all the other 19 authors.

If we imagined that someone eventually decided to print off these pages, bind them, and sell them for either zero-profit or minor profit to students, university libraries etc, then the publisher would probably be worried about copyright violation lawsuits unless the agreement of all N [tex]\gg[/tex] 1 authors could be obtained. This is the case even for the people who started the site: you would have to print off a version which excludes all the N-3 or however many corrections by people outside the core group, or else make up for the excluded corrections by redoing them "in your own arbitrary style" (i.e. without violating copyright). Which would a lot of time trying to decide on copyright issues of many places of just one or two sentences of corrections instead of doing something more interesting and fun.

This might sound rather abstract and hypothetical, but we could also imagine that someone "exterior" to the core group writes some pretty useful contributions with some interesting formulae written in quite a novel way, and that this comes to be accepted by the community as very useful. Everyone else would then have to negotiate with that author about copyright stuff or else exclude it when making copies.

Hope this thinking aloud is useful in the long term...

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