How popular is this "standard"?

It appears these are both 404 or unintentional redirects:

• http://slashopen.net/open
• http://opendefinition.org/open

http://www.whitehouse.gov/open is referenced a fair amount in slash-open related documentation, but I'm not sure that's fair. That is a page about the open government policy that appears to be on that address by coincidence, it doesn't mention anything about licensing or "free" content. In order words, it isn't due to slash-open that that page exists.

Regarding the general purpose of this mission, MediaWiki already implements <link rel="copyright"> and <a rel="license"> on each page, which are more established standards.

I'm not sure why it wants to be on /open. Probably not for machine-reading, since those have more established to which slash-open doesn't seem to contribute anything. If it is for human reading, then existing navigation is probably sufficient (and better localised / integrated).

slashopen.net mentions "Mission statement", this reminds me, perhaps it is useful to redirect /open to https://www.wikimedia.org/ instead and add a licence + "free content" note there?

I believe we may have implemented a general portal site that links to all the available open data and open content on the Wikimedia sites at http://www.wikimedia.org/

This would duplicate existing functionality.

andy wrote:

Presumably, slashopen.net doesn't publish any open data; perhaps opendefinition.org likewise.

There is no widely recognised rel="open".

I don't see any claims that http://www.whitehouse.gov/open exists due to slash-open, but it does include discussion of open data and a prominent link to open.gov - perhaps it inspired the slash-open initiative?

I doubt the community or Foundation would accept having the level of detail and volume of content on the draft page (which still requires expansion) on https://www.wikimedia.org/

andy wrote:

(In reply to comment #2)

I believe we may have implemented a general portal site that links to all the
available open data and open content on the Wikimedia sites at
http://www.wikimedia.org/

Where does that provide the detail on the draft page cited?

tobias wrote:

Hi everyone,

Thanks, Andy, for proposing this idea, and thanks Tom and Krinkle for the questions and discussion. I am of course chuffed that some wikipedians are interested in /open but of course also understand that many of you might also not see it as necessary, given that all of wikipedia is open data.

Nevertheless, I think that a quick and easy way in for humans looking for your API and downloads and ways to access your data programmatically would be very useful, and the /open URL is as good a place as any since it's already being used by many others. It is becoming a standard.. though I don't claim all credit! Just like I think the contact page should be quick and easy to find, the page explaining the different ways to get your data should be easy to find - for non-wikipedians. (This works reasonably well for the contact page - though it still takes two clicks to get to the contact page via http://en.wikipedia.org/contact . Something similar for /open would be fine).

Let me give you some background. I created the /open site in 2011 after the Open Data for Development camp in Amsterdam where many participants lamented how difficult it can be to find open data to work with and many others were interested in opening up their organization data and looking for examples to follow and guidelines on how to do it. I created /open as a community resource to help address this and also to encourage more people to learn about open data and start publishing their data as open data. More info about the original motivations is in the "hello world" post on the /open site: http://slashopen.net/2011/09/hello-world/

The /open site is open to community input and I welcome all suggestions on ways to improve the guidelines, badge and other aspects of the site to make them promote more openness and do more to help people who are trying to find open data, spread open data and open up their data.

I'm happy to keep the conversation going and to learn more about how others see this - and will also reflect on and respond to Tom's blog post at http://tommorris.org/posts/2459 which makes several points that right now I don't really understand.

Cheers,

Tobias

(In reply to comment #5)

the /open URL is as good a place as any since it's already being
used by many others. It is becoming a standard..

I'm curious who "many others" are. Does this refer to the 12 pages listed under "Open Data websites" on http://slashopen.net/ , or is there more?

tobias wrote:

Try some sites - you'd be surprised.

I do think most US government sites have a /open URL - e.g. http://usaid.gov/open - probably because of the open government initiative. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Government_Initiative

Cheers,

Tobias