On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 10:24 PM, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 26 June 2012 21:38, Andreas Kolbe
<jayen466(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Are you not being a bit naive here? Seriously, if
Google wanted
something,
and were willing to pay Wikimedia another half
million dollars for it,
they'd talk to Jimbo and other WMF luminaries behind closed doors.
You've been hanging out on wikipedia critics forums too much.
Perhaps so. :)) (But clearly, so have you.)
Like most of them you don't appear to realise to
what extent wikipedians
tend to be bloody minded individualists. Cutting a deal with "WMF
luminaries" or any other cabal you care to propose simply isn't a
viable approach.
I was actually thinking of the board, or just Jimbo himself, rather than
any wider group of luminaries (or actual Wikipedia editors). If Google
wanted something, I am sure they would speak in person to the people they
have had personal contact with. I was struck by the following four-month
timeline the other day:
---o0o---
October 4 to October 6, 2011: Italian Wikipedia blackout, hailed as
successful in preventing Italian legislation.
November 18, 2011: Media announce that Google's Sergey Brin is donating
half a million dollars to Wikipedia.
December 10, 2011: Jimmy first raises the topic of an anti-SOPA Wikipedia
blackout on Wikipedia.
January 16, 2012: English Wikipedia is blacked out for a day, in an action
hailed as successful in preventing US legislation.
---o0o---
Frappant, n'est-ce pas? :)
The community vote on the blackout was fairly rushed, and unlike most other
important community votes was open to IPs and single-purpose accounts. They
came to vote in large numbers, and editors marking non-regulars' votes in
the usual way were told to stop.
And it's not as though there wasn't any contact between Jimmy and Brin in
the months before the blackout; their names, along with others, appear on a
joint Open Letter to the US government, opposing SOPA, that appeared in
mid-December.
So, seen from one perspective, all the value that volunteers had created in
the English Wikipedia over a decade was leveraged to support one view on
copyrights, which happened to coincide with Google's business interests.
And Google happened to donate half a million to Wikipedia just around that
time.