[Wikimedia-l] Re: License for Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia

Thanks. The key question to my mind is whether abstract content and the resulting foreign-language text output should be CC0 (like Wikidata) or CC BY-SA (like Wikipedia). The difference is that with CC0, re-users do not have to credit Wikimedia or Wikipedia for the material they use. Voice assistants like Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri and Google's Assistant along with search engines like Google and Bing would no longer have to say that they got the material from a Wikimedia project. They would also be free to copyright any derivative works. I think both of these results are undesirable, for reasons aptly described by Heather Ford in her Wikipedia@20 chapter, "The Rise of the Underdog".[1] Here is one part of the chapter that speaks to this: ---o0o--- "... Wikipedia’s facts are now increasingly extracted without credit by artificial intelligence processes that consume its knowledge and present it as objective fact. "As one of most popular websites in the world, it is tempting in 2020 to see Wikipedia as a top dog in the world of facts, but the consumption of Wikipedia’s knowledge without credit introduces Wikipedia’s greatest existential threat to date. This is not just because of the ways in which third-party actors appropriate Wikipedia content and remove the links that might sustain the community in terms of contributions of donations and volunteer time. More important is that unsourced Wikipedia content threatens the principle of verifiability, one of the fundamental principles on which Wikipedia was built. "Verifiability sets up a series of rights and obligations by readers and editors of Wikipedia to knowledge whose political and social status is transparent. By removing direct links to the Wikipedia article where statements originate from, search engines and digital assistants are removing the clues that readers could use to (a) evaluate the veracity of claims and (b) take active steps to change that information through consensus if they feel that it is false. Without the source of factual statements being attributed to Wikipedia, users will see those facts as solid, incontrovertible truth, when in reality they may have been extracted during a process of consensus building or at the moment in which the article was vandalized. "Until now, platform companies have been asked to contribute to the Wikimedia Foundation’s annual fund-raising campaign to “give back” to what they are taking out of the commons.[23] <https://hfordsa.medium.com/rise-of-the-underdog-92565503e4af#_edn23> But contributions of cash will not solve what amounts to Wikipedia’s greatest existential threat to date. What is needed is a public campaign to reinstate the principle of verifiability in the content that is extracted from Wikipedia by platform companies. Users need to be able to understand (a) exactly where facts originate, (b) how stable or unstable those statements are, (c) how they might become involved in improving the quality of that information, and (d) the rules under which decisions about representation will be made. "Wikipedia was once recognized as the underdog not only because it was underresourced but also, more importantly, because it represented the just fight against more powerful media who sought to limit the possibilities of people around the world to build knowledge products together. Today, the fight is a new one, and Wikipedia must adapt in order to survive. "Sitting back and allowing platform companies to ingest Wikipedia’s knowledge and represent it as the incontrovertible truth rather than the messy and variable truths it actually depicts is an injustice. It is an injustice not only for Wikipedians but also for people around the world who use the resource — either directly on Wikimedia servers or indirectly via other platforms like search." ---o0o--- There is a lot at stake in this discussion. Andreas [1] https://hfordsa.medium.com/rise-of-the-underdog-92565503e4af On Mon, Nov 22, 2021 at 9:25 PM Denny Vrandečić &lt;dvrandecic(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: