Hoi,
I would not call it research. You have an opinion and you are dead set on
hearing yourself talk, making your current opinion prevail. Fine. You start
from assumptions that are not proven.. "this is a wonderful community"
there are plenty of arguments possible why there is a dictatorship of the
mob. All kinds of arguments are possible; one of mine is that there is no
interest in investigating how Wikidata can help Wikipedia achieve a higher
level of quality (and yes, that would work both ways). Your argument is
based in BIG Wikipedia and does not consider at all what it is that
generated text can bring where our wonderful community did not have the
room to be interested or where it did not have the bandwidth.
When you mean by research that you will endeavour to find arguments to
support your position then I understand you well. When you mean actual
research, you have to reflect on your assumptions, you have to come up with
a hypothesis and seek out what it takes to find the arguments to support
it. When your research is only to establish a timeline, I would not be
interested really as I have been there done that. I do not research but do
have an objective: share the sum of all knowledge with everyone. I have
become more humble, practically it is more like share the sum of the
knowledge that is available to us with everyone. In my blog [1] you find
many of the arguments, observations that developed over time. Maybe it is
of interest to your research; it spans a period of twelve years.
Thanks,
GerardM
[1]
On 1 December 2017 at 03:43, mathieu stumpf guntz <
psychoslave(a)culture-libre.org> wrote:
Hello Markus,
First rest assured that any feedback provided will be integrated in the
research project on the topic with proper references, including this email.
It might not come before beginning of next week however, as I'm already
more than fully booked until then. But once again it's on a wiki, be bold.
Le 01/12/2017 à 01:18, Markus Krötzsch a écrit :
Dear Mathieu,
Your post demands my response since I was there when CC0 was first chosen
(i.e., in the April meeting). I won't discuss your other claims here -- the
discussions on the Wikidata list are already doing this, and I agree with
Lydia that no shouting is necessary here.
Nevertheless, I must at least testify to what John wrote in his earlier
message (quote included below this email for reference): it was not Denny's
decision to go for CC0, but the outcome of a discussion among several
people who had worked with open data for some time before Wikidata was
born. I have personally supported this choice and still do. I have never
received any money directly or indirectly from Google, though -- full
disclosure -- I got several T-shirts for supervising in Summer of Code
projects.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough on that too, but to my mind the problem is not
money but governance. Anyone with too much cash can throw it wherever
wanted, and if some fall into Wikimedia pocket, that's fine.
But the moment a decision that impact so deeply Wikimedia governance and
future happen, then maximum transparency must be present, communication
must be extensive, and taking into account community feedback is extremely
preferable. No one is perfect, myself included, so its all the more
important to listen to external feedback. I said earlier that I found the
knowledge engine was a good idea, but for what I red it seems that
transparency didn't reach expectation of the community.
So, I was wrong my inferences around Denny, good news. Of course I would
prefer to have other archived sources to confirm that. No mistrust
intended, I think most of us are accustomed to put claims in perspective
with sources and think critically.
For completeness, was this discussion online or – to bring bag the earlier
stated testimony – around a pizza? If possible, could you provide a list of
involved people? Did a single person took the final decision, or was it a
show of hands, or some consensus emerged from discussion? Or maybe the
community was consulted with a vote, and if yes, where can I find the
archive?
Also archives show that lawyers were consulted on the topic, could we have
a copy of their report?
At no time did Google or any other company take part in our discussions in
the zeroth hour of Wikidata. And why should they?
From what I can see on
their web page, Google has no problem with all kinds of different license
terms in the data they display.
Because they are more and more moving to a business model of providing
themselves what people are looking for to keep users in their sphere of
tracking and influence, probably with the sole idea of generating more
revenue I guess.
Also, I can tell you that we would have reacted
in a very allergic way to
such attempts, so if any company had approached us, this would quite likely
have backfired. But, believe it or not, when we started it was all but
clear that this would become a relevant project at all, and no major
company even cared to lobby us. It was still mostly a few hackers getting
together in varying locations in Berlin. There was a lot of fun, optimism,
and excitement in this early phase of Wikidata (well, I guess we are still
in this phase).
Please situate that in time so we can place that in a timeline. In March
2012 Wikimedia DE announced the initial funding of 1.3 million Euros by
Google, Paul Allen's Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Gordon and
Betty Moore Foundation.
So please do not start emails with made-up stories around past events
that you have not even been close to (calling something "research" is no
substitute for methodology and rigour).
But that's all the problem here, no one should have to carry the pain of
trying to reconstruct what happened through such a research. Process of
this kind of decision should have been documented and should be easily be
found in archives. If you have suggestion in methods, please provide them.
Just denigrating the work don't help in any way to improve it. If there are
additional sources that I missed, please provide them. If there are
methodologies that would help improve the work, references are welcome.
Putting unsourced personal attacks against community members before all
other arguments is a reckless way of maximising
effect, and such rhetoric
can damage our movement beyond this thread or topic.
All this is built on references. If the analyze is wrong, for example
because it missed crucial undocumented information this must be corrected
with additional sources. Wikidata team, as far as I can tell, was perfectly
aware of this project for weeks. So if there was some sources that the team
considered that it merited my attention to complete my thoughts on the
topic, there was plenty of time to provide them before I posted this
message.
Our main strength is not our content but our community, and I am glad to
see that many have already responded to you in
such a measured and polite
way.
We completely agree on that. This is a wonderful community. And that's
concerns for future of this very community which fueled this project.
I only can reiterate all apologies to anyone that might have felt
personally attacked. I can go back to reformulate my message.
I hope you will help me to improve the research, or call it as you like,
with more relevant feedback and references.
Peace
Peace,
Markus
On 30.11.2017 09:55, John Erling Blad wrote:
Licensing was discussed in the start of the
project, as in start of
developing code for the project, and as I recall it the arguments for
CC0 was valid and sound. That was long before Danny started working for
Google.
As I recall it was mention during first week of the project (first week
of april), and the duscussion reemerged during first week of
development. That must have been week 4 or 5 (first week of may), as the
delivery of the laptoppen was delayed. I was against CC0 as I expected
problems with reuse og external data. The arguments for CC0 convinced
me.
And yes, Denny argued for CC0 AS did Daniel and I believe Jeroen and
Jens did too.
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