New subject: [Wikidata] An answer to Lydia Pintscher regarding its considerations on Wikidata and CC-0

1 Dec 2017

My reference was to in-place discussions at WMDE, not the open meetings
with Markus. Each week we had an open demo where Markus usually attended.
As I remember the May-discussion, it was just a discussion in the office,
there was a reference to an earlier meeting. It is although easy to mix up
old memories, so what happen first and what happen next should not be taken
to be facts. If Markus also says the same it is although a reasonable
chance we have got it right.

As to the questions about archives on open discussions with the community.
This was in April-May 2012. There was no community, there were only
concerned individuals. The community started to emerge in August with the
first attempts to go public. On Wikidata_talk:Introduction there are some
posts from 15. August 2012,[1] while first post on the subject page is from
30. October. The stuff from before October comes from a copy-paste from
Meta.[3] Note that Denny writes "The data in Wikidata is published under a
free license, allowing the reuse of the data in many different scenarios."
but Whittylama changes this to "The data in Wikidata is published under [
http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ a free license], allowing
the reuse of the data in many different scenarios.",[4] and at that point
there were a community on an open site and had been for a week. When
Whittylama did his post it was the 4504th post on the site, so it was
hardly the first! The license was initially a CC-SA.[8] I'm not quite sure
when it was changed to CC0 in the footer,[9] but it seems to have happen
before 31 October 2012, at 19:09. First post on Q1 is from 29. October
2012,[5] this is one of several items updated this evening.

It is quite enlightening to start at oldid=1 [6] and stepping forward. You
will find that our present incarnation went live 25. October 2012. So much
for the "birthday". To ask for archived community discussions before 25th
October does not make sense, there were no site, and the only people
involved were mostly devs posting at Meta. Note for example that the page
Wikidata:Introduction is from Meta.[7]

[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata_talk:Introduction
[2]
https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Wikidata:Introduction&oldid=…
[3]
https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Wikidata_talk:Introduction&d…
[4]
https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Wikidata:Introduction&diff=n…
[5] https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q1&oldid=103
[6] https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?oldid=1
[7]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikidata/Introduction&oldi…
[8]
https://web.archive.org/web/20121027015501/http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wik…
[9]
https://web.archive.org/web/20121102074347/http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wik…

On Fri, Dec 1, 2017 at 1:18 AM, Markus Krötzsch <
markus(a)semantic-mediawiki.org&gt; wrote:

...
  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.

 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. 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).

 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). 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. 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.

 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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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Wikidata] An answer to Lydia Pintscher regarding its considerations on Wikidata and CC-0