Hi Gautam,

I am not sure if this is related with them closing down other Indic related projects.

Two guesses:

1. They might have started these projects with a goal of collecting some data and they might have met it.

2. They might have found the Indic market less profitable at the moment and might have chosen to shut down some resources.

Google's project can hardly be called a partnership. It started the program on its own and the communities had only two choices: Block them or guide them how to do it better.

Tamil Wikipedia chose to work with them in the hope of improving this project and tried to provide a pilot model for other Wikipedias.

From my experience in this project, my personal opinion is that:

Partnerships should be mutual, transparent, well conceived and always in the best interest of Wikipedia.

Any commercial interest in the content created will only lead to compromise of some sort.

For example, if a book publisher wants to write a series of articles in Wikipedia and then publish it, this might seem like a good will gesture of donating articles to Wikipedia. But, the articles may not adhere to Wikipedia's MOS and may be written in a style for their target audience.

Commercial entities can best support Wikimedia by "donating" resources like tools, facilities and sponsorships to conduct events.

Ravi

On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 12:14 AM, Gautam John <gautam@prathambooks.org> wrote:

Thanks for sending this, Ravi. I am wondering how much this has to do
with them also shutting down their translation and transliteration
APIs as recently announced and how much this has to do with them
having achieved what they set out to do - not as far as Wikipedia is
concerned but their internal metrics for the project.

A larger question I am trying to parse - what have we learned from it
in terms of partnering with organizations that also have commercial
goals?

Thank you.

Best,

Gautam