[Foundation-l] PediaPress

[Tim Starling]

On 12/11/10 13:23, MZMcBride wrote:
> They negotiated with Wikimedia? Where and when? How many thousands of
> companies would like their links in the sidebar of the fifth most-visited
> website in the world? Are they really that good at negotiating? On the
> English Wikipedia, there's a Book namespace and the sidebar has a completely
> separate "print/export" section that comes from the Collection extension.
> That's worth a percentage of the book sales?

Potential parternships are assessed by mission-relevance, not just
revenue potential. Offline distribution is part of the Foundation's
mission, as is open source software development. PediaPress were
offering to do those two things.

Note that PediaPress's software is useful even if you don't want to
buy a book. It offers free PDF downloads, generated by mwlib. It would
have been a useful thing to have in the sidebar, even without the
print-on-demand feature. If PediaPress goes out of business, the
sidebar link will stay there. So I think it would be more accurate to
say that PediaPress are getting a box on [[Special:Book]], not a
sidebar link.

> I think focusing energy and efforts on creating print versions of Wikipedia
> articles is antithetical to the idea of creating an online encyclopedia. 

You're entitled to your opinion, but this is not the Foundation's
position. Print versions have always been supported by both the
community and the Foundation.

> I've read Wikimedia's PediaPress press release[1] a few times now and I
> still can't figure out if PediaPress is a non-profit organization or a
> for-profit company. 

It says it's a "startup", which means a startup company, i.e. for-profit.

> I think there's a large distinction between the
> Wikimedia Foundation taking a community project and encouraging a for-profit
> company to make money off of it (through sidebar links and installing a
> custom extension) and working with a non-profit organization to distribute
> free content.

Yes, it is an important distinction. The reason our content licenses
are friendly to commercial use is to allow companies to make money by
distributing Wikipedia's content. The theory is that commercial
activity can help to further our mission, more effectively than the
non-profit sector working alone.

The Foundation's mission is to educate, not "to educate as much as is
possible without anyone making any money".