Hello everybody,
In the past weeks we have heard from more several unrelated sources
(official, private sector & academia) that:
*Google is funding Wikimedia
*Google is actively promoting Wikipedia in search results
*Therefore, Wikimedia and Wikimedia cannot be considered user-generated,
crowd-funded and non-commercial projects
As the wording and structure of these claims were extremely similar and
they came within a short time period I am convinced that there someone is
running a quiet smear campaign against us. These things are not uncommon
and we do have a large network already, so there's not need to panic. I
just wanted you to be warned.
In responding to it I use the following key facts:
*Cite the WMF Fundraising Report [1], which says that the average donation
is 15USD and that 74% of revenue is from donation under 100USD. A
dependency can thus not be asserted.
*We provide content as freely is possible and there are almost no barriers
to its re-use, including for commercial purposes. Anyone, be it Google,
DuckDuckGo,
Ask.com, apps or private blogs can freely integrate it. And
they do!
*We never pay for content on Wikimedia projects. It is edited by hundreds
of thousands of users each year. [2]
If you have other thoughts, feel free to share them.
Cheers,
Dimi
[
1]https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2014-2015_Fundraising_Report
[
2]https://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/active_editors#