Hi Thad,
On 20.09.19 15:28, Thad Guidry wrote:
With my tech evangelist hat on...
Google's philanthropy is nearly
boundless when it comes to the promotion of knowledge. Why?
Because indeed it's in their best interest otherwise no one can
prosper without knowledge. They aggregate knowledge for the
benefit of mankind, and then make a profit through advertising
... all while making that knowledge extremely easy to be found
for the world.
I am neither pro-Google or anti-Google
per se. Maybe skeptical and interested in what is the truth behind
the truth. Google is not synonym to philanthropy. Wikimedia is or
at least I think they are doing many things right. Google is a
platform, so primarily they "aggregate knowledge for their
benefit" while creating enough incentives in form of accessibility
for users to add the user's knowledge to theirs. It is not about
what Google offers, but what it takes in return. 20% of employees
time is also an investment in the skill of the employee, a Google
asset called Human Capital and also leads to me and Denny from
Google discussing whether
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Knowledge_Graph is content
marketing or knowledge (@Denny: no offense, legit arguments, but
no agenda to resolve the stalled discussion there). Except I don't
have 20% time to straighten the view into what I believe would be
neutral, so pushing it becomes a resource issue.
I found the other replies much more
realistic and the perspective is yet unclear. Maybe Mozilla wasn't
so much frenemy with Google and got removed from the browser
market for it. I am also thinking about Linked Open Data.
Decentralisation is quite weak, individually. I guess spreading
all the Wikibases around to super-nodes is helpful unless it
prevents the formation of a stronger lobby of philanthropists or
competition to BigTech. Wikidata created some pressure on DBpedia
as well (also opportunities), but we are fine since we can simply
innovate. Others might not withstand. Microsoft seems to favor
OpenStreetMaps so I am just asking to which degree Open Source and
Open Data is being instrumentalised by BigTech.
Hence my question, whether it is
compromise or be removed. (Note that states are also platforms,
which measure value in GDP and make laws and roads and take VAT on
transactions. Sometimes, they even don't remove opposition.)