Hello Markus,

First rest assured that any feedback provided will be integrated in the research project on the topic with proper references, including this email. It might not come before beginning of next week however, as I'm already more than fully booked until then. But once again it's on a wiki, be bold.

Le 01/12/2017 à 01:18, Markus Krötzsch a écrit :

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.

Maybe I wasn't clear enough on that too, but to my mind the problem is not money but governance. Anyone with too much cash can throw it wherever wanted, and if some fall into Wikimedia pocket, that's fine.

But the moment a decision that impact so deeply Wikimedia governance and future happen, then maximum transparency must be present, communication must be extensive, and taking into account community feedback is extremely preferable. No one is perfect, myself included, so its all the more important to listen to external feedback. I said earlier that I found the knowledge engine was a good idea, but for what I red it seems that transparency didn't reach expectation of the community.

So, I was wrong my inferences around Denny, good news. Of course I would prefer to have other archived sources to confirm that. No mistrust intended, I think most of us are accustomed to put claims in perspective with sources and think critically.

For completeness, was this discussion online or – to bring bag the earlier stated testimony – around a pizza? If possible, could you provide a list of involved people? Did a single person took the final decision, or was it a show of hands, or some consensus emerged from discussion? Or maybe the community was consulted with a vote, and if yes, where can I find the archive?

Also archives show that lawyers were consulted on the topic, could we have a copy of their report?

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.

Because they are more and more moving to a business model of providing themselves what people are looking for to keep users in their sphere of tracking and influence, probably with the sole idea of generating more revenue I guess.

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).

Please situate that in time so we can place that in a timeline. In March 2012 Wikimedia DE announced the initial funding of 1.3 million Euros by Google, Paul Allen's Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

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).

But that's all the problem here, no one should have to carry the pain of trying to reconstruct what happened through such a research. Process of this kind of decision should have been documented and should be easily be found in archives. If you have suggestion in methods, please provide them. Just denigrating the work don't help in any way to improve it. If there are additional sources that I missed, please provide them. If there are methodologies that would help improve the work, references are welcome.

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.

All this is built on references. If the analyze is wrong, for example because it missed crucial undocumented information this must be corrected with additional sources. Wikidata team, as far as I can tell, was perfectly aware of this project for weeks. So if there was some sources that the team considered that it merited my attention to complete my thoughts on the topic, there was plenty of time to provide them before I posted this message.

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.

We completely agree on that. This is a wonderful community. And that's concerns for future of this very community which fueled this project.

I only can reiterate all apologies to anyone that might have felt personally attacked. I can go back to reformulate my message.

I hope you will help me to improve the research, or call it as you like, with more relevant feedback and references.

Peace

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.