Dear all,
personally I am quite happy that Denny can contribute more to Wikidata and Wikipedia. No personal criticism there, I read his thesis and I am impressed by his work and contributions.
I don't want to facilitate any conspiracy theories here, but I am
wondering about where Wikidata is going, especially with respect
to Google.
Note that Chrome/Chromium being Open Source with a twist has already pushed Firefox from the market, but now there is this controversy about what is being tracked server side by Google Analytics and Client side by cookies and also the current discussion about Ad Blocker removal from Chrome: https://www.wired.com/story/google-chrome-ad-blockers-extensions-api/
Maybe somebody could enlighten me about the overall strategy and connections here.
1. there was a Knowledge Engine Project which failed, but in
principle had the right idea:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Engine_(Wikimedia_Foundation)
This was aimed to "democratize the discovery of media, news and
information", in particular counter-moving the traffic sink by
Google providing Wikipedia's information in Google Search. Now
that there is Wikidata, this is much better for Google because
they can take the CC-0 data as they wish.
2. there are some very widely used terms like "Knowledge Graph"
, which seems to be blocked by Google:
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q648625 and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Graph without a neutral
point of view like the German WP adopted:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google#Knowledge_Graph
3. I was under the impression that Google bought Freebase and
then started Wikidata as a non-threatening model to the data they
have in their Knowledge Graph
Could someone give me some pointers about the financial
connections of Google and Wikimedia (this should be transparent,
right?) and also who pushed the Wikidata movement into life in
2012?
Google was also mentioned in
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/10/30/wikidata-fifth-birthday/ but
while it reads "Freebase,
was discontinued because of the superiority of Wikidata’s approach
and active community." I know the story as: Google didn't want its
competitors to have the data and the service. Not much of Freebase
did end up in Wikidata.
As I said, I don't want to push any opinions in any directions. I am more asking for more information about the connection of Google to Wikidata (financially), then Google to WMF and also I am asking about any strategic advantages for Google in relation to their competition.
Please don't answer with "How great Wikidata is", I already know
that and this is also not in the scope of my "How intertwined is
Google with Wikidata / WMF?" question. Can't mention this enough:
also not against Denny.