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 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
It is a request for better information as I can't seem to find clear
answers here.
--
All the best,
Sebastian Hellmann
Director of Knowledge Integration and Linked Data Technologies (KILT)
Competence Center
at the Institute for Applied Informatics (InfAI) at Leipzig University
Executive Director of the DBpedia Association
Projects:
http://dbpedia.org,
http://nlp2rdf.org,
http://linguistics.okfn.org,
https://www.w3.org/community/ld4lt
<http://www.w3.org/community/ld4lt>
Homepage:
http://aksw.org/SebastianHellmann
Research Group:
http://aksw.org