New subject: An answer to Lydia Pintscher regarding its considerations on Wikidata and CC-0

30 Nov 2017

Whatever happens behind the scenes (all those conspiracies), as long as
Wikidata can be useful to everyone (yes, incl. Google, etc) then it does
not matter.

And I believe there are still a million things we can do to make Wikidata
even more useful.

-fariz

On Nov 30, 2017 07:05, "Andra Waagmeester" &lt;andra(a)micelio.be&gt; wrote:

Here are some reasons for other resources to switch to CC0:
https://www.wikipathways.org/index.php/WikiPathways:CC0_Announcement

On Wed, Nov 29, 2017 at 10:45 PM, Mathieu Stumpf Guntz <
psychoslave(a)culture-libre.org&gt; wrote:

...
  Saluton ĉiuj,

 I forward here the message I initially posted on the Meta Tremendous
 Wiktionary User Group talk page

<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wiktionary/Tremendous_Wiktionary_User_Group#An_answer_to_Lydia_general_thinking_about_Wikidata_and_CC-0>,
 because I'm interested to have a wider feedback of the community on this
 point. Whether you think that my view is completely misguided or that I
 might have a few relevant points, I'm extremely interested to know it, so
 please be bold.

 Before you consider digging further in this reading, keep in mind that I
 stay convinced that Wikidata is a wonderful project and I wish it a bright
 future full of even more amazing things than what it already brung so far.
 My sole concern is really a license issue.

 Bellow is a copy/paste of the above linked message:

 Thank you Lydia Pintscher
 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Lydia_Pintscher_%28WMDE%29> for
 taking the time to answer. Unfortunately this answer
 <https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Lydia_Pintscher_%28WMDE%29/CC-0> miss
 too many important points to solve all concerns which have been raised.

 Notably, there is still no beginning of hint in it about where the
 decision of using CC0 exclusively for Wikidata came from. But as this
 inquiry on the topic

<https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/fr:Recherche:La_licence_CC-0_de_Wikidata,_origine_du_choix,_enjeux,_et_prospections_sur_les_aspects_de_gouvernance_communautaire_et_d%E2%80%99%C3%A9quit%C3%A9_contributive>
 advance, an answer is emerging from it. It seems that Wikidata choice
 toward CC0 was heavily influenced by Denny Vrandečić, who – to make it
 short – is now working in the Google Knowledge Graph team. Also it worth
 noting that Google funded a quarter of the initial development work.
 Another quarter came from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation,
 established by Intel co-founder. And half the money came from Microsoft
 co-founder Paul Allen's Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2)[1]

<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wiktionary/Tremendous_Wiktionary_User_Group#cite_note-1>.
 To state it shortly in a conspirational fashion, Wikidata is the puppet
 trojan horse of big tech hegemonic companies into the realm of Wikimedia.
 For a less tragic, more argumentative version, please see the research
 project (work in progress, only chapter 1 is in good enough shape, and it's
 only available in French so far). Some proofs that this claim is completely
 wrong are welcome, as it would be great that in fact that was the community
 that was the driving force behind this single license choice and that it is
 the best choice for its future, not the future of giant tech companies.
 This would be a great contribution to bring such a happy light on this
 subject, so we can all let this issue alone and go back contributing in
 more interesting topics.

 Now let's examine the thoughts proposed by Lydia.
 Wikidata is here to give more people more access to more knowledge. So
 far, it makes it matches Wikimedia movement stated goal. This means we
 want our data to be used as widely as possible. Sure, as long as it
 rhymes with equity. As in *Our strategic direction: Service and **Equity*

<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Strategy/Wikimedia_movement/2017/Direction/Endorsement#Our_strategic_direction:_Service_and_Equity>.
 Just like we want freedom for everybody as widely as possible. That is,
 starting where it confirms each others freedom. Because under this level,
 freedom of one is murder and slavery of others. CC-0 is one step towards
 that. That's a thesis, you can propose to defend it but no one have to
 agree without some convincing proof. Data is different from many other
 things we produce in Wikimedia in that it is aggregated, combined,
 mashed-up, filtered, and so on much more extensively. No it's not. From a
 data processing point of view, everything is data. Whether it's stored in a
 wikisyntax, in a relational database or engraved in stone only have a
 commodity side effect. Whether it's a random stream of bit generated by a
 dumb chipset or some encoded prose of Shakespeare make no difference. So
 from this point of view, no, what Wikidata store is not different from what
 is produced anywhere else in Wikimedia projects. Sure, the way it's
 structured does extremely ease many things. But this is not because it's
 data, when elsewhere there would be no data. It's because it enforce data
 to be stored in a way that ease aggregation, combination, mashing-up,
 filtering and so on. Our data lives from being able to write queries over
 millions of statements, putting it into a mobile app, visualizing parts of
 it on a map and much more. Sure. It also lives from being curated from
 millions[2]

<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wiktionary/Tremendous_Wiktionary_User_Group#cite_note-2>
 of benevolent contributors, or it would be just a useless pile of random
 bytes. This means, if we require attribution, in a huge number of cases
 attribution would need to go back to potentially millions of editors and
 sources (even if that data is not visible in the end result but only helped
 to get the result). No, it doesn't mean that. First let's recall a few
 basics as it seems the whole answer makes confusion between attribution and
 distribution of contributions under the same license as the original.
 Attribution is crucial for traceability and so for reliable and trusted
 knowledge that we are targeting within the Wikimedia movement. The "same
 license" is the sole legal guaranty of equity contributors have. That's it,
 trusted knowledge and equity are requirements for the Wikimedia movement
 goals. That means withdrawing this requirements is withdrawing this goals. Now,
 what would be the additional cost of storing sources in Wikidata? Well,
 zero cost. Actually, it's already here as the "reference" attribute is
part
 of the Wikibase item structure. So attribution is not a problem, you don't
 have to put it in front of your derived work, just look at a Wikipedia
 article: until you go to history, you have zero attribution visible, and
 it's ok. It's also have probably zero or negligible computing cost, as it
 doesn't have to be included in all computations, it just need to be
 retrievable on demand. What would be the additional cost of storing
 licenses for each item based on its source? Well, adding a license
 attribute might help, but actually if your reference is a work item, I
 guess it might comes with a "license" statement, so zero additional cost.
 Now for letting user specify under which free licenses they publish their
 work, that would just require an additional attribute, a ridiculous weight
 when balanced with equity concerns it resolves. Could that prevent some
 uses for some actors? Yes, that's actually the point, preventing abuse of
 those who doesn't want to act equitably. For all other actors a "distribute
 under same condition" is fine. This is potentially computationally hard
 to do and and depending on where the data is used very inconvenient (think
 of a map with hundreds of data points in a mobile app). OpenStreetMap
 which use ODbL, a copyleft attributive license, do exactly that too,
 doesn't it? By the way, allowing a license by item would enable to include
 OpenStreetMap data in WikiData, which is currently impossible due to the
 CC0 single license policy of the project. Too bad, it could be so useful to
 have this data accessible for Wikimedia projects, but who cares? This is
 a burden on our re-users that I do not want to impose on them. Wait,
 which re-users? Surely one might expect that Wikidata would care first of
 re-users which are in the phase with Wikimedia goal, so surely needs of
 Wikimedia community in particular and Free/Libre Culture in general should
 be considered. Do this re-users would be penalized by a copyleft license?
 Surely no, or they wouldn't use it extensively as they do. So who are this
 re-users for who it's thought preferable, without consulting the community,
 to not annoy with questions of equity and traceability? It would make it
 significantly harder to re-use our data and be in direct conflict with our
 goal of spreading knowledge. No, technically it would be just as easy as
 punching a button on a computer to do that rather than this. What is in
 direct conflict with our clearly stated goals emerging from the 2017
 community consultation is going against equity and traceability. You
 propose to discard both to satisfy exogenous demands which should have next
 to no weight in decision impacting so deeply the future of our community. Whether
 data can be protected in this way at all or not depends on the jurisdiction
 we are talking about. See this Wikilegal on on database rights
 <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Database_Rights> for more
 details. It says basically that it's applicable in United States and
 Europe on different legal bases and extents. And for the rest of the world,
 it doesn't say it doesn't say nothing can apply, it states nothing. So
 even if we would have decided to require attribution it would only be
 enforceable in some jurisdictions. What kind of logic is that? Maybe it
 might not be applicable in some country, so let's withdraw the few rights
 we have. Ambiguity, when it comes to legal matters, also unfortunately
 often means that people refrain from what they want to to for fear of legal
 repercussions. This is directly in conflict with our goal of spreading
 knowledge. Economic inequality, social inequity and legal imbalance might
 also refrain people from doing what they want, as they fear practical
 repercussions. CC0 strengthen this discrimination factors by enforcing
 people to withdraw the few rights they have to weight against the growing
 asymmetry that social structures are concomitantly building. So CC0 as
 unique license choice is in direct conflict with our goal of *equitably*
 spreading knowledge. Also it seems like this statement suggest that
 releasing our contributions only under CC0 is the sole solution to diminish
 legal doubts. Actually any well written license would do an equal job
 regarding this point, including many copyleft licenses out there. So while
 associate a clear license to each data item might indeed diminish legal
 uncertainty, it's not an argument at all for enforcing CC0 as sole license
 available to contributors. Moreover, just putting a license side by side
 with a work does not ensure that the person who made the association was
 legally allowed to do so. To have a better confidence in the legitimacy of
 a statement that a work is covered by a certain license, there is once
 again a traceability requirement. For example, Wikidata currently include
 many items which were imported from misc. Wikipedia versions, and claim
 that the derived work obtained – a set of items and statements – is under
 CC0. That is a hugely doubtful statement and it alarmingly looks like license
 laundering <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/license_laundering>. This is
 true for Wikipedia, but it's also true for any source on which a large
 scale extraction and import are operated, whether through bots or crowd
 sourcing. So the Wikidata project is currently extremely misplaced to
 give lessons on legal ambiguity, as it heavily plays with legal blur and
 the hope that its shady practises won't fall under too much scrutiny. Licenses
 that require attribution are often used as a way to try to make it harder
 for big companies to profit from openly available resources. No there are
 not. They are used as *a way to try to make it harder for big companies
 to profit from openly available resources* *in inequitable manners*.
 That's completely different. Copyleft licenses give the same rights to big
 companies and individuals in a manner that lower socio-economic
 inequalities which disproportionally advantage the former. The thing is
 there seems to be no indication of this working. Because it's not trying
 to enforce what you pretend, so of course it's not working for this goal.
 But for the goal that copyleft licenses aims at, there are clear evidences
 that yes it works. Big companies have the legal and engineering resources
 to handle both the legal minefield and the technical hurdles easily. There
 is no pitfall in copyleft licenses. Using war material analogy is
 disrespectful. That's true that copyleft licenses might come with some
 constraints that non-copyleft free licenses don't have, but that the price
 for fostering equity. And it's a low price, that even individuals can
 manage, it might require a very little extra time on legal considerations,
 but on the other hand using the free work is an immensely vast gain that
 worth it. In Why you shouldn't use the Lesser GPL for your next library
 <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-not-lgpl.html> is stated *proprietary
 software developers have the advantage of money; free software developers
 need to make advantages for each other*. This might be generalised as *big
 companies have the advantage of money; free/libre culture contributors need
 to make advantages for each other*. So at odd with what pretend this
 fallacious claims against copyleft licenses, they are not a "minefield and
 the technical hurdles" that only big companies can handle. All the more,
 let's recall who financed the initial development of Wikidata: only actors
 which are related to big companies. Who it is really hurting is the
 smaller start-up, institution or hacker who can not deal with it. If this
 statement is about copyleft licenses, then this is just plainly false.
 Smaller actors have more to gain in preserving mutual benefit of the common
 ecosystem that a copyleft license fosters. With Wikidata we are making
 structured data about the world available for everyone. And that's great.
 But that doesn't require CC0 as sole license to be achieved. We are
 leveling the playing field to give those who currently don’t have access to
 the knowledge graphs of the big companies a chance to build something
 amazing. And that's great. But that doesn't require CC0 as sole license.
 Actually CC0 makes it a less sustainable project on this point, as it
 allows unfair actors to take it all, add some interesting added value that
 our community can not afford, reach/reinforce an hegemonic position in the
 ecosystem with their own closed solution. And, ta ta, Wikidata can be
 discontinued quietly, just like Google did with the defunct Freebase which
 was CC-BY-SA before they bought the company that was running it, and after
 they imported it under CC0 in Wikidata as a new attempt to gather a larger
 community of free curators. And when it will have performed license
 laundering of all Wikimedia projects works with shady mass extract and
 import, Wikimedia can disappear as well. Of course big companies benefits
 more of this possibilities than actors with smaller financial support and
 no hegemonic position. Thereby we are helping more people get access to
 knowledge from more places than just the few big ones. No, with CC0 you
 are certainly helping big companies to reinforce their position in which
 they can distribute information manipulated as they wish, without
 consideration for traceability and equity considerations. Allowing
 contributors to also use copyleft licenses would be far more effective to *collect
 and use different forms of free, trusted knowledge* that *focus efforts
 on the knowledge and communities that have been left out by structures of
 power and privilege*, as stated in *Our strategic direction: Service and
 Equity*. CC-0 is becoming more and more common. Just like economic
 inequality <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/economic_inequality>. But that
 is not what we are aiming to foster in the Wikimedia movement. Many
 organisations are releasing their data under CC-0 and are happy with the
 experience. Among them are the European Union, Europeana, the National
 Library of Sweden and the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Arts. Good for
 them. But they are not the Wikimedia community, they have their own goals
 and plan to be sustainable that does not necessarily meet what our
 community can follow. Different contexts require different means. States
 and their institutions can count on tax revenue, and if taxpayers ends up
 in public domain works, that's great and seems fair. States are rarely
 threatened by companies, they have legal lever to pressure that kind of
 entity, although conflict of interest and lobbying can of course mitigate
 this statement. Importing that kind of data with proper attribution and
 license is fine, be it CC0 or any other free license. But that's not an
 argument in favour of enforcing on benevolent a systematic withdraw of all
 their rights as single option to contribute. All this being said we do
 encourage all re-users of our data to give attribution to Wikidata because
 we believe it is in the interest of all parties involved. That's it, zero
 legal hope of equity. And our experience shows that many of our re-users
 do give credit to Wikidata even if they are not forced to. Experience
 also show that some prominent actors like Google won't credit the Wikimedia
 community anymore when generating directly answer based on, inter alia,
 information coming from Wikidata, which is itself performing license
 laundering of Wikipedia data. Are there no downsides to this? No, of
 course not. Some people chose not to participate, some data can't be
 imported and some re-users do not attribute us. But the benefits I have
 seen over the years for Wikidata and the larger open knowledge ecosystem
 far outweigh them. This should at least backed with some solid statistics
 that it had a positive impact in term of audience and contribution in
 Wikimedia project as a whole. Maybe the introduction of Wikidata did have a
 positive effect on the evolution of total number of contributors, or maybe
 so far it has no significant correlative effect, or maybe it is correlative
 with a decrease of the total number of active contributors. Some plots
 would be interesting here. Mere personal feelings of benefits and
 hindrances means nothing here, mine included of course. Plus, there is
 not even the beginning of an attempt to A/B test with a second Wikibase
 instant that allow users to select which licenses its contributions are
 released under, so there is no possible way to state anything backed on
 relevant comparison. The fact that they are some people satisfied with the
 current state of things doesn't mean they would not be even more satisfied
 with a more equitable solution that allows contributors to chose a free
 license set for their publications. All the more this is all about the
 sustainability and fostering of our community and reaching its goals, not
 immediate feeling of satisfaction for some people.

    -

    [1] Wikipedia Signpost 2015, 2nd december

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/en:Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2015-12-02/Op-ed>

    -

    [2] according to the next statement of Lydia

 Once again, I recall this is not a manifesto against Wikidata. The
 motivation behind this message is a hope that one day one might participate
 in Wikidata with the same respect for equity and traceability that is
 granted in other Wikimedia projects.

 Kun multe da vikiamo,
 mathieu

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Re: [Wikidata] An answer to Lydia Pintscher regarding its considerations on Wikidata and CC-0