Thanks all for the helpful answers.
Jimmy Wales wrote:
William Pietri wrote:
Say, are there examples of people who do this well, contributing back to Wikipedia or to the general public? [...]
Answers.com is an excellent example. They license Wikipedia content and also license content from many other more traditional sources, and offer it up to people who search on their site. They have always been a strong supporter of Wikimedia and have been traditionally the #1 sponsor of the annual Wikimania conference.
So they benefit from our work, and they give back to the community as well.
Interesting. Are there examples of organizations who give back in other ways?
I ask with some ulterior motive. I and some pals are looking at doing a commercial startup that would involve a substantial amount of open content. That content would be narrower but deeper than Wikipedia, by which I mean it would cover a much smaller set of topics, but would include a fair bit of material that Wikipedia currently deletes for lack of notability.
As a startup, major cash donations are unlikely, at least for a few years. But where our material overlaps with Wikipedia, we wanted to find ways to collaborate. I think the only item currently in our product plan is a tool to compare related articles, so that editors of either site can easily diff and merge parts they like from the other. Ideally, we'd open-source that code so that it could be used to compare and sync between other open-content sites as well.
Do folks here have other ideas that would be mutually beneficial?
Thanks,
William