Erik Moeller wrote:
Wales says he is already talking with some of the larger search engine players about licensing specific portions of the Wikipedia knowledge baseThis must be a misunderstanding. Jimbo or the Wikimedia Foundation do not have particular rights to the content, it is freely licensed to the general public under the GNU Free Documentation License by the authors.
You're right, Erik, but the line you quote in the article is technically correct, too. The way the article is written, it sounds like these search engine players would have to execute some special license agreement with us, which is of course not true.
But I have talked to them about using our content. It's a funny kind of sales job -- "here's our stuff, use it, it's free!" And the "specific portions" is that someone at Yahoo asked me about using our movie star biographies, and I said "Sure, fine" and suggested that they donate money as well, a suggestion which was received with enthusiasm. No results yet, but big companies move very slowly... :-)
Another side effect is that if, for some reason, Jimbo would lose interest in Wikipedia, or try to do something with it that the community does not support, we could just take the content somewhere else and continue working on it there. The project can, by virtue of its license, never die; it will always reincarnate.
Absolutely, and this is essential. Volunteers volunteer because what we are doing is nonproprietary. Just being a nonprofit is not enough.
--Jimbo