Hi Andreas and Cunctator,

I partially agree with you with the WMF's budget and fundraising. It's a
lot of money that is being raised, and there seems to be a big
disconnect between the fundraising messages being used and the actual
expenditure. The money is being well spent and on worthwhile things,
though, which mitigates - but doesn't solve - the issue. It's a big
ethical problem that I hope the WMF can improve on in the near future.

With CC-0, though, I disagree. From my perspective/understanding, it's
not about supporting big businesses, and I think your comments about
Denny and Google are off the mark.

A key part of the Wikimedia movement is that we understand, and follow,
copyright law. We may not like it much, but we follow it as accurately
as we possibly can (given legal ambiguities etc.). When it comes to
Wikidata, we're storing factual information in short segments (triples),
which by law can't be copyrighted. It doesn't matter where the
information comes from - whether CC-BY-SA, full copyright, or elsewhere.
You can argue about database rights, but on the whole, it's not
information that *should* be CC-BY-SA, it's public domain information,
so CC-0 makes the most sense.

It's like planting trees. They produce oxygen, which benefits us all.
They may also benefit big tech as well, but that's not why we plant them.

(Full disclaimer: I run bot scripts that copy info from Wikipedias into
Wikidata, including short descriptions, via Pi bot. My understanding is
that none of the information copied is copyrightable. Feel free to argue
about this on-wiki if you want.)

Thanks,
Mike

On 27/9/21 14:02:23, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
> The Cunctator's point about Wikidata's copyright-free CC0 licence is
> actually one issue that I had meant to include in the list of WMF
> ethical lapses in my other post .
>
> Wikidata has imported very large amounts of content from Wikipedia,
> which, as The Cunctator points out, has a Creative Commons
> Attribution-ShareAlike License. This was not the original plan, as it
> was thought doing so would infringe the licence under which Wikipedia
> contributors had released their contributions.
>
> In 2012, for example, while he was still a Wikimedia Deutschland
> employee, Denny wrote on Meta,[1]
>
> Alexrk2, it is absolutely true that Wikidata under CC0 would not be
> allowed to import content from a Share-Alike data source. Wikidata does
> not plan to extract content out of Wikipedia at all. Wikidata will
> ''provide'' data that can be reused in the Wikipedias. And a CC0 source
> can be used by a Share-Alike project, be it either Wikipedia or OSM. But
> not the other way around. Do we agree on this understanding?
> --[[User:Denny Vrandečić (WMDE)|Denny Vrandečić (WMDE)]] ([[User
> talk:Denny Vrandečić (WMDE)|talk]]) 12:39, 4 July 2012 (UTC)
>
> Denny then moved to Google in October 2013, and subsequently argued
> strongly in favour of making Wikidata CC0, which is the viewpoint that
> prevailed and led to large-scale importation of Wikipedia content in
> Wikidata.
>
> The legal situation is admittedly fairly complex[2] but it stands to
> reason that when a person moves from Wikimedia to Google, loyalties and
> priorities will change along with such a move. That is only natural.
> Nobody would or should make such a move if they weren't prepared to be
> loyal to their new employer. (I've cc'ed Denny as a courtesy.)
>
> What is equally certain is that the CC0 licence served the interests of
> Google and other Big Tech companies. All of this of course happened at a
> time when Google and Silicon Valley were particularly strongly
> represented on the WMF board.[3]
>
> As far as the Wikimedia projects are concerned, Wikidata's shift to CC0
> substantially increased the risk of disintermediation that Guillaume
> mentioned in his post. If content is CC0, there is no need for
> attribution, so unlike the present Knowledge Graph panels, which at
> least have a link to Wikipedia, there is no need for any attribution to
> a Wikimedia site at all when others use Wikidata content.
>
> Content is then widely disseminated and presented as truth without any
> indication that it comes from a Wikimedia volunteer project. As Heather
> Ford has pointed out in her chapter of the Wikipedia @ 20 book, "Rise of
> the Underdog"[4], this obscuring of provenance is undesirable for other
> reasons as well – it becomes harder to contest information. Users lose
> agency.
>
> Now, in the context of the grand aim of Knowledge Equity, I believe it
> is absolutely the wrong thing for the WMF to enter into any association
> with Big Tech companies that results in any preferential treatment being
> extended to them.
>
> Companies like Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook are surveillance
> capitalists. Their entire business model is based on tracking user
> behaviour. It is diametrically opposed to professed WMF core values
> concerning privacy and data protection.
>
> Moreover, these companies have become trillion-dollar companies – really
> the 21st-century equivalent in many ways of what oil companies were in
> the last century, and wielding the same kind of covert influence – in
> part because of their diligent effort to avoid paying taxes in the
> countries they operate in.
>
> The way these companies are set up, this will never change: shareholders
> will always demand maximum return on their investments, which
> necessitates minimising tax. I believe anyone who would try to change
> these companies' tax-avoidance behaviour, volunteering to pay the
> billions of dollars of tax these companies morally owe the global south
> and other jurisdictions, would simply be axed.
>
> What this means, given that all these companies are based in the US, is
> that as their already overwhelming market share grows globally, the
> economic imbalance disadvantaging the global south – which is the root
> cause of unequal access to knowledge – will only grow. It's a bit like
> 21st-century colonialism: wealth streaming out of poor countries into a
> rich one.
>
> For both of these reasons, privacy and tax avoidance, I believe the WMF
> has absolutely no business aiding these companies to any extent where it
> would give them any additional advantage over regional or global
> competitors. Of course I acknowledge that it is impossible to avoid
> interacting with Big Tech, but where competitors such as DuckDuckGo are
> available whose values are at least partially more aligned with the
> WMF's own, they should be clearly preferred as WMF partners.
>
> For that reason I was really glad to read about a joint WMF/DuckDuckGo
> study the other day that shed some interesting light on another aspect
> of disintermediation. This study found that knowledge panels increase
> rather than diminish click-throughs to Wikipedia[5], much the opposite
> of what I and others thought a few years ago. While this is a single
> study whose conclusions may not necessarily hold true in all contexts,
> it is an interesting and encouraging result.
>
> Andreas
>
> [1]
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Wikidata&diff=3876137&oldid=3875379
> <https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Wikidata&diff=3876137&oldid=3875379>
> [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Database_Rights#Conclusion
> <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Database_Rights#Conclusion>
> [3]
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-01-13/News_and_notes
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-01-13/News_and_notes>
> [4] https://wikipedia20.pubpub.org/pub/fcgjp9ul/release/2
> <https://wikipedia20.pubpub.org/pub/fcgjp9ul/release/2>
> [5]
> https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/09/23/searching-for-wikipedia-duckduckgo-and-the-wikimedia-foundation-share-new-research-on-how-people-use-search-engines-to-get-to-wikipedia
> <https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/09/23/searching-for-wikipedia-duckduckgo-and-the-wikimedia-foundation-share-new-research-on-how-people-use-search-engines-to-get-to-wikipedia>
>