Looking at the Burger King case:
I do not have a concern with the ad they created to have Google read the WP
article about their product.
My concern is them possibly altering the first sentence of said article.
But we now have that under control and it was a fairly innocuous in the
grand scheme of undisclosed paid editing.
James
On Wed, Apr 12, 2017 at 10:46 PM, Risker <risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Without getting into the details of the situation,
Pine, I'll simply point
out that the budget for the legal team of an international corporation like
Burger King is going to be significantly larger than the entire budget of
the Wikimedia Foundation, and punishing organizations that have figured out
a way to trigger a voice-activated software program to obtain information
that is likely to come from Wikipedia articles doesn't really seem to be
within scope. I do not see why you would advocate spending the WMF's tiny
Legal Department budget like this, instead of on copyright reform, or
assisting in prosecuting those harassing members of our community, or
preventing others from claiming they are directly related to the Wikimedia
Foundation or its projects; all of these are entirely on-mission.
There's nothing there to sue them for, anyway - it's open-licensed content
that anyone can use in any way they see fit, including for commercial
purposes. Indeed, that's exactly what Google does on its own search
results, every day, all day - and it's exactly why the Burger King "trick"
works, too. They're taking advantage of the Google interface, knowing that
it is most likely to search Wikipedia for the information requested. But
there's not as much vitriol directed at Google, because after all it was
Google bumping Wikipedia up in its search result algorithms that has (in
large part) driven the popularity of the Wikipedia projects. There's not
even a genuine attribution issue; as I recall, Alexa says "From Wikipedia"
at either the beginning or the end of its report.
In other words, I'm hard-pressed to see why you would want the WMF to take
legal action against a company that is using Wikipedia as intended. Okay,
it's not my favourite way of using it....but this is exactly how it's
intended to be used. I regularly see links to Wikipedia articles in
mainstream media, not to mention twitter and facebook news reports. Just
think if someone says "OK Google, what is Neurocysticercosis?" or "OK
Google, who's Charlie Murphy?" to reflect two news stories I learned about
today. I got to the Wikipedia articles on both of those subjects by
following links in online reports by commercial news outlets.
Risker/Anne
On 13 April 2017 at 00:01, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I'm bumping this thread because there has
been a somewhat high-profile
incident of misuse of Wikipedia by a corporate entity.
This is not entirely the same as undisclosed paid editing, but it was
certainly a misuse of Wikipedia.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/12/15259400/burger-king-
google-home-ad-wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Whopper&diff=
773807497&oldid=773585358
It seems to me that this kind of behavior, and accompanying waste of
Wikimedia volunteers' time, is likely to continue until WMF Legal cracks
down and starts making it financially painful for organizations to misuse
Wikipedia in all their various creative and inappropriate ways.
A quote from
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/clever-burger-king-ad-
attempts-to-hijack-google-home-devices-2017-04-12:
“Burger King saw an opportunity to do something exciting with the
emerging
technology of intelligent personal assistant
devices,” a Burger King
spokesperson said. I would like for WMF to make Burger King feel that
their
misuse of WIkipedia was inappropriate and for WMF
to hit them where it
counts -- in their checkbook -- and with enough force that corporations
will decide that messing with Wikipedia is both ethically wrong and
financially not worth the risk. WMF needs to change marketers' thinking
from the idea that messing with Wikipedia is "an opportunity" to "a big
risk." I would like to see WMF Legal get energized about cracking down on
these kinds of situations, and I'd be happy to have WMF make an expensive
example of Burger King to deter misconduct by others.
Pine
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James Heilman
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The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine