Hello,
Today I stumbled upon this public phabricator ticket [1] created by someone
from WMF starting with:
"My team is creating bi-weekly HTML Dumps for all of the wikis, except for
wikidata as part of the paid API project."
I have so many questions:
- What is the "paid API" project? Are we planning to make money out of our
API? Now are we selling our dumps?
- If so, why is this not communicated before? Why are we kept in the dark?
- Does the board know and approve it?
- How is this going to align with our core values like openness and
transparency?
- The ticket implicitly says these are going to be stored on AWS ("S3
bucket"). Is this thought through? Specially the ethical problems of
feeding Jeff Bezos' empire? (If you have seen this episode of Hasan
Minhaj's on ethical issues of using AWS [2]). Why can't we do/host this on
Wikimedia infrastructure? Has this been evaluated?
- Why is the community not consulted about this?
Maybe I missed announcements, consultations or anything, forgive me for my
ignorance. Any pointers is enough. I also understand diversifying our
revenue is a good tool for rainy days but a consultation with the community
wouldn't be too bad.
[1]:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T254275
[2]:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5maXvZ5fyQY
Best
--
Amir (he/him)