On 11/15/2010 08:22 PM, Ryan Kaldari wrote:
If I'm the only person who can see this aspersion, I must be the only person bothering to read Robert's emails:
- "The problem was that PediaPress offered money, which we didn't."
- "The difference between PediaPress and this other effort is that
PediaPress came from the top down with money in hand..."
I'm not sure what conclusion you could make from these statements other than that PediaPress bought their partnership. I have no interest in causing extra drama on Foundation-l (god knows it has plenty), but if someone is going to casually imply that the Foundation's favor can be bought and sold (without any evidence to that effect), I don't see why we should just accept that. I agree there are more important points to discuss, so I'm dropping the issue, but I still reserve the right to question any spurious accusations in the future.
Ryan Kaldari
One other thing I should point out.... I was trying to work from within the community, recruiting volunteers and participants doing organizing on Meta and the other sister projects to put things together in terms of getting the book development going. Code in terms of MediaWiki extensions and such might have developed, but very likely almost everything we were going to do would have been working from within community consensus and at best would have been something like a Wikiproject. The WMF board would have been hardly involved unless money started to flow. We were also trying to be extra careful not to get volunteers bent out of shape for not making money when other volunteers perhaps were getting paid for some reason, and the intention was that if profits did come, the WMF would get the bulk if not all of the profits. The purpose wasn't to make a killing but to get the content distrbuted.
PediaPress, unlike this effort, came straight to the WMF board with a proposal in hand, even though in the long run they did try to work with the communities too after a fashion. It is mainly a difference of approach rather than something sinister or evil and it reflects mainly a difference in philosophies about how things should be done. Again, I'm not saying that PediaPress is the bad guy here either.
If I'm not mistaken, PediaPress had already been printing content from Wikipedia prior to all of this happening anyway, so they also had some experience in the market in terms of knowing what to expect out of the concept and from that also some money already committed to the idea. They also insisted upon keeping the details of the whole thing confidential until after the deal was inked with the WMF board. While there are certainly situations where that is appropriate, it also made making a counter proposal very difficult to make. All of this has been said before and even recently so this shouldn't be anything new to reveal.
Do I wish things would have gone perhaps a bit differently? Yes. But the issue is where to go from here and not to undo things that happened in the past.
My whole point in bringing this issue up in the first place is to express that there were other roads that the WMF and Wikimedia projects could have gone but didn't, for various reasons, and that perhaps other choices in the future could be selected if we think about it.
-- Robert Horning ____________________________________________________________ $350,000 Life Insurance Coverage as low as $13.04/month. Free, No Obligation Quotes. http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL3241/4ce20ba2c3ece2c6158st01duc