On Sunday, February 28, 2016, Andreas Kolbe jayen466@gmail.com wrote:
Jimmy,
I think the first step is for the Foundation to be more open and transparent about what work it is actually doing for commercial re-users, and to announce such work proactively to both donors and the community. There should be a dedicated space where such information is collected and available to the public. Major developments should be announced on the Wikimedia blog.
If some engineering team does work *specifically* for Amazon Kindle, Amazon Echo, Google Play, Siri etc., then in my view the companies concerned should pay for that work, or the work should be left to a for-profit contractor. It should not be paid for by donors.
What non-hypothetical work are you referring to?
{{cn}}
-- brion
Donors do not give money to the Foundation so it can flood the knowledge market with a free product that a handful of companies then earn billions from.
As for API use, if there are *generic* APIs that multiple commercial re-users can benefit from, then they should be charged according to their usage, with small users operating below a certain threshold being exempt from payment.
Lastly, we should not seek world domination. :) It's unhealthy, especially in the world of information and knowledge. Prices should be high enough that some competition is possible.
Andreas
On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 5:32 PM, Jimmy Wales <jimmywales@ymail.com javascript:;> wrote:
On the very specific topic of donor funding going to help commercial re-users, we've had some interesting but inconclusive board discussions about this topic. Despite that he takes every opportunity to attack me, and surely it will disappoint him to know, but my general view is 100% in agreement with him on the core issue - where commercial re-users are getting enormous value from our work, they should be paying for the engineering resources required for their support.
Here are two push-backs on the idea that I do think are deserving of serious consideration:
- Part of our core mission as a community is free access - will a "pay
for service" model for APIs for commercial re-users alienate a significant portion of the community? Does requiring some to pay while others get it free raise questions similar to those around "net neutrality"?
As a historical footnote, there was a deal many years ago with Answers.com to give them access to an API which they used to present our content alongside many other resources. They paid for that - not a huge amount, but it was meaningful back in those days. I don't recall this being particularly controversial.
- In many cases it may be too simplistic to simply say "a company is
benefiting, so they should pay". The point is that *we* also benefit, from increased readership for example, from our work making it to end users as technology changes and as the way people get information changes. There is certainly a situation where setting too high a price would simply push commercial re-users to not use our content at all, so sensible pricing would be key. And with real serious ongoing analysis, the right price could still be "free" even if we in principle charge.
For me, despite those being real concerns, I come down firmly on the side of being careful about falling into a trap of doing lots of expensive work for commercial re-users without having them pay. I don't actually think we do a lot of that right now. What I'd like to see is more of it, and I'm pretty agnostic about whether that's in the form of "self-financing cottage industries" or a "separate for-profit arm" or within the current engineering organization. I can see arguments for any of those.
On 2/28/16 8:02 AM, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 3:24 PM, Dariusz Jemielniak <darekj@alk.edu.pl
wrote:
We COULD outsource most of our tech (I'm not supporting this, I'm just
giving perspective).
One thing I've been wondering about of late is how much donor-funded
the
work the WMF is doing that is primarily designed to support commercial re-users.
The other day, I read an Engineering report on the Wikimedia blog that spoke of the Wikipedia Zero team doing "side project" work for Amazon Kindle and Google Play.
I was thinking, Why are donors paying for that? – especially at a time
when
the Foundation worries about being able to sustain fundraising growth.
Wikimedia content is worth billions. Wikidata in particular has huge potential value for commercial re-users.[1] So have the link-ups
between
Wikipedia and Amazon, Google, Bing etc.
It's clear that even in 2008, the Foundation was inundated with
"multiple
product-specific pitches" from Google.[2] I imagine the breadth and
number
of these pitches from Silicon Valley companies can only have increased since then.
Sure, Wikimedia is committed to using its donated funds to make content freely available under an open licence, but does that mean donors
should
also be paying for programming work that is primarily designed to
support
commercial re-users?
That work could be done by self-financing cottage industries built up
by
Wikimedians, working for profit, or even a for-profit arm of the Foundation. All the Foundation would have to do would be to provide
basic
documentation; the rest could be left to the open market.
The astonishing thing to me is that there seems to be very little or no publicity and transparency from the WMF about developments in this
area.
For instance, I was unable to find any WMF communication about
Wikipedia
Smart Lookup being integrated in the Amazon Kindle (something Amazon announced in 2014),[3] even though WMF teams clearly have done
programming
work on this. You'd have thought having Wikipedia search embedded in a major product like the Kindle is a big thing, worthy of a
community-facing
announcement?
In short, I think the WMF should collate and publicise more information about commercial re-use applications, and be transparent about the work it's doing to support such re-use. Maybe there is another "transparency gap" here.[4]
And if there is any work that the Foundation is currently doing that primarily benefits commercial re-users, then I think it should stop
doing
that for free (= at donors' expense), and allow for-profit contractors
to
spring up and pitch for that work. That would allow the non-profit foundation to focus on user-facing improvements.
Andreas
[1]
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/25/wikidata_turns_the_world_into_a_data...
[2] See Sue Gardner's email quoted on the last two pages of http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/sandberg.pdf [3]
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/forums/kindleqna/ref=cs_hc_k_m_oldest...
[4]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_transparency_gap#T...
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