Le 30/11/2017 à 10:19, Amir E. Aharoni a écrit :
It's not the central point of this discussion, but I have to chime in here a bit: It's OK for me, and I guess that it's OK for you given that you're writing this, and I guess that it's OK for a lot of current Wikipedia editors because otherwise they probably wouldn't be editing. But it's not necessary OK for people who could be writing on Wikipedia and aren't writing.
I specifically heard from several people who live in different countries and speak different languages that the absence of easily visilbe attribution is one reason why they don't want to contribute. Should this be changed?—that's a big and completely separate question. I just wanted to point out that it's not something that should be easily dismissed with "it's OK". It's not OK for everybody.
Thank you, that's indeed a very interesting feedback, and probably not the least significant bias I showed in my message.
Is it a really local phenomena, that might be significantly matched with a lake of contributions in some linguistic versions? I mean, would it worth an A/B testing on some wiki to measure if showing credits somewhere on the article page itself does have an impact on number of contributors? (should this question be developed, forking the thread would be relevant)
I will also note, like some other people in this thread, that it's far better to discuss ideas than discuss people. In particular, there are no reasons to assume any bad intentions on Denny's part; Denny's involvement with Wikimedia began long before his move to Google, and his current Google affiliation is not a problem either.
I don't think that you need bad intentions for being in a position of conflict of interest. You might even defend that such a position make a person a victim of some social structure.
Maybe it's also not clear from my messages, but I'm not against Google or any company which is in hegemonic position, which is not a problem per se, at least this is my opinion. The problem is of course, the easiness of badly abusing an hegemonic position, even in total good faith.
In recent weeks someone posted on wikimedia-l an adage like "power corrupt but absolute power looks rather cool". I don't agree with that. In the best situations, absolute power miraculously ends up in quite dissolution, but must likely it's a good point of departure for a whole society mess. But maybe it just me being ignorant of some enlightened absolute monarch/dictator/party which led to a wonderful flourishing society full of mutual human respect and sane sustainable economic development, references are welcome. :)