Hi SJ,
Re " Even as the world moves on to new frontiers and companies race to enclose derivatives of our work." Not an easy task when work is licenced Share Alike and By Attribution. But yes it is a real threat, and should be one that both the WMF and the volunteer community can agree to combat. For the WMF unattributed reuse reduces clickthroughs and thereby potential donations. For some volunteers not being credited for the work you contribute reduces motivation, for others it increases the difficulty of avoiding circular referencing. Especially when Wikipedia winds up citing as a source an article copied from a page on Wikipedia that has itself been deleted.
Attribution and share alike are at times a pain to comply with, and I fear that there are those in the movement who see this feature as a bug, and that this contributed to the use of CC0 on Wikidata.
But the opportunity is still there. The WMF could employ some legal staff, or fund a legal charity, that would strongly encourage reusers to respect the CC-BY-SA licence. This would protect the work people have done from being used to derive works that are neither attributed nor shared alike. It would protect WMF revenue, maintain volunteer motivation and make it difficult to "enclose derivatives of our work.
Employing a few dozen legals and paralegals in a country such as India could make a real difference to this, and at least partially address the issues others have raised about the lack of WMF spending in developing countries.
WSC
Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2022 17:48:12 -0400 From: Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: what do we do with all this opportunity? To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: <CAAtU9WL5yFXyArg5qpRr1wtwXQSq=010mhZa4YJ4+Shhy4HZ= Q@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="000000000000b566b205e1bfd4c3"
We face the paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredkin%27s_paradox of choice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice, the lull of peace, and the fog of distributed bureaucracy. ~ With great possibility comes disfocus. (and a few things with focus!) ~ With no clear challenge or adversary, we've become comfortable fussing over small changes... Even as the world moves on to new frontiers and companies race to enclose derivatives of our work. This peace is coming to an end. ~ Our central overhead costs are quite high. So high^ that it seems to baffle everyone involved, each believing the bureaucracy must be caused by some other part of the system, outside of their or their org's control.
Our projects are already a global standard for multimodal collaboration at scale, we should embrace that and rise to meet it. Building some of the world's best free, mulitilingual, accessible tools for is within our remit, experience, and budget. [Discourse raised a *total *of $20M over its lifetime. we could support + spin out free-knowledge free-software layers like that every year.]
Let's practice working together, focusing on a few things each year that can change not only our projects but the world, honoring existing work and aggressively shedding anything we are doing that others are alreay doing almost as well.
SJ
*^* Up to 10-to-1 in some areas, plus delays of years inserted into otherwise continuous processes. This ratio can slip into the negative if one includes opportunity cost, or funded work that displaces or drives out comparable voluntary work; or that demands thousands of hours of input for little result. 🌍🌏🌎🌑
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 8:45 AM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga < galder158@hotmail.com> wrote:
Or, maybe, just making Wikimedia a non-obsolete environment. I'm sure the money can go to that effort.
*From:* Felipe Schenone schenonef@gmail.com *Sent:* Friday, June 17, 2022 12:51 PM *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikimedia Foundation Inc. design staff
I agree with the diagnosis, but maybe not with the solution. If Wikimedia is getting "overfunding" and doesn't quite know what to so with it,
there's
probably plenty of good things to do. We could start a community process
to
decide it, because as you say, reducing funding efforts or saving indefinitely for the future isn't likely to happen or even desirable, considering the alternatives.
Here are some ideas:
- Investing in clean energy sources for Wikimedia servers.
- Funding of external developers and libraries on which MediaWiki
depends.
- Funding of open knowledge projects beyond Wikimedia, to not stray too
far the original intentions of donors and volunteers.
- Funding of other non-knowledge altruistic projects (like buying land
for
a natural reserve). I'm sure the funding team could rethink and
generalize
the campaign to justify this use for future donations.
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 4:47 AM tim.herb@gmx.de wrote:
The question of you is important. The Wikimedia Foundation hired a lot of people in the last years and I do not see so big change in the output. It is a question that is from my point of view relevant for different areas
at
the Wikimedia Foundation. I dont support a too big focus on efficiency
that
needs a lot of metrics to measure and to create these metrics needs then
a
lot of staff. What is needed and what not is not easy to measure. With increasing available resources the staff will probably increase. This is
an
usual behaviour of humans that they try to use resources if available and do not only allocate them for the future or say no and try to reduce the needed resources if not neccessary. From my point of view the Wikimedia Foundation should reduce the Fundraising acitivities and try to reduce in the next years the yearly expenses or pay at least attention that they do not increase further. The salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are currently from my point of view in relation to Germany based NGOs high. I think interesting documents to get an overview about the work of the Wikimedia Foundation are the quaterly tuning sessions.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Foundation_tuning_sess...
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Hi WSC,
For some time now, the edit window has included the following phrase: "You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license."
This has no bearing on the "share alike" part of your argument, but as far as the "attribution" part of CC BY-SA is concerned, there is now much less to enforce.
Best, Andreas
On Sun, Jun 19, 2022 at 4:22 PM WereSpielChequers < werespielchequers@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi SJ,
Re " Even as the world moves on to new frontiers and companies race to enclose derivatives of our work." Not an easy task when work is licenced Share Alike and By Attribution. But yes it is a real threat, and should be one that both the WMF and the volunteer community can agree to combat. For the WMF unattributed reuse reduces clickthroughs and thereby potential donations. For some volunteers not being credited for the work you contribute reduces motivation, for others it increases the difficulty of avoiding circular referencing. Especially when Wikipedia winds up citing as a source an article copied from a page on Wikipedia that has itself been deleted.
Attribution and share alike are at times a pain to comply with, and I fear that there are those in the movement who see this feature as a bug, and that this contributed to the use of CC0 on Wikidata.
But the opportunity is still there. The WMF could employ some legal staff, or fund a legal charity, that would strongly encourage reusers to respect the CC-BY-SA licence. This would protect the work people have done from being used to derive works that are neither attributed nor shared alike. It would protect WMF revenue, maintain volunteer motivation and make it difficult to "enclose derivatives of our work.
Employing a few dozen legals and paralegals in a country such as India could make a real difference to this, and at least partially address the issues others have raised about the lack of WMF spending in developing countries.
WSC
Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2022 17:48:12 -0400 From: Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: what do we do with all this opportunity? To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: <CAAtU9WL5yFXyArg5qpRr1wtwXQSq=010mhZa4YJ4+Shhy4HZ= Q@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="000000000000b566b205e1bfd4c3"
We face the paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredkin%27s_paradox of choice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice, the lull of peace, and the fog of distributed bureaucracy. ~ With great possibility comes disfocus. (and a few things with focus!) ~ With no clear challenge or adversary, we've become comfortable fussing over small changes... Even as the world moves on to new frontiers and companies race to enclose derivatives of our work. This peace is coming to an end. ~ Our central overhead costs are quite high. So high^ that it seems to baffle everyone involved, each believing the bureaucracy must be caused by some other part of the system, outside of their or their org's control.
Our projects are already a global standard for multimodal collaboration at scale, we should embrace that and rise to meet it. Building some of the world's best free, mulitilingual, accessible tools for is within our remit, experience, and budget. [Discourse raised a *total *of $20M over its lifetime. we could support
spin out free-knowledge free-software layers like that every year.]
Let's practice working together, focusing on a few things each year that can change not only our projects but the world, honoring existing work and aggressively shedding anything we are doing that others are alreay doing almost as well.
SJ
*^* Up to 10-to-1 in some areas, plus delays of years inserted into otherwise continuous processes. This ratio can slip into the negative if one includes opportunity cost, or funded work that displaces or drives out comparable voluntary work; or that demands thousands of hours of input for little result. 🌍🌏🌎🌑
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 8:45 AM Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga < galder158@hotmail.com> wrote:
Or, maybe, just making Wikimedia a non-obsolete environment. I'm sure
the
money can go to that effort.
*From:* Felipe Schenone schenonef@gmail.com *Sent:* Friday, June 17, 2022 12:51 PM *To:* Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org *Subject:* [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikimedia Foundation Inc. design staff
I agree with the diagnosis, but maybe not with the solution. If
Wikimedia
is getting "overfunding" and doesn't quite know what to so with it,
there's
probably plenty of good things to do. We could start a community
process to
decide it, because as you say, reducing funding efforts or saving indefinitely for the future isn't likely to happen or even desirable, considering the alternatives.
Here are some ideas:
- Investing in clean energy sources for Wikimedia servers.
- Funding of external developers and libraries on which MediaWiki
depends.
- Funding of open knowledge projects beyond Wikimedia, to not stray too
far the original intentions of donors and volunteers.
- Funding of other non-knowledge altruistic projects (like buying land
for
a natural reserve). I'm sure the funding team could rethink and
generalize
the campaign to justify this use for future donations.
On Fri, Jun 17, 2022, 4:47 AM tim.herb@gmx.de wrote:
The question of you is important. The Wikimedia Foundation hired a lot
of
people in the last years and I do not see so big change in the output.
It
is a question that is from my point of view relevant for different
areas at
the Wikimedia Foundation. I dont support a too big focus on efficiency
that
needs a lot of metrics to measure and to create these metrics needs
then a
lot of staff. What is needed and what not is not easy to measure. With increasing available resources the staff will probably increase. This
is an
usual behaviour of humans that they try to use resources if available
and
do not only allocate them for the future or say no and try to reduce the needed resources if not neccessary. From my point of view the Wikimedia Foundation should reduce the Fundraising acitivities and try to reduce
in
the next years the yearly expenses or pay at least attention that they
do
not increase further. The salaries at the Wikimedia Foundation are currently from my point of view in relation to Germany based NGOs high.
I
think interesting documents to get an overview about the work of the Wikimedia Foundation are the quaterly tuning sessions.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Foundation_tuning_sess...
Hogü-456 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at
https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/...
To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at
https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/...
To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org