Hi Gautam,
I am not sure if this is related with them closing down other Indic related
projects.
Two guesses:
1. They might have started these projects with a goal of collecting some
data and they might have met it.
2. They might have found the Indic market less profitable at the moment and
might have chosen to shut down some resources.
Google's project can hardly be called a partnership. It started the program
on its own and the communities had only two choices: Block them or guide
them how to do it better.
Tamil Wikipedia chose to work with them in the hope of improving this
project and tried to provide a pilot model for other Wikipedias.
From my experience in this project, my personal opinion
is that:
Partnerships should be mutual, transparent, well conceived and always in the
best interest of Wikipedia.
*Any commercial interest in the content created will only lead to compromise
of some sort. *
For example, if a book publisher wants to write a series of articles in
Wikipedia and then publish it, this might seem like a good will gesture of
donating articles to Wikipedia. But, the articles may not adhere to
Wikipedia's MOS and may be written in a style for their target audience.
Commercial entities can best support Wikimedia by "donating" resources like
tools, facilities and sponsorships to conduct events.
Ravi
On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 12:14 AM, Gautam John <gautam(a)prathambooks.org>wrote;wrote:
Thanks for sending this, Ravi. I am wondering how much
this has to do
with them also shutting down their translation and transliteration
APIs as recently announced and how much this has to do with them
having achieved what they set out to do - not as far as Wikipedia is
concerned but their internal metrics for the project.
A larger question I am trying to parse - what have we learned from it
in terms of partnering with organizations that also have commercial
goals?
Thank you.
Best,
Gautam