Clearly what is needed, with some urgency is:
* A clear statement from Roger as to what renumeration he is receiving, and what agreements he has in place with the Gibraltar tourist board etc. This will go to clearing up the confusion.
* A clear statement about WMUK's intended involvement with this process.
* Roger and his business associates to recuse from editing articles in relation to this; and/or to clearly declare a COI when interacting over them.
As I noted before - this is a hot button issue on Wikipedia, and if not handled delicately the community is liable to come crashing down like a ton of bricks on Roger & WMUK. The last thing we need is *another* board member banned from Wikipedia :S
From my prespective there are serious ethical questions about this situation. And I think going forward WMUK can't realistically have any association with the project.
Roger also, I think, needs to clearly engage with the Wikipedia community over the product/service he is selling and how he will deal with the ethical/COI situation surrounding that.
Seriously though; how did this situation get so far along without someone raising concerns!!!
Tom
On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 8:39 PM, Andreas Kolbe
<jayen466@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 8:37 PM, Chris Keating
<chriskeatingwiki@gmail.com> wrote:
I understand the QRpedia software is freely reusable under the MIT License, today. In other words – people in Brazil or India are able to use the QRpedia technology too, aren't they? And they will always be able to use it whenever they want, without ever having to ask the current rights holders or Wikimedia UK for permission first, correct?
Correct.
To further clarify - we are not really talking about intellectual property rights. We are talking about the domains currently used to provide the qrpedia service, which are
qrpedia.org and
qrwp.org.
Thanks Chris. That makes more sense. :)
Actually, one more question. Chris Owen says on the DYK talk page
that Roger is apparently being paid for the use of these domains, which I understand link the users of mobile devices to Wikipedia content. Does that mean that, once the transfer of these sites to Wikimedia UK is complete, Wikimedia UK will be charging customers of these sites to generate revenue? Or will QRpedia thereafter be a free encyclopedia?
Or is Chris Owen altogether mistaken about QRpedia being a paid service?
Andreas