[Foundation-l] A branded copy of Wikipedia lanuched today in Poland

[Marcin Cieslak]

Here:

http://wikipedia.wp.pl/

you will find a branded copy of Polish Wikipedia, launched today by
Wirtualna Polska (wp.pl), an online portal which is a subsidiary of
Telekomunikacja Polska (which in turn is a subsidiary of France Telecom)
- a result of the recent Orange - WMF agreement.

Visible changes:
 - skin is obviously different
 - no editing allowed
 - no source view
 - "Witamy w Wikipedii WP" - the banner says "Welcome to WP Wikipedia"
 - article history link points to the plwiki history page
 - no red links visible
 - "Copyright 1995-2009 Wirtualna Polska" notice at the bottom

Official press release[1] (excerpts):

"Wirtualna Polska has developed a special web portal that offers access
to the selected information and services of Wirtualna Polska as well
as Wikipedia articles in an innovative way.

A combination of news articles presented within thematic services of
Wirtualna Polska - informational, business, educational, technical,
entertainment - with encyclopedic resources of Wikipedia enables
Internet users to expand and update their knowledge."

Bartłomiej Krawczyk, WP project manager, said [square brackets are mine]:

"Wirtualna Polska consists of tens of specialised Web portals,
cooperating with the most important news outlets countrywide and abroad.
This makes Wirtualna Polska a huge source of information. That
potential combined with the current offering of Wikipedia,
containing over 633 thousand articles enables Internet
use to a wholly new extent. (...) "

"We have limited the possibility of accessing editing options [of
Wikipedia] because not every Internet user is interested in adding their
own articles to the encyclopedia or in updating existing ones. What is
important is that all changes and new definitions in [ Polish ]
Wikipedia are visible on the Wirtualna Polska website. Wikipedia.wp.pl
is an example of a new business model. It combines expansion of the
content of [ Wirtualna Polska's ] portal through a direct connection
with Wikipedia articles with the financial support for the Wikimedia
Foundation, including advertisement revenue." [2]

There is also a mention about two-way cross-linking of the WP and
Wikipedia content on the WP website. It even goes on to say "articles in
the free encyclopedia will be linking to the related WP stories".

A press release stresses out that all advertising on the site has been
specifically approved by the Wikimedia Foundation.

One of the news websites has published a note titled "Wirtualna Polska
has >>acquired<< Wikipedia" and specifically mentions the lack of
editing possibility as well as the advertising that might be put on the
site[3].

[1] http://media.netpr.pl/PressOffice/PressRelease.149390.po
[2] http://webinside.pl/artykul.php?id=6275

-- 
              << Marcin Cieslak // saper at saper.info >>

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