[Foundation-l] PediaPress

[MZMcBride]

Tim Starling wrote:
> On 11/11/10 19:47, MZMcBride wrote:
>> I don't understand why this specific company/organization has been given
>> special status (when there are surely thousands of companies looking to
>> partner with Wikimedia). They had a custom MediaWiki extension installed[2]
>> that has a very prominent place in the sidebar of one of the most popular
>> sites in the world. Why?
>> 
>> I also don't understand who would want a printed copy of a Wikipedia
>> article. It seems antithetical to the point of the Internet and the creation
>> of an online encyclopedia.
> 
> These two paragraphs contradict each other. You say that there must be
> thousands of companies willing to do what PediaPress did, and then you
> say that their product is pointless and you don't see why anyone would
> buy it.

Not really. The first point was that thousands of companies (whether
print-related or not) are trying to partner with Wikimedia, if for no other
reason than Wikipedia is a really popular website. PediaPress "broke
through" and now has really prominent placement on, among other sites, the
English Wikipedia. The second point is that this particular venture that
Wikimedia entered into (inexplicably, in my view) is rather silly.

> PediaPress developed the PDF export system (Collection, mwlib) with
> their own money, and released them under an open source license. There
> was nobody else offering to do such a thing. They had no way to tell
> whether they would be able to recover this development cost, and their
> other startup costs, from book sales. But to give themselves a
> fighting chance, they negotiated with Wikimedia to get sidebar placement.

They negotiated with Wikimedia? Where and when? How many thousands of
companies would like their links in the sidebar of the fifth most-visited
website in the world? Are they really that good at negotiating? On the
English Wikipedia, there's a Book namespace and the sidebar has a completely
separate "print/export" section that comes from the Collection extension.
That's worth a percentage of the book sales?

> This distribution concept predates the Foundation, and has been
> consistently supported by Jimmy and others. It's not antithetical to
> anything.

I think focusing energy and efforts on creating print versions of Wikipedia
articles is antithetical to the idea of creating an online encyclopedia. The
benefits of the Internet (and more specifically Wikipedia) include the
ability to centralize information in one place and the ability to update
information in a quicker manner. The idea that it's a good idea to
distribute hard copies of these articles, negating two huge benefits of the
Internet and of Wikipedia, is baffling to me. The business model seems to
mostly consist of "hey, look, we've reverted to the printing press!"

The people living in places without readily available Internet access don't
seem like the same people who would want to order a printed copy of "List of
The Simpsons episodes".

I've read Wikimedia's PediaPress press release[1] a few times now and I
still can't figure out if PediaPress is a non-profit organization or a
for-profit company. I think there's a large distinction between the
Wikimedia Foundation taking a community project and encouraging a for-profit
company to make money off of it (through sidebar links and installing a
custom extension) and working with a non-profit organization to distribute
free content.

MZMcBride

[1] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikis_Go_Printable