[Foundation-l] PediaPress

[Robert S. Horning]

On 11/15/2010 12:10 PM, Ryan Kaldari wrote:
> On 11/13/10 3:26 PM, Robert S. Horning wrote:
>    
>> The difference between PediaPress and this other effort is that
>> PediaPress came from the top down with money in hand, and the group I
>> had was mostly grass roots with little money to start with in terms of
>> getting things going.
>>
>>      
> Do you have any evidence that PediaPress offered the Foundation money up
> front for consideration as a partner? If so, how much money did they
> give? This is a very serious accusation that requires some evidence in
> my opinion, especially as it is contradicted by what Erik says.
>
> Ryan Kaldari
>    
Let's turn this question around to something more legitimate to ask:  
how much money or other consideration has the WMF received from this 
effort?  Obviously some developer time went into the PDF maker and some 
of the things that you see with the button, and that certainly 
represents some "other considerations" as well.  I am not suggesting 
that the money went into the pockets of anybody but the WMF general fund 
that is being used to pay for the servers and the rest of the program 
and is certainly well accounted for.  I haven't looked at the financial 
disclosure statements recently for the WMF to see if the PediaPress 
money is broken out from other general donations either.

All I'm trying to say here is that once the deal with PediaPress came 
through, it sort of blew out of the water any other effort to try 
something different, especially stuff that was being done by a largely 
adhoc group of Wikimedia volunteers doing stuff out of their own pocket 
without substantial financial backing.  PediaPress obviously was more 
established and certainly had the finances in place to get something 
done.  That this volunteer effort isn't going any more (mind you, I was 
not the only person working on it either) should say something at least 
that it discouraged other efforts to provide printed materials.  That is 
the point I'm trying to make here.

I also am not a huge fan of the automated preparing of texts, at least 
all of the automation that is happening.  I think books are a work of 
art unto themselves and the current content preparation sort of misses 
something in the process, making the books that are produced somewhat 
sterile and missing some of the flavor that comes with hand crafting the 
content.  There were certainly some tasks that could be automated, but I 
think it also goes a bit too far for my taste as well.  It gets raw 
content out there, but the process could be improved and right now that 
is being blocked because what is being done is "good enough" for most 
casual efforts to print books.  To take it to the next tier and get a 
really professionally published book would take much, much more effort 
and the development of tools that are in my opinion now being blocked 
because of the presence of PediaPress.

This is not to say that the WMF can't look into alternative fund raising 
options, and it certainly is within the right of the WMF to consider 
legitimate offers that come along.  This offer from PediaPress certainly 
filled a niche and has proven to be fairly useful to at least a small 
number of Wikimedia users, and the question that ought to be raised now 
is if this level of participation and usage of printed materials is 
sufficient or is there a potential for other options to also be tried to 
perhaps step it up a notch or two.  There is some excellent content on 
the Wikimedia projects that is often laying around quite hidden and I 
think printing the content would be a useful thing to spread that 
knowledge to a wider audience.

Unfortunately, stepping the effort up a notch is going to take some 
significant effort and possibly some financing... something that also 
could potentially increase liability for the WMF if they were more 
directly involved too.  Increased liability plus being at least for 
awhile a fiscal sink doesn't sound too appealing to the WMF, and I 
understand why things are being done the way they are being done right 
now.  Still, I see printed content with inferior quality content 
compared to what I see on Wikimedia projects selling in much larger 
volumes in major publishing markets... so why is that gap there?

-- Robert Horning
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