[Foundation-l] PediaPress

[Robert S. Horning]

On 11/15/2010 08:22 PM, Ryan Kaldari wrote:
> If I'm the only person who can see this aspersion, I must be the only
> person bothering to read Robert's emails:
>
> * "The problem was that PediaPress offered money, which we didn't."
> * "The difference between PediaPress and this other effort is that
> PediaPress came from the top down with money in hand..."
>
> I'm not sure what conclusion you could make from these statements other
> than that PediaPress bought their partnership. I have no interest in
> causing extra drama on Foundation-l (god knows it has plenty), but if
> someone is going to casually imply that the Foundation's favor can be
> bought and sold (without any evidence to that effect), I don't see why
> we should just accept that. I agree there are more important points to
> discuss, so I'm dropping the issue, but I still reserve the right to
> question any spurious accusations in the future.
>
> Ryan Kaldari
>
>    
One other thing I should point out.... I was trying to work from within 
the community, recruiting volunteers and participants doing organizing 
on Meta and the other sister projects to put things together in terms of 
getting the book development going.   Code in terms of MediaWiki 
extensions and such might have developed, but very likely almost 
everything we were going to do would have been working from within 
community consensus and at best would have been something like a 
Wikiproject.  The WMF board would have been hardly involved unless money 
started to flow.  We were also trying to be extra careful not to get 
volunteers bent out of shape for not making money when other volunteers 
perhaps were getting paid for some reason, and the intention was that if 
profits did come, the WMF would get the bulk if not all of the profits.  
The purpose wasn't to make a killing but to get the content distrbuted.

PediaPress, unlike this effort, came straight to the WMF board with a 
proposal in hand, even though in the long run they did try to work with 
the communities too after a fashion.  It is mainly a difference of 
approach rather than something sinister or evil and it reflects mainly a 
difference in philosophies about how things should be done.  Again, I'm 
not saying that PediaPress is the bad guy here either.

If I'm not mistaken, PediaPress had already been printing content from 
Wikipedia prior to all of this happening anyway, so they also had some 
experience in the market in terms of knowing what to expect out of the 
concept and from that also some money already committed to the idea.  
They also insisted upon keeping the details of the whole thing 
confidential until after the deal was inked with the WMF board.  While 
there are certainly situations where that is appropriate, it also made 
making a counter proposal very difficult to make.  All of this has been 
said before and even recently so this shouldn't be anything new to reveal.

Do I wish things would have gone perhaps a bit differently?  Yes.  But 
the issue is where to go from here and not to undo things that happened 
in the past.

My whole point in bringing this issue up in the first place is to 
express that there were other roads that the WMF and Wikimedia projects 
could have gone but didn't, for various reasons, and that perhaps other 
choices in the future could be selected if we think about it.

-- Robert Horning
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