[Wikimedia-l] TVTropes deletes all pages with "Rape" in title under advertising pressure.

[Andreas Kolbe]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 10:24 PM, geni <geniice at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 26 June 2012 21:38, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Are you not being a bit naive here? Seriously, if Google wanted
> something,
> > and were willing to pay Wikimedia another half million dollars for it,
> > they'd talk to Jimbo and other WMF luminaries behind closed doors.
>
> You've been hanging out on wikipedia critics forums too much.



Perhaps so. :)) (But clearly, so have you.)



> Like most of them you don't appear to realise to what extent wikipedians
> tend to be bloody minded individualists. Cutting a deal with "WMF
> luminaries" or any other cabal you care to propose simply isn't a
> viable approach.




I was actually thinking of the board, or just Jimbo himself, rather than
any wider group of luminaries (or actual Wikipedia editors). If Google
wanted something, I am sure they would speak in person to the people they
have had personal contact with. I was struck by the following four-month
timeline the other day:

---o0o---

October 4 to October 6, 2011: Italian Wikipedia blackout, hailed as
successful in preventing Italian legislation.

November 18, 2011: Media announce that Google's Sergey Brin is donating
half a million dollars to Wikipedia.

December 10, 2011: Jimmy first raises the topic of an anti-SOPA Wikipedia
blackout on Wikipedia.

January 16, 2012: English Wikipedia is blacked out for a day, in an action
hailed as successful in preventing US legislation.

---o0o---

Frappant, n'est-ce pas? :)

The community vote on the blackout was fairly rushed, and unlike most other
important community votes was open to IPs and single-purpose accounts. They
came to vote in large numbers, and editors marking non-regulars' votes in
the usual way were told to stop.

And it's not as though there wasn't any contact between Jimmy and Brin in
the months before the blackout; their names, along with others, appear on a
joint Open Letter to the US government, opposing SOPA, that appeared in
mid-December.

So, seen from one perspective, all the value that volunteers had created in
the English Wikipedia over a decade was leveraged to support one view on
copyrights, which happened to coincide with Google's business interests.
And Google happened to donate half a million to Wikipedia just around that
time.