On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 4:09 PM MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Pete Forsyth wrote:
Lisa presented some alternative strategies for revenue needs for the Foundation, including the possibility of charging for premium access to the services and APIs, expanding major donor and foundation fundraising, providing specific services for a fee, or limiting the Wikimedia Foundation's growth. The Board emphasized the importance of keeping free access to the existing APIs and services, keeping operational growth in line with the organization's effectiveness, providing room for innovation in the Foundation's activities, and other potential fundraising strategies.
This reminds me of the Wikimedia update feed service: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_update_feed_service. The Wikimedia Foundation basically allowed large search engines to access a private faster and dedicated stream of recent changes to Wikimedia wikis for a fee. While Google isn't mentioned on the Meta-Wiki page, I have a vague memory that they were (and maybe still are) involved.
I believe it was Yahoo. They were allowing us to use some of their servers in Asia back in the day, and I believe they also paid for large-scale access. There was even a special dump with the article start sections for them.
Somewhat related, there is also search.wikimedia.org: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Search.wikimedia.org. This service was designed to give Apple a fast and dedicated stream for title prefix searches. Apple's built-in Dictionary application has been the primary consumer of this feed, though I believe it's open to anyone.
MZMcBride
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