On Sun, Feb 28, 2016 at 3:24 PM, Dariusz Jemielniak <dar...@alk.edu.pl> wrote:
We COULD outsource most of our tech (I'm not supporting this, I'm just > giving perspective). > One thing I've been wondering about of late is how much donor-funded the work the WMF is doing that is primarily designed to support commercial re-users. The other day, I read an Engineering report on the Wikimedia blog that spoke of the Wikipedia Zero team doing "side project" work for Amazon Kindle and Google Play. I was thinking, Why are donors paying for that? – especially at a time when the Foundation worries about being able to sustain fundraising growth. Wikimedia content is worth billions. Wikidata in particular has huge potential value for commercial re-users.[1] So have the link-ups between Wikipedia and Amazon, Google, Bing etc. It's clear that even in 2008, the Foundation was inundated with "multiple product-specific pitches" from Google.[2] I imagine the breadth and number of these pitches from Silicon Valley companies can only have increased since then. Sure, Wikimedia is committed to using its donated funds to make content freely available under an open licence, but does that mean donors should also be paying for programming work that is primarily designed to support commercial re-users? That work could be done by self-financing cottage industries built up by Wikimedians, working for profit, or even a for-profit arm of the Foundation. All the Foundation would have to do would be to provide basic documentation; the rest could be left to the open market. The astonishing thing to me is that there seems to be very little or no publicity and transparency from the WMF about developments in this area. For instance, I was unable to find any WMF communication about Wikipedia Smart Lookup being integrated in the Amazon Kindle (something Amazon announced in 2014),[3] even though WMF teams clearly have done programming work on this. You'd have thought having Wikipedia search embedded in a major product like the Kindle is a big thing, worthy of a community-facing announcement? In short, I think the WMF should collate and publicise more information about commercial re-use applications, and be transparent about the work it's doing to support such re-use. Maybe there is another "transparency gap" here.[4] And if there is any work that the Foundation is currently doing that primarily benefits commercial re-users, then I think it should stop doing that for free (= at donors' expense), and allow for-profit contractors to spring up and pitch for that work. That would allow the non-profit foundation to focus on user-facing improvements. Andreas [1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/25/wikidata_turns_the_world_into_a_database/ [2] See Sue Gardner's email quoted on the last two pages of http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/sandberg.pdf [3] http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/forums/kindleqna/ref=cs_hc_k_m_oldest?ie=UTF8&forumID=Fx1FI6JDSFEQQ7V&cdThread=Tx27IU7Z5IQJV2J&cdSort=oldest [4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_transparency_gap#Transparency_about_donor-funded_work_supporting_commercial_re-users _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
