Anthony Cole wrote: >Google's "info boxes" and their answers at the top of their results, we're >all agreed now, I think, are impacting Wikipedia's page views and, >consequently, our ability to raise funds and recruit new volunteers.
Google and others have a direct interest in their data being accurate and reliable. We already see that Google has a "report a correction" feature for some of its services. It's in both Wikimedia's interest and re-users' interest for the underlying data source to be update-to-date and correct. Our mission is to spread free educational content to the world and we make our data available for re-use for this purpose. Shouldn't we be applauding Google and others for helping us share our knowledge with the world? As far as threats to direct-to-user fund-raising go, I'd put organizational instability ahead of Google at the moment. The Wikimedia Foundation has repeatedly been in the news lately for ongoing management issues, both in its executive team and in its board of trustees. What size do you think the Wikimedia Foundation should be in terms of yearly budget and number of full-time employees? How much bigger or smaller should the Wikimedia Foundation be than other Wikimedia chapters? Even if we accepted your premise that Google was impacting Wikipedia's page views and the ability to raise funds and recruit new volunteers (citations needed, to be sure), are you sure that we're all agreed that this is problematic? If others re-using our content has a side effect of reducing donations to Wikimedia Foundation Inc., donations which are received through questionable and increasingly obnoxious on-site advertisements, you will not find universal agreement that this donor reduction would be terrible. As others have argued previously, small and recurring donations are a means of providing accountability for the entities entrusted with these monetary donations. If potential donors no longer trust the Wikimedia Foundation to manage and distribute this money, no longer donating financially is practical and wise. If Google causes page views to go down and our sites are directly hit less frequently, that actually saves us money, doesn't it? We're theoretically then off-loading some of our hosting costs to Google, Facebook, and others who are downloading and re-uploading our data to the Web, exactly as we mandated that anyone be able to do. With multiple copies of the data on the Web, we're better ensuring that the content lives on in perpetuity. MZMcBride _______________________________________________ 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>
