On 12/11/10 13:23, MZMcBride wrote: > They negotiated with Wikimedia? Where and when? How many thousands of > companies would like their links in the sidebar of the fifth most-visited > website in the world? Are they really that good at negotiating? On the > English Wikipedia, there's a Book namespace and the sidebar has a completely > separate "print/export" section that comes from the Collection extension. > That's worth a percentage of the book sales?
Potential parternships are assessed by mission-relevance, not just revenue potential. Offline distribution is part of the Foundation's mission, as is open source software development. PediaPress were offering to do those two things. Note that PediaPress's software is useful even if you don't want to buy a book. It offers free PDF downloads, generated by mwlib. It would have been a useful thing to have in the sidebar, even without the print-on-demand feature. If PediaPress goes out of business, the sidebar link will stay there. So I think it would be more accurate to say that PediaPress are getting a box on [[Special:Book]], not a sidebar link. > I think focusing energy and efforts on creating print versions of Wikipedia > articles is antithetical to the idea of creating an online encyclopedia. You're entitled to your opinion, but this is not the Foundation's position. Print versions have always been supported by both the community and the Foundation. > I've read Wikimedia's PediaPress press release[1] a few times now and I > still can't figure out if PediaPress is a non-profit organization or a > for-profit company. It says it's a "startup", which means a startup company, i.e. for-profit. > I think there's a large distinction between the > Wikimedia Foundation taking a community project and encouraging a for-profit > company to make money off of it (through sidebar links and installing a > custom extension) and working with a non-profit organization to distribute > free content. Yes, it is an important distinction. The reason our content licenses are friendly to commercial use is to allow companies to make money by distributing Wikipedia's content. The theory is that commercial activity can help to further our mission, more effectively than the non-profit sector working alone. The Foundation's mission is to educate, not "to educate as much as is possible without anyone making any money". >From another post: > There are a limited amount of resources available. In this case, as Tim > said, the resources (namely the extension development) were essentially > donated, but nothing in life is free. They were donated seemingly because > this company wanted to turn a profit. I don't think it's accurate to call it a donation. It was an investment. > There's nothing wrong with that and > PediaPress certainly isn't unique in wanting to monetize off of Wikipedia. > What does appear to be unique is that this particular company gets what I'd > describe as "star treatment." This includes having their custom code > enabled, a prominent section in the sidebar, and even blog posts on the > Wikimedia blog shilling for their products. The reason they are treated differently is that their activities further our mission. I understand that you don't agree with that part of our mission. -- Tim Starling _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
