A few additional corrections / clarifications: 1) Our partnership with PediaPress has not displaced comparable community efforts, nor did PediaPress "offer money" and therefore received attention that other efforts did not get. Most of the community-based efforts at that time, including the ones Robert is referring to, were of an entirely different nature: manually collecting content from projects and creating reasonable-looking PDF files, then selling them through a print-on-demand publisher like Lulu (obviously a completely commercial/proprietary operation). There were a few barely functional PDF exporters, but nothing coming close to the PediaPress tools.
It's true that a 2006 community-driven effort to publish Wikijunior content had incorrectly identified "Wikimedia Foundation" as the authors of the content. That mistake was corrected; as far as I can tell, the same volume is still available at: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/wikijunior-big-cats/1875136 You can review some of the relevant threads here: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-July/thread.html Volker from PediaPress first introduced himself at the same time, but nothing much happened between WMF and PediaPress until January 2007, when we contacted them about working together, which ultimately resulted in the current business relationship. 2) In terms of open source code, as I explained, PediaPress has contributed a full alternative parser implementation, a complete PDF export implementation, a complete tool for assembling and managing article collections, etc. These are all very important and valuable contributions. By last count, the PDF feature is used to create about 85,000 PDF files per day, keeping two dedicated servers busy. We'd be happy to integrate open source LaTeX support if someone provided it, and we'd be happy to consider paying for implementing it if enough people found it useful. 3) We've in the past explored various other partnerships with publishers resulting in commercial use of Wikipedia content. One of the most elaborate such partnerships was the Bertelsmann "Wikipedia in one volume", based on the German Wikipedia (using edited lead sections as mini-articles). Trademark use for this book was negotiated by Wikimedia Germany with approval by WMF. The book was a commercial failure. See http://www.amazon.de/Das-WIKIPEDIA-Lexikon-einem-Band/dp/3577091029/ for information about this book. In general, we've concluded that most such commercial partnerships are problematic because a) Commercial publishers are not comfortable with freely licensed content, and try to find ways to lock it in; b) Most such partnerships would be poorly scalable one-offs; c) Both the revenue potential and the mission benefit are relatively small. We like the PediaPress model, because: a) it's fully consistent with the intent of free content licensing; b) it allows people to create their own customized experience in any supported language; c) it can scale flexibly to accommodate demand. That doesn't preclude other models from being potentially viable. Even the PediaPress model allows for more carefully curated content (using collections pointing to specific versions of pages that have been reviewed for book export), and of course it would be great to see more community efforts to vet, collect and publish content. Such efforts don't require our permission where no trademark use is involved. If trademark use is involved, then we'd have to consider such requests on a case-by-case basis, but we'd certainly consider them. (There's a big difference between claiming "authorship" of WMF, or labeling a book "Wikibooks: Physics" -- the former is factually incorrect and never acceptable, the latter is a potentially permissible trademark use.) I'd argue that working with PediaPress on this would be advisable: They have an existing 10% revenue sharing agreement with WMF, and the existing toolchain allows for export to multiple formats using entirely open source tools. But alternatives are always worth looking into. 4) There's a big difference between something like Special:Booksources, and something like the book creator tool. The former links to separate and independent services (commercial or not), the latter operates commercially on Wikimedia project content. Services that integrate and use our content commercially should at minimum be vetted by WMF, to establish fair and reasonable parameters and to ensure compliance. There's actually an example of a commercial printing operation that's been entirely developed by individual community members: the WikiPoster service running on the French Wikipedia. To see it in operation, click on any image in the French Wikipedia and click "Obtenir un poster de cette image": http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Pirates_of_the_Caribbean.jpg I have very little information about this service -- neither whether they are meeting their promises of donations (I could ask accounting to examine our records, but we receive no explicit reports), nor whether any of their software is open source, nor whether it's functioning correctly and delivering a quality experience. Wikimedia France may have more detailed numbers. In general, I don't think this is a good way to develop commercial relationships, but since it's supported by the French community in this case, and we have no plans to provide the same service in some other fashion, we've not asked to remove it. We'd be more than happy to consider alternative print-on-demand services. So far, we've had two commercial contacts related to the print-on-demand tool. One, an alternative printer servicing a specific geography, was happy to work directly with PediaPress instead of developing their own wiki-to-print infrastructure. The other was too small to be relevant. 5) I've given you the scale of sales (about 8,000 per year at current numbers). As "premium" as the placement in the sidebar may seem, the reality is that the "Print/export" link is collapsed by default, doesn't obviously relate in any way to ordering printed books, and provides access to a number of related services and functions. You have to expand the sidebar, activate the book creator, assemble your own book and go through the ordering process to get a printed book. The fact that this still leads to thousands of sales is testament both to our huge readership and the actual interest in such functionality. I understand the desire to apply fair and neutral principles to such partnerships. Fairness and neutrality, to me, would indicate that another for-profit publisher would either have to provide some serious added value (in the form of product or code), or pay a higher commission to WMF, to make up for the lack of any investment in the underlying technology. But given the sales numbers and our reluctance to advertise the tool in any prominent fashion, it's not surprising that major corporations aren't exactly beating our doors down. In general, commercial partnerships we've entered that relate to code or services provided through Wikimedia projects are very careful and conservative, and tend to focus on mission value more than revenue. PediaPress falls into this category: the relatively tiny amount of revenue we're getting from it is not the reason we're engaged in the relationship. Rather, supporting community efforts to print content had long been something we wanted to do, and this was a scalable way to do it. And yes, having a third party responsible for printing and sales is a good idea from a legal perspective. External partnerships such as wikipedia.orange.fr , where Wikipedia content is commercially used (using the Wikipedia trademark) with our explicit permission, are significantly less conservative and more revenue oriented. We've generally placed less focus on these types of business relationships in recent months, as part of our general shift towards the "many small gifts" revenue model as the central pillar of our revenue strategy. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
