Hi Andreas and Cunctator,
I partially agree with you with the WMF's budget and fundraising. It's a
lot of money that is being raised, and there seems to be a big
disconnect between the fundraising messages being used and the actual
expenditure. The money is being well spent and on worthwhile things,
though, which mitigates - but doesn't solve - the issue. It's a big
ethical problem that I hope the WMF can improve on in the near future.
With CC-0, though, I disagree. From my perspective/understanding, it's
not about supporting big businesses, and I think your comments about
Denny and Google are off the mark.
A key part of the Wikimedia movement is that we understand, and follow,
copyright law. We may not like it much, but we follow it as accurately
as we possibly can (given legal ambiguities etc.). When it comes to
Wikidata, we're storing factual information in short segments (triples),
which by law can't be copyrighted. It doesn't matter where the
information comes from - whether CC-BY-SA, full copyright, or elsewhere.
You can argue about database rights, but on the whole, it's not
information that *should* be CC-BY-SA, it's public domain information,
so CC-0 makes the most sense.
It's like planting trees. They produce oxygen, which benefits us all.
They may also benefit big tech as well, but that's not why we plant them.
(Full disclaimer: I run bot scripts that copy info from Wikipedias into
Wikidata, including short descriptions, via Pi bot. My understanding is
that none of the information copied is copyrightable. Feel free to argue
about this on-wiki if you want.)
Thanks,
Mike
On 27/9/21 14:02:23, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
The Cunctator's point about Wikidata's copyright-free CC0 licence is
actually one issue that I had meant to include in the list of WMF
ethical lapses in my other post .
Wikidata has imported very large amounts of content from Wikipedia,
which, as The Cunctator points out, has a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike License. This was not the original plan, as it
was thought doing so would infringe the licence under which Wikipedia
contributors had released their contributions.
In 2012, for example, while he was still a Wikimedia Deutschland
employee, Denny wrote on Meta,[1]
Alexrk2, it is absolutely true that Wikidata under CC0 would not be
allowed to import content from a Share-Alike data source. Wikidata does
not plan to extract content out of Wikipedia at all. Wikidata will
''provide'' data that can be reused in the Wikipedias. And a CC0 source
can be used by a Share-Alike project, be it either Wikipedia or OSM. But
not the other way around. Do we agree on this understanding?
--[[User:Denny Vrandečić (WMDE)|Denny Vrandečić (WMDE)]] ([[User
talk:Denny Vrandečić (WMDE)|talk]]) 12:39, 4 July 2012 (UTC)
Denny then moved to Google in October 2013, and subsequently argued
strongly in favour of making Wikidata CC0, which is the viewpoint that
prevailed and led to large-scale importation of Wikipedia content in
Wikidata.
The legal situation is admittedly fairly complex[2] but it stands to
reason that when a person moves from Wikimedia to Google, loyalties and
priorities will change along with such a move. That is only natural.
Nobody would or should make such a move if they weren't prepared to be
loyal to their new employer. (I've cc'ed Denny as a courtesy.)
What is equally certain is that the CC0 licence served the interests of
Google and other Big Tech companies. All of this of course happened at a
time when Google and Silicon Valley were particularly strongly
represented on the WMF board.[3]
As far as the Wikimedia projects are concerned, Wikidata's shift to CC0
substantially increased the risk of disintermediation that Guillaume
mentioned in his post. If content is CC0, there is no need for
attribution, so unlike the present Knowledge Graph panels, which at
least have a link to Wikipedia, there is no need for any attribution to
a Wikimedia site at all when others use Wikidata content.
Content is then widely disseminated and presented as truth without any
indication that it comes from a Wikimedia volunteer project. As Heather
Ford has pointed out in her chapter of the Wikipedia @ 20 book, "Rise of
the Underdog"[4], this obscuring of provenance is undesirable for other
reasons as well – it becomes harder to contest information. Users lose
agency.
Now, in the context of the grand aim of Knowledge Equity, I believe it
is absolutely the wrong thing for the WMF to enter into any association
with Big Tech companies that results in any preferential treatment being
extended to them.
Companies like Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook are surveillance
capitalists. Their entire business model is based on tracking user
behaviour. It is diametrically opposed to professed WMF core values
concerning privacy and data protection.
Moreover, these companies have become trillion-dollar companies – really
the 21st-century equivalent in many ways of what oil companies were in
the last century, and wielding the same kind of covert influence – in
part because of their diligent effort to avoid paying taxes in the
countries they operate in.
The way these companies are set up, this will never change: shareholders
will always demand maximum return on their investments, which
necessitates minimising tax. I believe anyone who would try to change
these companies' tax-avoidance behaviour, volunteering to pay the
billions of dollars of tax these companies morally owe the global south
and other jurisdictions, would simply be axed.
What this means, given that all these companies are based in the US, is
that as their already overwhelming market share grows globally, the
economic imbalance disadvantaging the global south – which is the root
cause of unequal access to knowledge – will only grow. It's a bit like
21st-century colonialism: wealth streaming out of poor countries into a
rich one.
For both of these reasons, privacy and tax avoidance, I believe the WMF
has absolutely no business aiding these companies to any extent where it
would give them any additional advantage over regional or global
competitors. Of course I acknowledge that it is impossible to avoid
interacting with Big Tech, but where competitors such as DuckDuckGo are
available whose values are at least partially more aligned with the
WMF's own, they should be clearly preferred as WMF partners.
For that reason I was really glad to read about a joint WMF/DuckDuckGo
study the other day that shed some interesting light on another aspect
of disintermediation. This study found that knowledge panels increase
rather than diminish click-throughs to Wikipedia[5], much the opposite
of what I and others thought a few years ago. While this is a single
study whose conclusions may not necessarily hold true in all contexts,
it is an interesting and encouraging result.
Andreas
[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Wikidata&diff=3876137&oldid=3875379
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Wikidata&diff=3876137&oldid=3875379>
[2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Database_Rights#Conclusion
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikilegal/Database_Rights#Conclusion>
[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-01-13/News_and_notes
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2016-01-13/News_and_notes>
[4] https://wikipedia20.pubpub.org/pub/fcgjp9ul/release/2
<https://wikipedia20.pubpub.org/pub/fcgjp9ul/release/2>
[5]
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/09/23/searching-for-wikipedia-duckduckgo-and-the-wikimedia-foundation-share-new-research-on-how-people-use-search-engines-to-get-to-wikipedia
<https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/09/23/searching-for-wikipedia-duckduckgo-and-the-wikimedia-foundation-share-new-research-on-how-people-use-search-engines-to-get-to-wikipedia>
On Sun, Sep 26, 2021 at 7:35 AM Gerard Meijssen
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hoi,
Facts are in and of themselves not copyrightable. Collections of
data may be copyrighted.We choose not to and as a result Wikidata is
the powerhouse that it has become.The CC-by-sa license is our
license of choice for Wikipedia however, the way it has been
enforced so far has been defensive, we are quite happy when our
material is used.
At Wikidata we are long past the point where the majority of the
data is from a Wikipedia. From day one Wikidata has provided
essential services to every Wikipedia, Wikidata can provide
superior services to Wikipedia. Because like Commons, we have to
maintain the data only once and have it available everywhere.
Wikidata is instrumental in sychronising death information among our
projects. It has been shown over and over again to have more
complete information as can be found in Wikipedia lists and
categories. Wikipedians choose to stick with their arguably
substandard practices.
The notion that a Google or an Amazon are not capable of extracting
facts from a Wikipedia is silly. They have the capacity and the
skills and the software to do just that. Wikidata provides them
additional information making their information more complete. They
have their reasons to be model citizens and contribute to the
Wikimedia Foundation. We now provide paid for services to them
making their bot activity less of a strain to our services and
provide them a (paid for) service.
Thanks,
GerardM
On Sun, 26 Sept 2021 at 04:32, The Cunctator <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Sorry for not being explicit; the connection is that protection
of copyleft would be inconvenient to major endowment donors such
as Google and Amazon. WikiData is a Wikimedia project that
converts copylefted content into (what Wikimedia asserts to be)
copyright-free content.
On Thu, Sep 23, 2021 at 5:40 PM Andy Mabbett
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>
wrote:
On Thu, 23 Sept 2021 at 19:27, The Cunctator
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> It's really disappointing to me that the Structured Data
work has been used to blow up Wikipedia's copyleft.
1. Your message has nothing to do with the endowment
2. You offer no evidence that "the Structured Data work has
been used
to blow up Wikipedia's copyleft."
3. You do not explain what you mean by "blow up Wikipedia's
copyleft."
If you wish to discuss copyright and/or structured data,
please start
a new thread; and be clear there about the point you wish to
make.
--
Andy Mabbett
@pigsonthewing
https://pigsonthewing.org.uk <https://pigsonthewing.org.uk>
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