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Comment by ROARosen | Hacker News Reader

With all due respect to Wikipedia for what it is, I believe their success is partly because of the 'altruistic' nature of their model. Sure, they should seek donations from huge companies like Google - which make tons of money off of their data - for the services they provide, but I feel like locking down the 'better' api to the public is not the way to go about it. It's just too often that a commercial offering just disincentives bettering the 'free' product.

Wikipedia as the product of a public good foundation should be just that; by the public, for the public, and accessible to the public (including all access methods and API's).

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Wikipedian here. We edit because we're contributing to free information. Free information means anyone can use it for any purpose, including commercially.

I think this move is great. I'd rather have this money go to the foundation, than ParseAPIco.

> Free information means anyone can use it ...

Of course anyone can use it commercially and for whichever reason they like. But by creating a walled 'premium' offering you are going against the premise of 'anyone can use it' since not anyone can use the commercial api.

Surely if Google or anyone wants the api so badly they're willing to pay for it, they should fund it. Why does that mean it needs to be 'locked'?

Google and co will essentially pay for the SLA, free access will be available through Wikimedia Cloud Services and I'm sure that the team is investigating how to make the API available to the wider public.

Devils advocate: Google clearly already has a working pipeline to import and format Wikipedia data for its needs. Why would they stop using it and start paying Wikipedia? Will Wikipedia be able to build an enterprise API thats faster/cheaper/more reliable/more scalable than the internal one build by one of the world’s top engineering companies?

No doubt the enterprise API will add attractive value for smaller companies without the resources to process the raw dumps but I’m skeptical that this will convert Google et al into well-paying customers. Unless they start restricting the free dumps...

While Google already have a pipeline in place the bottleneck of that pipeline is on the Wikimedia end of things, this project addresses that. No more scraping and data dumps when they can stream changes over gRPC. WMF didn't build this without consultation with these big companies.

What is the difference between a funder and a paying customer?

They are both users who are paying for the service.

The difference is that funders have political power over the project beyond the scope of their own use.

Customers are always better and more fair to everyone than funders.

A service that's available to the 'public' is called a 'public service' even though it is funded by 'funders'. But a service that's available only to 'customers' is by definition not a 'public' service.

see you in a year, after you hear stories about how wikipedia had to redact information that was sensitive to their valued customers

I'm another Wikipedian and donor, and I'm pissed about this.

Creating an enterprise product with enterprise funding means Wikimedia is directing energy and resources to serve enterprise alone. These APIs were likely demanded by larger tech firms, and I imagine they discussed with Wikimedia the possibility of creating a commercial service. Now they got what they wanted, it won't be a public resource, and it's design won't be guided by the public either.

Now the lines are very blurry. A wiser strategy would have been to create a separate private entity.

> A wiser strategy would have been to create a separate private entity.

Unless I am mistaken, seems like they did do that?

"the foundation’s newly created subsidiary, Wikimedia LLC"

https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-finally-asking-big-tec...

I haven't loom at the details, but a free usage tier with relatively low limits so hobbiest can use it would be acceptable. If you're pulling a lot of data out of a project like wikipedia you would at least be paying to keep the servers running.

The point is that's not an option. Everyone should get the public tier. And if you tried to pull a lot of data, you'd get throttled.

Totally, and if a big company like Google does not want to be throttled or they feel a need for a more advanced api, they can donate to Wikimedia for the purpose of creating such an api which will be available to everyone publicly.

Yes exactly. Google should pay whatever would be required such that it would be free to everyone.

> The new API is an opt-in product, meaning that everyone (including those companies) can continue to use the current publicly-available tools at no cost and no restriction. The ability to freely access the knowledge across all Wikimedia projects remains unaffected–it is core to our mission.

Not sure what you have to worry about.

>Not sure what you have to worry about.

>From op: It's just too often that a commercial offering just disincentives bettering the 'free' product.

Instead of the public foundation focusing on bettering and modernizing the public option, they are -and will continue to be - putting their efforts to create a better api to be used solely for private purposes (albeit with good intentions).

Sure, it's opt-in to use the 'better' api. But that comes at the expense of this better api not being available publicly. So going forward by default the public is always going to be getting the inferior api, saving the 'better' ones for commercial use. That doesn't seem very opt-in-like to me...

They state better API, is just a way to scrape data easier think like a structured JSON, regular public don't scrape data they visit for info once in a while, some people use other tens of apps to export data offline. Wikipedia wants to charge some money from freeloading corporates so, instead of facing the backlash about scraping being paid, they chose to charge these mega corps in a different way to avoid the hassle of commercial and non commercial BS. If they don't provide a fancy API, no different from free ways, corporates would rather use the free stuff than pay for the API.

The altruistic model seems to be doing not that well. The number of editors peaked in 2007 and has been going down since.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians#Number_o...

Going by the complains people on this site have about editing wikipedia, it's not funding that's driving people away, it's the Stack-Overflow-like situation where certain editors are extremely quick to delete content and resist the submission of new content.

Maybe people have moved on to wikia (now called fandom) where you can focus on a specific series or topic. The number of users seem to heavily favor fandom too.

And it's a big loss to the Internet, because unlike Wikipedia, there's AFAIK no easy way to download all the content despite most of it being under the same license, and because unlike Wikipedia, site functionality is significantly impaired unless you enable their obnoxious Javascript.

Is it possible that this effect is due to a lot of "low-hanging fruit" articles being essentially complete? Back in '07 there were a lot more empty pages to fill on topics of broad interest.

Maybe I should listen instead of problem solving, but....

Maybe they could alternate their fundraising banners with "contribute to an article" campaigns?

Have you ever looked at funding statistics?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

I can't quite follow your point. Yes, donations continue to grow. Are you trying to rebut him?

This thread (or rather, this whole topic) is more about funding/business model than anything else, yet gp points to the slight decline in the number of active editors that is quite easily explained by other factors (see other replies) as evidence that Wikipedia is “not doing that well” (cerntainly not financially, so in what way exactly and how is that relevant?). Now that’s something hard to follow.

The thread is about whether a for-profit service for Wikipedia is a good idea. The healthy finances show this is completely unnecessary for keeping the lights on, while the "slight" decline in editors (a huge drop relative to where it should be with continued exponential growth) shows that the health of the community is much more concerning. That suggests that the decision should be informed much more by its impact of community healthy than its impact on finances. The more Wikipedia becomes an organization monetizing the work of volunteers, with that money spent on cancerous overhead while the contributor tools languish for decades without meaningful improvement, the fewer people will want to volunteer.

This is being discussed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_... New Developments

I am pretty sure that they would welcome comments from Hacker News users on that page.

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