Good.
So much of the recent progress in natural language understanding in commercial products like Siri and Alexa is due to the richness and structure in Wikipedia and wiki data. Big tech should be paying for this stuff…
So much of the recent progress in natural language understanding in commercial products like Siri and Alexa is due to the richness and structure in Wikipedia and wiki data. Big tech should be paying for this stuff…
I don’t see anything about anyone paying the content creators. What fairness is it to har one platform currently freeloading of of the work that another platform is freeloading of its users (while begging them for donations mind you) suddenly have to pay the first freeloading platform?
I can’t speak for others naturally, but every vontribution I have made to Wikipedia has been made on the basis of contributing you our common knowledge base, not to try to provide a free service for a profit driven corporation.
If you want a charitable cause to donate to find one that needs the money.
For a site called hacker news, its a wonder that people think system admins are a superfluous job, totally unnessary at scale*
* and yes im aware that wmf employees a lot of people, most aren't sysadmins, and some are more critical than others. I just think its rediculous people think that servers just run themselves and hosting is the only core cost.
jk, it's fascinating how critical people get with how other people spend their money when asking for donations. When was the last time HN took a close look at how Johnathan Ives spends his proceeds?
You could complain about how they're using some of that money to support the projects (the community teams historically have produced relatively little of value), but it's expensive to pay for a highly experienced engineering department, legal department, etc. For a site with the level of reach they have, they do a very good job of doing it with a relatively low cost.
The knowledge contributed to Wikimedia is understood to be public knowledge. Any contributions are considered voluntary and available to the general public. This includes profit driven corporations who want to create a service wrapper around Wikimedia content or serve the content in a different presentation (licenses withstanding).
> ...not to try to provide a free service for a profit driven corporation.
I personally feel like this is a fair step. Since contributions are made for public consumption, it makes sense that for-profit corporations whose products depend on Wikimedia APIs would pay for access to those APIs. They're not paying for the data; that's free to the public. They're paying ensure their presentation has a guaranteed level of availability and support[0]. The end result is the same: knowledge contributors aren't paid for additions or edits. The context behind the payments are different.
It should have been extremely obvious under this paradigm that content would be reused by commercial entities! As a contributor, I don't have a problem with it. The openness of the wiki has been way way way more valuable to me than anything I've contributed back.
It is not. CC NC prohibits commercial use while GPL allows it.
Is your implication that there is something wrong about AWS running OSI-licensed open source software as a service?
In general your comment doesn't make much sense to me. First of all it assumes a highly biased position in the AWS vs Elasticsearch war, but furthermore it's not even clear that the two situations aren't comparable. In both cases something that was free is having something built on top of it.
BTW the whole idea of Wikimedia Enterprise is providing higher levels of service availability. It's not really about the "content" itself. It's analogous to when you have a user of some service of yours that is flooding the service with requests and causing performance issues. A common pattern is to convert them into a paying customer and give them some guarantees about availability, while using that revenue to make sure there's enough hardware / engineering time to keep things running smoothly.
Finally, the "middleman vs author" distinction you introduce is entirely irrelevant. To use the Elastic example, it doesn't matter who wrote the software, what matters is it was written under a permissive license, and therefore the author of a given code doesn't have any "ownership". Similarly, someone who contributes to Wikipedia doesn't own that content either. In both cases the actor is contributing to the commons and has no expectation to put any restrictions on their contribution.