Does Amazon Owe Wikipedia For Taking Advantage of The Free Labor of Their Volunteers? (slate.com) 176
Slate's Rachel Withers argues that "tech companies that profit from Wikipedia's extensive database owe Wikimedia a much greater debt." Amazon's Alexa, for example, uses Wikipedia "without credit, contribution, or compensation." The Google Assistant also sources Wikipedia, but they credit the encyclopedia -- and other sites -- when it uses it as a resource. From the report: Amazon recently donated $1 million to the Wikimedia Endowment, a fund that keeps Wikipedia running, as "part of Amazon's and CEO Jeff Bezos' growing work in philanthropy," according to CNET. It's being framed as a "gift," one that -- as Amazon puts it -- recognizes their shared vision to "make it easier to share knowledge globally." Obviously, and as alluded to by CNET, $1 million is hardly a magnanimous donation from Amazon and Bezos, the former a trillion-dollar company and the latter a man with a net worth of more than $160 billion. But it's not just the fact that this donation is, in the scheme of things, paltry. It's that this "endowment" is dwarfed by what Amazon and its ilk get out of Wikipedia -- figuratively and literally. Wikipedia provides the intelligence behind many of Alexa's most useful skills, its answers to everything from "What is Wikipedia?" to "What is Slate?" (meta).
Amazon's know-it-all Alexa is renowned for its ability to answer questions, but Amazon didn't compile all that data itself; according to the Amazon developer forum, "Alexa gets her information from a variety of trusted sources such as IMDb, Accuweather, Yelp, Answers.com, Wikipedia and many others." Nor did it pay those who did: While Amazon customers pay at least $39.99 for an Echo device (and the pleasure of asking Alexa questions), Alexa freely pulls this information from the internet, leeching off the hard work performed by Wikipedia's devoted volunteers (and unlike high school students, it doesn't even bother to change a few words around). It's hardly noble for Amazon to support Wikipedia, considering how much Alexa uses its services, nor is it particularly selfless to fund the encyclopedia when it relies upon its peer-reviewed accuracy; ultimately, helping Wikipedia helps Amazon, too. [...] We all benefit from Wikipedia, but arguably no one more than the smart speakers, for which the internet's encyclopedia is a valuable and value-adding resource. It's frankly a little exploitative how little they give back. Withers goes on to note that Wikipedia seeks donations from its users -- it's a non-profit that runs entirely on donations from the general public. While one can argue that "Amazon is only packing up information that we ourselves leech for free all the time, [...] Alexa is also diverting people away from visitng Wikipedia pages, where they might noticed a little request for a donation, or from realizing they are using Wikipedia's resources at all," Withers writes.
A report from TechCrunch earlier this year pointed out that Amazon is the only one of the big tech players not found on Wikimedia's 2017-2018 corporate donor list -- one that includes Apple, Google, and even Amazon's Seattle-based sibling Microsoft, all of which matched employee donations to the tune of $50,000.
Amazon's know-it-all Alexa is renowned for its ability to answer questions, but Amazon didn't compile all that data itself; according to the Amazon developer forum, "Alexa gets her information from a variety of trusted sources such as IMDb, Accuweather, Yelp, Answers.com, Wikipedia and many others." Nor did it pay those who did: While Amazon customers pay at least $39.99 for an Echo device (and the pleasure of asking Alexa questions), Alexa freely pulls this information from the internet, leeching off the hard work performed by Wikipedia's devoted volunteers (and unlike high school students, it doesn't even bother to change a few words around). It's hardly noble for Amazon to support Wikipedia, considering how much Alexa uses its services, nor is it particularly selfless to fund the encyclopedia when it relies upon its peer-reviewed accuracy; ultimately, helping Wikipedia helps Amazon, too. [...] We all benefit from Wikipedia, but arguably no one more than the smart speakers, for which the internet's encyclopedia is a valuable and value-adding resource. It's frankly a little exploitative how little they give back. Withers goes on to note that Wikipedia seeks donations from its users -- it's a non-profit that runs entirely on donations from the general public. While one can argue that "Amazon is only packing up information that we ourselves leech for free all the time, [...] Alexa is also diverting people away from visitng Wikipedia pages, where they might noticed a little request for a donation, or from realizing they are using Wikipedia's resources at all," Withers writes.
A report from TechCrunch earlier this year pointed out that Amazon is the only one of the big tech players not found on Wikimedia's 2017-2018 corporate donor list -- one that includes Apple, Google, and even Amazon's Seattle-based sibling Microsoft, all of which matched employee donations to the tune of $50,000.
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If you voluntarily give something away for free, you have no right to complain if people use it and don't pay you.
Yes. Same as GPL license (Score:2)
Sure no problem. Just change the liscene terms of Wikipedia to no commercial use unless .... then choose something viral like you open source Alexa or the AI using it. Or payment. I'd be opposed to a profit model for Wikipedia but a support model would be reasonable.
GNU GPL is essentiall that. if you use it you open source it. BSD is if you use it you cite it.
Re:Yes. Same as GPL license (Score:5, Informative)
Sure no problem. Just change the liscene terms of Wikipedia to no commercial use unless ....
They can not retroactively change the license. I contributed many articles and edits to Wikipedia, and I absolutely would NOT agree to "no commercial use". I contributed so that anyone can use it for any purpose, and Wikipedia has no right to change that just because they feel greedy.
Easy fix for that too (Score:2)
just fork it. THen close down the original. The fork gets the new license. Since the original was licesnsed for any purpose, it can be forked since that's a purpose.
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A code of conduct is not a licence.
They cannot change their licence without approval from all contributors.
We went through this discussion during the GPL2 to GPL3 conversions.
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We already talked about this with the Linux Kernel Code of Conduct change.
Except that a key element in the Linux Kernel discussion was that the licence was the very thing preventing people from withdrawing their contributions.
Similarly Wikipedia contributions are inherently copyright to the contributor, who licences their work under GFDL and CC-BY SA.
No, Wikipedia can not change those licences. They can choose to cease sharing that content, but they can't legally just stick their own shiny new licence on it.
Just because you don't like it does not mean you have any control or rights over your past contributions.
Except.. yes, yes he does. He retains copyright and all the commercial an
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You spelled "negativity" wrong...
Re: No (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly what I thought. I know she probably isn't nerdly or old enough to read Slashdot, but:
Rachel, that attitude is scummy as fuck. The word "volunteer" means a person who freely and willingly gives their time. They don't want compensation, they are doing it out of the goodness of their heart, that's the whole fucking point. Saying "Amazon Owes Wikipedia Big-Time" is no different than saying "Wikipedia Owes Volunteers Big-Time". If you only do things for pay, then don't volunteer to do things, you entitled little millennial shit.
By the way, how much are you compensating all of the open source developers for being on the internet or using smartphones and mobile devices for commercial purposes? Don't you owe them "big time" too?
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Except the volunteers contributing content to Wikipedia have their work reverted by "an editor." I tried contributing valuable information, backed by sources including other Wikipedia articles, only to have my IP address blocked and the contribution removed and replaced by the previous incomplete and non-standard presentation. I was undertaking a data analysis project at the time which led me to supplement the existing article content as well as restructure it to facilitate web scraping. Wikipedia is nothin
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I've never had sourced quality content reverted without recourse. There is only your assertion that the content was valuable. If it was repeatedly reverted, and if it was sourced and relevant, then there is recourse where you can force a community vote on the dispute. If your IP was banned, then it was for violation of a Wikipedia rule. Sounds like you got into a reversion war with someone.
I am relatively happy with Wikipedia's model. It's not perfect, but it's good and it's effective enough to have la
Re: No (Score:5, Interesting)
There is truth in that but I think you don't hear much about special interest groups on wikipedia because they won. I followed the Philip Cross case ( https://wikipedia.fivefilters.... [fivefilters.org] ). The people who challenged Cross got exactly the treatment you're dealing out and it was very hard to prevail. The professionalization of Wikipedia always carries a danger. The complex rules allow people with clout to drown out those without. Not in principle, but in practice. People who want to want to take on subjects where big interests are involved quickly find out that it's very hard, especially when the big interests also manage to get their narrative into the reputable sources. And those who disagree, well, they're not reputable.
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There is truth in that but I think you don't hear much about special interest groups on wikipedia because they won. I followed the Philip Cross case ( https://wikipedia.fivefilters.... [fivefilters.org] ). The people who challenged Cross got exactly the treatment you're dealing out and it was very hard to prevail. The professionalization of Wikipedia always carries a danger. The complex rules allow people with clout to drown out those without. Not in principle, but in practice. People who want to want to take on subjects where big interests are involved quickly find out that it's very hard, especially when the big interests also manage to get their narrative into the reputable sources. And those who disagree, well, they're not reputable.
Reading the link you provided (as I've honestly never heard of this case), it seems to me like Philip Cross is a proficient editor accused of being a one man conspiracy by advocates of fringe view proponents. Googling the articles of those who claim to have been wronged is quite enlightening. It puts the finger on an interesting problem . How do you settle the debate when some people weigh facts from a very different view? To take an unrelated example: What if I held the view that Robin Hood was not as the
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I was thinking how to reply to this but it easily becomes very long. But maybe I can summarize it with a simple rule don't escalate the effort to push out the wrong ideas and don't raise the bar to only keep the best ideas:
Different groups have different ideas of common sense. Sometimes these differences are a matter of taste. Sometimes they are better founded. In hard science they can be pretty well founded. In journalism there are some rules to give some foundation to this common sense. In Wikipedia as we
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I just don't see what you are seeing. Philip Cross does a huge amont of work, and you can nitpick, but the examples against him aren't really convincing to me. The people against him doesn't seem to have a claim to fame by opposing the Iraq war, nor would I describe such a view as "fringe" so I don't see that connection. What I see is people expressing anti-Semitic views and supporting Assad and I consider such views "fringe".There certainly is a lot of propaganda in western media, but I don't believe that
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I think my point would be that what you consider fringe should not be fought by any other means than debate on content.
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You are wrong, careful sourced contributions ARE reverted, as AC stated:
I was undertaking a data analysis project at the time which led me to supplement the existing article content as well as restructure it to facilitate web scraping.
Sounds a lot like my contributions - made while I was actively working on the topic, in my field of expertise - and flow edits, carefully made to put the article in line with Wikipedia's own flow model.
AC writes clearly and lucidly. What would you have AC do, spend an hour or two coming up with examples and quotes from long-buried Wikipedia discussion pages?
As I recall there are automatic revert 'bots as well as human editors.
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If he wants to elicit credibility, then I would have him give the page. No hours of examples required. Then it's trivial to see the edits he did and the discussions on why they were reverted.
Did your own experience include getting IP banned? I suspect your behaviour didn't descend into the equivalent of Wikipedia civil disobedience.
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You are wrong, careful sourced contributions ARE reverted, as AC stated:
Then offer some evidence. Don't be part of the current culture that just expects the world to believe something because it came out of your pie hole. Seriously, I know very little about this, and I'd like to know more, but just batting yes / no back and forth wastes bits.
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pie hole
Yum, pie!
You deride the "current culture that just expects the world to believe something"
and yet believe without evidence that Wikipedia editing is a Virtuous System.
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and yet believe without evidence that Wikipedia editing is a Virtuous System.
I don't believe either way. I *suspect* Wikipedia is mostly factual with some bias and has blatantly incorrect information in a smaller number of cases. I'm not even crying about it either, because I'm able to see the world as neither black or white. I guess I'm just special.
If you make a claim, it's up to you to back it it. It's not up to the rest of us to disprove it. For example, I could claim your spouse is a whore. You'd probably laugh at me unless I provided some evidence of it. You probably wouldn't
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False comparison. He knows his wife very well. You don't know Wikipedia or the people behind it at all.
My god you are trying hard.
I tell you that Apple Computer employees are secretly being drugged by the cafeteria food to make them more "compliant" with company policy. By all accounts you ought to be running to the local police and reporting this. Of course you don't, because I'm just some random guy with a story about Apple.
A little Occam's Razor goes a long way here. What's more likely... Wikipedia is run by a secret cabal of editors that distort facts. Or you tried to make an edit to an article and had i
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Other Wikipedia articles are not on Wiki's list of "reliable sources [wikipedia.org]." To use them you have to do stuff like click through to their sources, verify those sources support the tex ton Wikipedia, and then cite them. You don't actually ever cite the wikipedia article itself.
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I suffered the same reverting of excellent and sourced facts (and professional writing.) Early days I was able to contribute occasional information in my field of expertise, but as time went on, _occasional_ careful contributions were treated dismissively.
Gradually only those with reputations in the fiefdom of Wikipedia were welcomed to contribute (bored homebounds) while careful contributions by unknowns (people with actual lives) were thoughtlessly reverted.
I assume many valuable contributions were b
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Of course not... (Score:1)
That's literally the whole point of Wikipedia, to distribute knowledge for free, is it not?
Gift Economies (Score:2)
In a market economy sense of Wikipedia being owed compensation for services rendered - absolutely not. You're right about that.
However, in a gift economy sense of maintaining a balanced flow of wealth - absolutely. Those who accept your gifts but never give gifts to you, gradually stop receiving gifts. (That was essentially what motivated the GPL3 - too many high-profile for-profit freeloaders building resentment in the community caused enough upset that some of the GPL2 community decided to further rest
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Alexa grants people access to shared knowlege. That knowledge was shared by people.
So really Alexa is merely granting people access to their own knowledge.
Unless you can demonstrate that users of Alexa and contributors to Wikipedia are very separate communities, people are granting gifts to themselves.
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Lets run the numbers, shall we?
This page looks a little outdated, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] but claims only 130,675 editors have contributed in the last 30 days, and only ~48,000 editors have made 600 total contributions. With about 3,500 editors make >100 contributions per month.
Meanwhile, around 50 million Alexa devices have been sold.
Unless the participation rates have increased dramatically, or all 48,000 major contributors purchased an average of 1000 Alexa devices each, it's very unlikely
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Unless you precede the first instance of "people" with "some" and the second with "those exact same" then the conclusion doesn't follow. Statistically it's very unlikely to be the case.
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Alexa, a web browser. The some/many ratio is consistent whichever tool people use to access the information.
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If I'm reading an article about (to choose a topic totally at random) aspie fucktards who don't understand logic, and I happen to be the one who wrote it, then in that case I'm sharing information with myself.
The other 6,999,999,999 people aren't.
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You are a member of a community. You access a resource created by that community. You benefit from the community's contribution. The community just shared knowledge with itself.
Aspie fucktard logic still beats your idiocy.
No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Donating to Wikipedia is fine, but at the end of the day their a charity making a public resource. Are we running out of things to criticize Amazon for now that they've been shamed into paying living wages?
Re:No. (Score:5, Funny)
Are we running out of things to criticize Amazon for now that they've been shamed into paying living wages?
Well, if we want to close the loop, we could criticize them for contributing to wage inflation.
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Also we're blaming them for
"Alexa gets her information from a variety of trusted sources such as IMDb, Accuweather, Yelp, Answers.com, Wikipedia and many others." Nor did it pay those who did:
Amazon owns imdb !
Re:No. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License that Wikipedia uses they are legally obliged to give attribution. So it appears that they are at the very least in breech of that licence, leaving aside any moral arguments about contributing to a resource that is absolutely vital to the performance of their highly profitable product.
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Is that a good reason to muzzle them?
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What makes Alexa so special here? Should Dell and every other OEM also pay Wikipedia money because I can use their computers to visit Wikipedia? And what about phone manufacturers? I guess they should pony up too.
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You're so right! Well-paid workers is a terrible thing, something we must avoid at all costs. I mean, just think of it - teachers earning enough money to rent a small apartment WITHOUT ROOMMATES - oh the outrage, the OUTRAGE! This, my friends, is why unions are bad.
DOWN WITH UNIONS!!!1!! Down with wages! Hard working people deserve less! I've got mine, so screw you Jack!
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Thank you, Dr Pedant, for those original and enlightening thoughts.
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No! (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't that one of the points of the internet... to share knowledge?
--
I can't accept this! - Monica Swinton, A.I.
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Isn't that called a job?
Wouldn't that defeat the entire concept behind wikipedia?
No (Score:5, Insightful)
No one owes Wikipedia anything for using it.
Wikipedia makes itself available as a free service. If it wants to GET PAID for its use, it needs to update its TOS appropriately, and start charging as it sees fit.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
So....credit the source.
That is a well-established practice, even when dealing with freely-available information.
Amazon owes that to Wikipedia, socially if not legally.
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More specifically, most tech corporations look at wikiepedia and think, how can I steal it and force government to make all citizens pay to access it, and make those payments compulsory and tied to capital assets, also if children fail to pay they must donate organs to cover expenses.
Face it most corporations only donate for the PR=B$ and would rather steal want they are donating too, plus of course all the other money that was donated by others. The only thing ringing in their heads is, infinite greed, i
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You are technically right, but the problem isn't the documentation. Morally speaking, Amazon's use of scraping other sites for free implies they see nothing wrong with doing so. Unfortunately, this is not what they actually believe, since they believe it is wrong to scrape their own site. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20160903083414/pricezombie.com/announcement
Having a TOS with onerous conditions doesn't make those conditions moral. It only most of the time makes them legal.
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Just write a bot that never reads the TOS and doesn't agree to comply with it.
Instead it can use a defined protocol to request responses from a server, and the server can choose whether to provide those responses. Maybe something like HTTP, that seems quite good at this sort of thing.
Re:No (Score:5, Funny)
No one owes Wikipedia anything for using it.
In what fucked up society did you grow up that you don't owe the courtesy of indicating who you quote?
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No one owes Wikipedia anything for using it.
In what fucked up society did you grow up that you don't owe the courtesy of indicating who you quote?
© 2018 angel'o'sphere. All rights reserved.
Hosting (Score:5, Interesting)
How about Amazon just save the donation, and instead host all of wiki (media, commons, and others) all free of charge on AWS. This cost Amazon less, and greatly reduces cost for the foundation.. win-win. Though, personally, I'd argue the site should be mirrored at least across the three largest cloud providers to keep it up at all times.
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No, this is a bad idea - it would give Amazon far too much leverage. It's best for Wikipedia to remain as independent as possible.
Re:Hosting (Score:5, Interesting)
Hosting and the technical operation is such a SMALL percentage of the Wikimedia foundation's $76 Million in annual operating expenses [wikimedia.org]: it's kind of ridiculous.
They would still complain that Amazon's contribution is paltry.
Consider this though: The people contributing FREE LABOR to build the encyclopedia are not getting paid by the foundation, BUT the foundation has many hired staff and buildings.... so the donations are going to pay people, But the people who develop the software and write the articles on the encyclopedia are largely unpaid volunteers ---- Meanwhile the WM foundation spends more than $6 million on administrative employees, close to a $1 million each on a bunch of different categories like "branding and brand identity, community health, etc"
In short.... they seem like a sprawling non-profit that has a disproportionately large and disproportionately expensive operation leeching off the public good done by unpaid volunteers to provide personal salaries for an entity that serves itself and uses donations to grow itself and pay administrative overheads to people that own itself, whereas an organization of 10% of its size would be more than adequate to support the technical infrastructure and systems that the unpaid volunteers doing 99% of the real work require for all languages of the global free encyclopedia to exist.
Re:Hosting (Score:5, Insightful)
In short.... they seem like a sprawling non-profit that has a disproportionately large and disproportionately expensive operation leeching off the public good done by unpaid volunteers to provide personal salaries for an entity that serves itself and uses donations to grow itself and pay administrative overheads to people that own itself, whereas an organization of 10% of its size would be more than adequate to support the technical infrastructure and systems that the unpaid volunteers doing 99% of the real work require for all languages of the global free encyclopedia to exist.
I have noticed that an awful lot of people underestimate the complexity of large operations especially when the end goal seems simple. Running something with the size and reach of wikipedia is not simple.
You probably think "it's just a website" and you could host it. You couldn't.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wik... [wikimedia.org]
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I vaguely remember around 10ish(?) years ago seeing Wikipedia having a donation thing across the top. There was something saying they didn't need money to have the site up, that they had enough to keep it up for a long long time. I can't remember what they said it was for, but it specifically stated it had nothing to do with keeping the site active online.
Now it feels like anytime they have the donation up, the wording is basically: "If you don't donate, Wikipedia might die forever. If everyone just gave
the non-trivial cost of straddling economic realms (Score:3)
Yours is the kind of narrow argument that makes me groan inside.
Given the enormous asset base (5.7 million articles in English alone, plus all of the discussion and history behind that process), and the public visibility and reach, it's pretty easy to slap a valuation on Wikipedia well north of $5B, were it commercialized in any way similar to its closest comparables.
When you're playing on such a big stage, even if you aren't commercialized to the full potential of your underlying asset, you are actually on
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s/but don't own me a freaking dime/but you don't owe me a freaking dime/
I've witnessed this failure mode many times, in myself and others. It takes roughly 95% of your brain to suppress the f-word.
Meanwhile, the other 5% of my brain was preparing to engage the cherished screed-culmination "submit" button.
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You: "They took it in accordance with the terms you offered."
The article: "Amazon's Alexa, for example, uses Wikipedia 'without credit, contribution, or compensation.'"
Wiki's licensing terms: "Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License"
"Credit", in other words, is a requirement of the "attribution" clause. So maybe rethink your stance?
Commercial use is allowed (Score:5, Insightful)
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All that's correct. OTOH, that license doesn't cover continuing access to Wikimedia's servers and network. I'd think it'd only make good business sense, if Wikipedia's such a valuable source of information for Amazon, for Amazon to have a contract in place insuring continued server and network capacity for Wikimedia to provide for Amazon's needs and for continued editor/moderator support. The ongoing cost for Amazon would probably be negligible, the direct benefits should be obvious and the benefits in term
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If they ever get to a point where they need money to keep the lights on, I'm sure Amazon will chip in.
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Who needs network capacity when you can literally just dump all of wikipedia into your own (AWS) databases all at once for faster access? https://dumps.wikimedia.org/ [wikimedia.org]
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Legally you are correct but ethically is another matter. Alexa is almost certainly costing the project money to serve content up.
Re: Commercial use is allowed (Score:1)
Did you actually give them a dollar, though?
Any Contract? No...? Then, No. Slow News Day? (Score:4, Insightful)
This question makes no sense. Why would someone owe for free things, which there is no contract/terms-of-service/financial agreement?
Today must be a slow news day....
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While the summary comes off as a clumsy hitjob and I somewhat resent siding with it, there is more to the concept of "owing" than what is laid out in legal contracts. Just because the state won't enforce the repayment of a debt doesn't mean the debt doesn't exist.
Once you've turned eighteen you don't legally owe your parents anything, but you owe them a lot personally if they've given you a good home, and you would be quite a crummy person if you didn't pay it back by taking care of them if they become dec
Re:Any Contract? No...? Then, No. Slow News Day? (Score:4, Interesting)
A million here and a million there by companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc... as well as governments and such is very generous. I'm quite sure Amazon would also be very happy to contribute hosting, bandwidth, counter-DDoS, etc...
A major part of running a non-profit is long term ambitions. In other words, it's in the interest of the organization and the world as a whole to continuously improve wikipedia over the next 100+ years. As such, if each year Amazon and others contribute to them allowing their reserves to grow at a rate faster than inflation, then Wiki over time could be entirely self-sufficient to the point that they offer scholarships and more.
People are missing that you don't want to get a $50 million payment today if you can instead get $500 million over the next 100 years from Amazon or whoever beats them out. Also, graciously accepting the handout and spending some time publicizing how grateful you are for it would attract other businesses who would like to be seen as positive contributors to the organization.
Wikipedia is not a business, it's an organization. So long as this is true, it should operate as one.
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This question makes no sense. Why would someone owe for free things, which there is no contract/terms-of-service/financial agreement?
Different life philosophies. Some people seem to more or less believe in moral karma, no matter how much you say it's free with no strings attached they feel an obligation to reciprocate and if they can't pay it back, they should pay it forward [wikipedia.org]. These people are often those who refuse charity, because to them it's a debt no matter what. On the other extreme of the scale you have people who aren't even grateful, it's more like disdain "If these fools are giving it away I'm grabbing all I can" and you find so
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I like your explanation, and hypothetical examples. Thank you for spending the time to explain these viewpoints as you did.
It seems to me like the critical portion of this question is the definition of the word "owe." I tend to take the viewpoint of the third group when it comes to the word "owe." I don't believe it's possible to "owe" someone something without some kind of agreement. I pay for my employees to provide "free" WordPress support [meetup.com], since my company makes a decent chunk of our income on the "free
No, but . . . (Score:2)
I don't care one bit for this development, but I don't think that top-down solutions, whether technical, monetary, or bureacratic, could be su
If they do, then Google does in spades (Score:2)
Google just about anything and the first result and the sidebar will have links to Wikipedia.
It's right in TFS (Score:4, Interesting)
Amazon's Alexa, for example, uses Wikipedia "without credit, contribution, or compensation."
Amazon recently donated $1 million to the Wikimedia Endowment, a fund that keeps Wikipedia running
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The "without credit" might be wrong, but if volunteers* are paid voluntarily for a job well done, it is a bit daft to complain about it.
* There probably are a lot more volunteers outside the wikimedia foundation who contributed. I think no penny goes to them. Not that they expected to.
It's free already (Score:2)
Just Imagine... (Score:5, Insightful)
Here we go ... (Score:3)
That's not how licences work. If you want more restrictions, or a non-profit clause, then use the correct licence to begin with.
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Todays thread about something that has been released under a CC licence, free for anyone to use or modify provided the attribute the source ... and then wanting to add EXTRA conditions after the fact...
If the summary is accurate (I know, I know), that emphasized bit is what Amazon isn't doing. Requiring monetary payment would be adding extra conditions, but requiring attribution is part of the license.
No good deed goes unpunished (Score:2)
This type of article is the type of lazy journalism that I hate. They gave one million dollars, that's a real sum for Wikipedia. It's a generous donation when none was needed. Normally no journalist would ever think to write 'does amazon owe money to wikimedia'. Yet, now it has reached the news that Amazon gave a million, they get pointed to the subject and start berating Amazon for it somehow not being to their standards (which it will never be, if it's too much they'll find something else wrong with it -
You could ask Wikipedia the same thing (Score:2)
The volunteers agreed to provide that service without compensation.
Wikipedia agreed to provide its service without compensation. If it now wants to switch to a pay model (and that's what this is - wanting to be paid for the service it's providing), it's free to do so (provided it can figure out a way to placate the volunteers who gave freely of their time and labor to make Wikipedia possible
Death of Wikipedia (Score:2)
Owe... whom? (Score:2)
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Search Engine (Score:3)
Alexa is a search engine. Just like Google.
Should Google pay Wikipedia for reading results?
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Ehhh? (Score:2)
Amazon "Cool beans thanks"
Wikipedia "WTF AMAZON?!! WHY HAVEN'T YOU GIVEN US MONEY (billions)??!!"
Amazon "lol, typical"
No (Score:2)
No.
Thanks for asking though ...
Sheesh, I hate Indian givers. "We're so great; we're making information freely available to the world! Oh, but not to you, big meany who makes more money than I do."
More Socialist-think? (Score:2)
Wikipedia is, indeed, a handy resource. But it's also one that sometimes seems like it wants to have things both ways; free for everyone's unlimited use AND a service that's owed some kind of regular donation if you utilize it.
Considering the content (which is the only reason the site has ANY value) is contributed by users volunteering to write it? I don't think they have much of a leg to stand on if they're upset Amazon uses it without compensating them.
In fact, the decision made to make Wikipedia a free t
Yes and no (Score:2)
Morally? Yes. They should. It'd be a real nice thing to do. But... even then, the REASON I put stuff up on wikipedia is so that EVERYONE can go use it. If Amazon is using it... that still counts. This is one of it's intended use-cases.
Legally? No, I don't think so.
does wikipedia? (Score:1)
This is what "freely available" means (Score:2)
When we release something to the community, for free, that includes commercial use. If we don't want it to, there are licenses that can make it free for personal use, but not for commercial.
The Wikimedia Foundation made a decision to make their content free for everybody, and to not restrict the usage. Same as GNU, Linux and others. Even if you are making money. Even if we don't like what you do with it. We give it away because that's what we decided to do. And nothing is owed.
It doesn't mean compa
OK, let me get this straight... (Score:2)
Yeah, didn't think so.