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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 Wikip

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…

boublepop 5y ago
> 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.
- arsome 5y ago
  This is still being run by the non-profit, so I suspect that these can go into ongoing Wikimedia operating costs. They're incredibly efficient for the scale they operate at and I'd say this might improve things even further. The less reliance on giant donation banners, the better.
  - jon-wood 5y ago
    Wikipedia doesn’t rely on giant donation banners - the Wikipedia foundation had $180M dollars available at the end of 2020, and an annual hosting cost of $2M/year. The vast majority of there expenses are $54M/year of salaries, which I doubt are focused on Wikipedia itself. If you want a charitable cause to donate to find one that needs the money.
    - bawolff 5y ago
      Ah yes, all those servers can just putter off by themselves without any attention at all. 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.
      - fragmede 5y ago
        Psh, how hard could it be. They only do 21 billion page views a month; 39 million edits, register 264k new users, and have a data change of 23 GiB. Free account at Wix.com ought to do it for hosting costs. 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?
    - ryan_lane 5y ago
      If you're going to assert that the expenses aren't focused on Wikimedia's services, you should have proof that backs that up. The foundation is quite transparent about their operations, and as a former employee, I can attest that what they provide publicly matches my experience internally. 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.
- nickvincent 5y ago
  IMO, the best mental model is that this gives a more formal way for Google or Apple to donate to Wikipedia. Wikipedia's mission of free knowledge is unchanged, but hopefully tech companies can provide financial support in a structured, reliable fashion. Ideally, it's even positive sum (i.e. the Wikipedia-dependent services can perform better, so that the efforts of Wikipedia volunteers impact more people).
- testudovictoria 5y ago
  > I don’t see anything about anyone paying the content creators. 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. [0]: https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/pricing/ https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/pricing/
dehrmann 5y ago
It depends if they run this break-even to support bulk APIs and improved workflows or to profit on the content. This content was donated to Wikimedia with the intent of being reused. This isn't AWS and Elasticsearch (though I also argue that you shouldn't open source something you don't want people using); Wikimedia is a middleman, not the author.
- __blockcipher__ 5y ago
  > This isn't AWS and Elasticsearch 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.
xxpor 5y ago
Ever since the very beginning of wikipedia they've been insistent that the only licenses that count as "open"/"free" are ones that allow commercial use. There's a ton of CC NC content out there that would have been great on Wikipedia, but hasn't been able to be used. It's essentially an MIT/BSD vs GPL debate but for text and media. 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.
- jackdaniel 5y ago
  > It's essentially an MIT/BSD vs GPL debate but for text and media. It is not. CC NC prohibits commercial use while GPL allows it.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    And on top of that, much of the ideaological backing of NC being bad comes from FSF calling it not free.
  - xxpor 5y ago
    the analogy doesn't work perfectly since there's hardly any open source media (whatever that means) but it's similar in terms of vitality

boublepop 5y ago

> 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.

arsome 5y ago
This is still being run by the non-profit, so I suspect that these can go into ongoing Wikimedia operating costs. They're incredibly efficient for the scale they operate at and I'd say this might improve things even further. The less reliance on giant donation banners, the better.
- jon-wood 5y ago
  Wikipedia doesn’t rely on giant donation banners - the Wikipedia foundation had $180M dollars available at the end of 2020, and an annual hosting cost of $2M/year. The vast majority of there expenses are $54M/year of salaries, which I doubt are focused on Wikipedia itself. If you want a charitable cause to donate to find one that needs the money.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    Ah yes, all those servers can just putter off by themselves without any attention at all. 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.
    - fragmede 5y ago
      Psh, how hard could it be. They only do 21 billion page views a month; 39 million edits, register 264k new users, and have a data change of 23 GiB. Free account at Wix.com ought to do it for hosting costs. 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?
  - ryan_lane 5y ago
    If you're going to assert that the expenses aren't focused on Wikimedia's services, you should have proof that backs that up. The foundation is quite transparent about their operations, and as a former employee, I can attest that what they provide publicly matches my experience internally. 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.
nickvincent 5y ago
IMO, the best mental model is that this gives a more formal way for Google or Apple to donate to Wikipedia. Wikipedia's mission of free knowledge is unchanged, but hopefully tech companies can provide financial support in a structured, reliable fashion. Ideally, it's even positive sum (i.e. the Wikipedia-dependent services can perform better, so that the efforts of Wikipedia volunteers impact more people).
testudovictoria 5y ago
> I don’t see anything about anyone paying the content creators. 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. [0]: https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/pricing/ https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/pricing/

dehrmann 5y ago

It depends if they run this break-even to support bulk APIs and improved workflows or to profit on the content. This content was donated to Wikimedia with the intent of being reused. This isn't AWS and Elasticsearch (though I also argue that you shouldn't open source something you don't want people using); Wikimedia is a middleman, not the author.

__blockcipher__ 5y ago
> This isn't AWS and Elasticsearch 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.

xxpor 5y ago

Ever since the very beginning of wikipedia they've been insistent that the only licenses that count as "open"/"free" are ones that allow commercial use. There's a ton of CC NC content out there that would have been great on Wikipedia, but hasn't been able to be used. It's essentially an MIT/BSD vs GPL debate but for text and media. 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.

jackdaniel 5y ago
> It's essentially an MIT/BSD vs GPL debate but for text and media. It is not. CC NC prohibits commercial use while GPL allows it.
- bawolff 5y ago
  And on top of that, much of the ideaological backing of NC being bad comes from FSF calling it not free.
- xxpor 5y ago
  the analogy doesn't work perfectly since there's hardly any open source media (whatever that means) but it's similar in terms of vitality