Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On 11/13/10 3:26 PM, Robert S. Horning wrote: The difference between PediaPress and this other effort is that PediaPress came from the top down with money in hand, and the group I had was mostly grass roots with little money to start with in terms of getting things going. Do you have any evidence that PediaPress offered the Foundation money up front for consideration as a partner? If so, how much money did they give? This is a very serious accusation that requires some evidence in my opinion, especially as it is contradicted by what Erik says. Ryan Kaldari ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On 11/15/2010 12:10 PM, Ryan Kaldari wrote: On 11/13/10 3:26 PM, Robert S. Horning wrote: The difference between PediaPress and this other effort is that PediaPress came from the top down with money in hand, and the group I had was mostly grass roots with little money to start with in terms of getting things going. Do you have any evidence that PediaPress offered the Foundation money up front for consideration as a partner? If so, how much money did they give? This is a very serious accusation that requires some evidence in my opinion, especially as it is contradicted by what Erik says. Ryan Kaldari Let's turn this question around to something more legitimate to ask: how much money or other consideration has the WMF received from this effort? Obviously some developer time went into the PDF maker and some of the things that you see with the button, and that certainly represents some other considerations as well. I am not suggesting that the money went into the pockets of anybody but the WMF general fund that is being used to pay for the servers and the rest of the program and is certainly well accounted for. I haven't looked at the financial disclosure statements recently for the WMF to see if the PediaPress money is broken out from other general donations either. All I'm trying to say here is that once the deal with PediaPress came through, it sort of blew out of the water any other effort to try something different, especially stuff that was being done by a largely adhoc group of Wikimedia volunteers doing stuff out of their own pocket without substantial financial backing. PediaPress obviously was more established and certainly had the finances in place to get something done. That this volunteer effort isn't going any more (mind you, I was not the only person working on it either) should say something at least that it discouraged other efforts to provide printed materials. That is the point I'm trying to make here. I also am not a huge fan of the automated preparing of texts, at least all of the automation that is happening. I think books are a work of art unto themselves and the current content preparation sort of misses something in the process, making the books that are produced somewhat sterile and missing some of the flavor that comes with hand crafting the content. There were certainly some tasks that could be automated, but I think it also goes a bit too far for my taste as well. It gets raw content out there, but the process could be improved and right now that is being blocked because what is being done is good enough for most casual efforts to print books. To take it to the next tier and get a really professionally published book would take much, much more effort and the development of tools that are in my opinion now being blocked because of the presence of PediaPress. This is not to say that the WMF can't look into alternative fund raising options, and it certainly is within the right of the WMF to consider legitimate offers that come along. This offer from PediaPress certainly filled a niche and has proven to be fairly useful to at least a small number of Wikimedia users, and the question that ought to be raised now is if this level of participation and usage of printed materials is sufficient or is there a potential for other options to also be tried to perhaps step it up a notch or two. There is some excellent content on the Wikimedia projects that is often laying around quite hidden and I think printing the content would be a useful thing to spread that knowledge to a wider audience. Unfortunately, stepping the effort up a notch is going to take some significant effort and possibly some financing... something that also could potentially increase liability for the WMF if they were more directly involved too. Increased liability plus being at least for awhile a fiscal sink doesn't sound too appealing to the WMF, and I understand why things are being done the way they are being done right now. Still, I see printed content with inferior quality content compared to what I see on Wikimedia projects selling in much larger volumes in major publishing markets... so why is that gap there? -- Robert Horning Obama Urges Homeowners to Refinance If you owe under $729k you probably qualify for Obama's Refi Program http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL3241/4ce1d698a3ad02ecc71st01vuc ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
I'm sure the amount of money the Foundation receives from its cut of actually published books is negligible - probably a few hundred dollars a year. I'm more interested in your insinuation that PediaPress bought their partnership status. Since you managed to avoid answering either of my questions, I'll assume you have no evidence for these aspersions. Ryan Kaldari On 11/15/10 4:55 PM, Robert S. Horning wrote: On 11/15/2010 12:10 PM, Ryan Kaldari wrote: On 11/13/10 3:26 PM, Robert S. Horning wrote: The difference between PediaPress and this other effort is that PediaPress came from the top down with money in hand, and the group I had was mostly grass roots with little money to start with in terms of getting things going. Do you have any evidence that PediaPress offered the Foundation money up front for consideration as a partner? If so, how much money did they give? This is a very serious accusation that requires some evidence in my opinion, especially as it is contradicted by what Erik says. Ryan Kaldari Let's turn this question around to something more legitimate to ask: how much money or other consideration has the WMF received from this effort? Obviously some developer time went into the PDF maker and some of the things that you see with the button, and that certainly represents some other considerations as well. I am not suggesting that the money went into the pockets of anybody but the WMF general fund that is being used to pay for the servers and the rest of the program and is certainly well accounted for. I haven't looked at the financial disclosure statements recently for the WMF to see if the PediaPress money is broken out from other general donations either. All I'm trying to say here is that once the deal with PediaPress came through, it sort of blew out of the water any other effort to try something different, especially stuff that was being done by a largely adhoc group of Wikimedia volunteers doing stuff out of their own pocket without substantial financial backing. PediaPress obviously was more established and certainly had the finances in place to get something done. That this volunteer effort isn't going any more (mind you, I was not the only person working on it either) should say something at least that it discouraged other efforts to provide printed materials. That is the point I'm trying to make here. I also am not a huge fan of the automated preparing of texts, at least all of the automation that is happening. I think books are a work of art unto themselves and the current content preparation sort of misses something in the process, making the books that are produced somewhat sterile and missing some of the flavor that comes with hand crafting the content. There were certainly some tasks that could be automated, but I think it also goes a bit too far for my taste as well. It gets raw content out there, but the process could be improved and right now that is being blocked because what is being done is good enough for most casual efforts to print books. To take it to the next tier and get a really professionally published book would take much, much more effort and the development of tools that are in my opinion now being blocked because of the presence of PediaPress. This is not to say that the WMF can't look into alternative fund raising options, and it certainly is within the right of the WMF to consider legitimate offers that come along. This offer from PediaPress certainly filled a niche and has proven to be fairly useful to at least a small number of Wikimedia users, and the question that ought to be raised now is if this level of participation and usage of printed materials is sufficient or is there a potential for other options to also be tried to perhaps step it up a notch or two. There is some excellent content on the Wikimedia projects that is often laying around quite hidden and I think printing the content would be a useful thing to spread that knowledge to a wider audience. Unfortunately, stepping the effort up a notch is going to take some significant effort and possibly some financing... something that also could potentially increase liability for the WMF if they were more directly involved too. Increased liability plus being at least for awhile a fiscal sink doesn't sound too appealing to the WMF, and I understand why things are being done the way they are being done right now. Still, I see printed content with inferior quality content compared to what I see on Wikimedia projects selling in much larger volumes in major publishing markets... so why is that gap there? -- Robert Horning Obama Urges Homeowners to Refinance If you owe under $729k you probably qualify for Obama's Refi Program http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL3241/4ce1d698a3ad02ecc71st01vuc
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On 16 November 2010 01:10, Ryan Kaldari rkald...@wikimedia.org wrote: I'm sure the amount of money the Foundation receives from its cut of actually published books is negligible - probably a few hundred dollars a year. I'm more interested in your insinuation that PediaPress bought their partnership status. Since you managed to avoid answering either of my questions, I'll assume you have no evidence for these aspersions. You seem to be making a point of harping on an aspersion that only you can see. It's not clear that doing so adds more light than heat. There is no reason to assume the PediaPress mess is anything more than SNAFU and that everyone at Wikimedia is anything other than as sincere and honest as we know they are. *However*, that is orthogonal to whether a privileged private closed source partnership is an acceptable arrangement to keep around. And the consensus appears to be that this is a question that needs some serious thought. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
2010/11/15 David Gerard dger...@gmail.com: *However*, that is orthogonal to whether a privileged private closed source partnership is an acceptable arrangement to keep around. And the consensus appears to be that this is a question that needs some serious thought. Well, I don't agree with your characterization as a closed source partnership -- it's a partnership that has resulted in development of key open source technologies. If you want to take the PDF generated using the open source toolset based on ReportLab and send it to a printer (or hack it to make it prettier or more suitably formatted), you can do that today. What you're not getting as open source is a LaTeX renderer that generates books using the same typesetting and print tweaks that PediaPress provides. What I do agree requires serious thought is whether we should or shouldn't acquire or develop an open source LaTeX renderer. One argument in favor of doing so is that it will make it easier for other commercial services to do what PediaPress is doing, creating a more competitive marketplace for the provision of actual printed books. To me, this is not the strongest argument -- given the scale of the current print-on-demand operation, we're unlikely to see significant commercial interest unless/until we decide to significantly expand the visibility and scope of the feature. That's not to say it wouldn't be a good thing to have (more quality open source code always is), but I'm skeptical that it would have dramatic impact. There are other arguments for developing such a renderer. For one thing, it will make it much easier for people like Robert to then take the generated LaTeX, manually improve it, and create books with a personal touch that's missing from the PDF pipeline. It would also be useful to many of the open source textbooks projects out there. (BTW, people interested in this space should check out http://www.booki.cc/ , which is a great new open source authoring/print platform.) I'd be curious to hear other arguments in favor of such a development project. An engineer contacted me off-list offering to write a LaTeX renderer plugging into mwlib (the open source parser library). Once we have an initial estimate of cost and complexity, we can make a considered decision whether that's an effort worth supporting. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
If I'm the only person who can see this aspersion, I must be the only person bothering to read Robert's emails: * The problem was that PediaPress offered money, which we didn't. * The difference between PediaPress and this other effort is that PediaPress came from the top down with money in hand... I'm not sure what conclusion you could make from these statements other than that PediaPress bought their partnership. I have no interest in causing extra drama on Foundation-l (god knows it has plenty), but if someone is going to casually imply that the Foundation's favor can be bought and sold (without any evidence to that effect), I don't see why we should just accept that. I agree there are more important points to discuss, so I'm dropping the issue, but I still reserve the right to question any spurious accusations in the future. Ryan Kaldari On 11/15/10 5:30 PM, David Gerard wrote: On 16 November 2010 01:10, Ryan Kaldarirkald...@wikimedia.org wrote: I'm sure the amount of money the Foundation receives from its cut of actually published books is negligible - probably a few hundred dollars a year. I'm more interested in your insinuation that PediaPress bought their partnership status. Since you managed to avoid answering either of my questions, I'll assume you have no evidence for these aspersions. You seem to be making a point of harping on an aspersion that only you can see. It's not clear that doing so adds more light than heat. There is no reason to assume the PediaPress mess is anything more than SNAFU and that everyone at Wikimedia is anything other than as sincere and honest as we know they are. *However*, that is orthogonal to whether a privileged private closed source partnership is an acceptable arrangement to keep around. And the consensus appears to be that this is a question that needs some serious thought. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On 11/15/2010 06:10 PM, Ryan Kaldari wrote: I'm sure the amount of money the Foundation receives from its cut of actually published books is negligible - probably a few hundred dollars a year. I'm more interested in your insinuation that PediaPress bought their partnership status. Since you managed to avoid answering either of my questions, I'll assume you have no evidence for these aspersions. Ryan Kaldari I'm not sure what you are expecting me to say here. I'm not really trying to be evasive, and I'm not sure if PediaPress made a business case to those WMF board members that were involved in the decision as to how much money that the WMF would likely get from the relationship. If money was promised, that was it so far as a promise of potential donation in the future. I would imagine that almost any non-profit organization would do that at some time or another with any potential donor. It seems like you are expecting some major scandal to break out where people are trying to be subversive and evil. The fact is that most of the time we are all merely muddling along doing what we think is the right thing to do given the facts and the information available to us at the time. I understand why the decision was made, but I'm also saying that from my perspective I wasn't too happy about it either for my own reasons. And I was in contact with at least a couple WMF board members at the time independently of Foundation-l. Nothing substantial (obviously, nothing happened), but I did express some concerns and some options. If there is a complaint, it is merely that other options could have been set up for physically printing Wikimedia content at the time, and still can if there are some wishing to make it so. Unfortunately that somebody else doesn't seem to want to happen either and I'm not independently wealthy enough at the moment to be able to do this completely on my own dime either without being a part of a larger group. It takes money to do this, and PediaPress had the money at the time when it mattered. Good for them, I suppose. That is also perhaps why other groups aren't necessarily busting down the door to the WMF to do something similar. It would be a speculative investment that would by definition already have built-in competitors. -- Robert Horning How to Fall Asleep? Cambridge Researchers have developed an all natural sleep aid just for you. http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL3241/4ce20524830e422b88est03vuc ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On 11/15/2010 08:22 PM, Ryan Kaldari wrote: If I'm the only person who can see this aspersion, I must be the only person bothering to read Robert's emails: * The problem was that PediaPress offered money, which we didn't. * The difference between PediaPress and this other effort is that PediaPress came from the top down with money in hand... I'm not sure what conclusion you could make from these statements other than that PediaPress bought their partnership. I have no interest in causing extra drama on Foundation-l (god knows it has plenty), but if someone is going to casually imply that the Foundation's favor can be bought and sold (without any evidence to that effect), I don't see why we should just accept that. I agree there are more important points to discuss, so I'm dropping the issue, but I still reserve the right to question any spurious accusations in the future. Ryan Kaldari One other thing I should point out I was trying to work from within the community, recruiting volunteers and participants doing organizing on Meta and the other sister projects to put things together in terms of getting the book development going. Code in terms of MediaWiki extensions and such might have developed, but very likely almost everything we were going to do would have been working from within community consensus and at best would have been something like a Wikiproject. The WMF board would have been hardly involved unless money started to flow. We were also trying to be extra careful not to get volunteers bent out of shape for not making money when other volunteers perhaps were getting paid for some reason, and the intention was that if profits did come, the WMF would get the bulk if not all of the profits. The purpose wasn't to make a killing but to get the content distrbuted. PediaPress, unlike this effort, came straight to the WMF board with a proposal in hand, even though in the long run they did try to work with the communities too after a fashion. It is mainly a difference of approach rather than something sinister or evil and it reflects mainly a difference in philosophies about how things should be done. Again, I'm not saying that PediaPress is the bad guy here either. If I'm not mistaken, PediaPress had already been printing content from Wikipedia prior to all of this happening anyway, so they also had some experience in the market in terms of knowing what to expect out of the concept and from that also some money already committed to the idea. They also insisted upon keeping the details of the whole thing confidential until after the deal was inked with the WMF board. While there are certainly situations where that is appropriate, it also made making a counter proposal very difficult to make. All of this has been said before and even recently so this shouldn't be anything new to reveal. Do I wish things would have gone perhaps a bit differently? Yes. But the issue is where to go from here and not to undo things that happened in the past. My whole point in bringing this issue up in the first place is to express that there were other roads that the WMF and Wikimedia projects could have gone but didn't, for various reasons, and that perhaps other choices in the future could be selected if we think about it. -- Robert Horning $350,000 Life Insurance Coverage as low as $13.04/month. Free, No Obligation Quotes. http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL3241/4ce20ba2c3ece2c6158st01duc ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
2010/11/15 Robert S. Horning robert_horn...@netzero.net: Do I wish things would have gone perhaps a bit differently? Yes. But the issue is where to go from here and not to undo things that happened in the past. My whole point in bringing this issue up in the first place is to express that there were other roads that the WMF and Wikimedia projects could have gone but didn't, for various reasons, and that perhaps other choices in the future could be selected if we think about it. I still don't really agree with your characterization, but that's OK as you say. I do totally understand where you're coming from. If you'd like to get quick feedback or help from WMF regarding alternative publishing approaches, don't hesitate to contact me directly and I'll see what we can do. Philosophically, I don't think the approaches of semi-automated generation and manual development are mutually exclusive and indeed, can build on each other or at least complement each other usefully. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On 13/11/2010 22:14, phoebe ayers wrote: The crux of the question seems to me to rather be who and how we directly partner with, and what services do we offer to readers (and contributors) by such partners through the site itself. In the case of PediaPress, it's fairly low-key; what you see in the sidebar is actually a link to the book creator tool, which is extension code to make a collection of pages that can then be generated as a pdf. It is only after you click through and do this that you are offered a link to Get a printed book from our print-on-demand partner and a link to PediaPress appears. People are quite free to create a pdf collection and never send it to PediaPress, which wouldn't generate a dime for them, and my instinct is that this accounts for the majority of the tool's use. Knowing which articles people are keen on collating is valuable economic data, regardless of whether the actually print a book. With that knowledge you have a greater incite into whether a collection is going to sell, and whether to invest some resources in improving the articles. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 9:20 PM, SlimVirgin slimvir...@gmail.com wrote: If PediaPress's software is open-source the Foundation surely wouldn't need to buy it. This is what I'm finding confusing, and that's partly because of my lack of technical knowledge. But as I see it Wikimedia has developers, paid and unpaid, lots of people who are able to develop this kind of thing. So it would have made sense to ask some volunteers to develop it. Or WMF could have insisted that Pediapress open source the entire toolchain in exchange for giving them access to a nice piece of real estate in the sidebar for, say, a year or something like that (with a contract pending renewal). It is OK to pay people to develop open source software and to insist on openness as part of a contract. If Pediapress said no, WMF could have kept looking for another partner who was into the deal. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 12:24 AM, Joe Corneli holtzerman...@gmail.com wrote: What people seem to have been stepping around in this thread so far is the fact that Pediapress's software chain includes some components that they have NOT released as open source. The name given of this type of open source + vendor lock-in has been on the tip of my tongue since this conversation started, but I've not been able to dislodge it. Does anyone recall a name for this beast? -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On 14 November 2010 20:04, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: The name given of this type of open source + vendor lock-in has been on the tip of my tongue since this conversation started, but I've not been able to dislodge it. Does anyone recall a name for this beast? Proprietary. Other terms include shared source, open core or just trap. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 7:06 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 14 November 2010 20:04, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: The name given of this type of open source + vendor lock-in has been on the tip of my tongue since this conversation started, but I've not been able to dislodge it. Does anyone recall a name for this beast? Proprietary. ;-) Other terms include shared source, thats a different, and more ugly, kind of 'convenience' to the one we have here. open core thats a new one to me..? or just trap. and that one is out of RMS' phrasebook, fa sure. iirc, the first big argument about this was the binary blobs in the Linux kernel. A few good derogatory terms came out of that. -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On 14 November 2010 20:13, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: iirc, the first big argument about this was the binary blobs in the Linux kernel. A few good derogatory terms came out of that. As far as I can tell there isn't a standard name for this sort of thing (open source for marketing, proprietary poison pill) - every time someone tries it, they come up with a new term to try to cover for what they're doing. Then everyone realises perfectly well what they're doing and calls it proprietary or a trap. So proprietary with open-source wrapper or trap is just fine. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
A few additional corrections / clarifications: 1) Our partnership with PediaPress has not displaced comparable community efforts, nor did PediaPress offer money and therefore received attention that other efforts did not get. Most of the community-based efforts at that time, including the ones Robert is referring to, were of an entirely different nature: manually collecting content from projects and creating reasonable-looking PDF files, then selling them through a print-on-demand publisher like Lulu (obviously a completely commercial/proprietary operation). There were a few barely functional PDF exporters, but nothing coming close to the PediaPress tools. It's true that a 2006 community-driven effort to publish Wikijunior content had incorrectly identified Wikimedia Foundation as the authors of the content. That mistake was corrected; as far as I can tell, the same volume is still available at: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/wikijunior-big-cats/1875136 You can review some of the relevant threads here: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-July/thread.html Volker from PediaPress first introduced himself at the same time, but nothing much happened between WMF and PediaPress until January 2007, when we contacted them about working together, which ultimately resulted in the current business relationship. 2) In terms of open source code, as I explained, PediaPress has contributed a full alternative parser implementation, a complete PDF export implementation, a complete tool for assembling and managing article collections, etc. These are all very important and valuable contributions. By last count, the PDF feature is used to create about 85,000 PDF files per day, keeping two dedicated servers busy. We'd be happy to integrate open source LaTeX support if someone provided it, and we'd be happy to consider paying for implementing it if enough people found it useful. 3) We've in the past explored various other partnerships with publishers resulting in commercial use of Wikipedia content. One of the most elaborate such partnerships was the Bertelsmann Wikipedia in one volume, based on the German Wikipedia (using edited lead sections as mini-articles). Trademark use for this book was negotiated by Wikimedia Germany with approval by WMF. The book was a commercial failure. See http://www.amazon.de/Das-WIKIPEDIA-Lexikon-einem-Band/dp/3577091029/ for information about this book. In general, we've concluded that most such commercial partnerships are problematic because a) Commercial publishers are not comfortable with freely licensed content, and try to find ways to lock it in; b) Most such partnerships would be poorly scalable one-offs; c) Both the revenue potential and the mission benefit are relatively small. We like the PediaPress model, because: a) it's fully consistent with the intent of free content licensing; b) it allows people to create their own customized experience in any supported language; c) it can scale flexibly to accommodate demand. That doesn't preclude other models from being potentially viable. Even the PediaPress model allows for more carefully curated content (using collections pointing to specific versions of pages that have been reviewed for book export), and of course it would be great to see more community efforts to vet, collect and publish content. Such efforts don't require our permission where no trademark use is involved. If trademark use is involved, then we'd have to consider such requests on a case-by-case basis, but we'd certainly consider them. (There's a big difference between claiming authorship of WMF, or labeling a book Wikibooks: Physics -- the former is factually incorrect and never acceptable, the latter is a potentially permissible trademark use.) I'd argue that working with PediaPress on this would be advisable: They have an existing 10% revenue sharing agreement with WMF, and the existing toolchain allows for export to multiple formats using entirely open source tools. But alternatives are always worth looking into. 4) There's a big difference between something like Special:Booksources, and something like the book creator tool. The former links to separate and independent services (commercial or not), the latter operates commercially on Wikimedia project content. Services that integrate and use our content commercially should at minimum be vetted by WMF, to establish fair and reasonable parameters and to ensure compliance. There's actually an example of a commercial printing operation that's been entirely developed by individual community members: the WikiPoster service running on the French Wikipedia. To see it in operation, click on any image in the French Wikipedia and click Obtenir un poster de cette image: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Pirates_of_the_Caribbean.jpg I have very little information about this service -- neither whether they are meeting their promises of donations (I could ask accounting to examine our
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On 11/12/2010 10:02 AM, phoebe ayers wrote: On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 12:47 AM, MZMcBridez...@mzmcbride.com wrote: I also don't understand who would want a printed copy of a Wikipedia article. It seems antithetical to the point of the Internet and the creation of an online encyclopedia. The last time I used the Special:Book extension was not on Wikipedia at all, but on the Strategy wiki, where it is enabled. Before the last Board meeting, I used the tool to make a collection/pdf of the final strategy documents, which I then printed out and read on my lunch break, on the train, etc. -- places where I didn't have a computer and my aging smartphone just wouldn't cut it. The benefits of doing this, rather than just printing each page one-off, was that it was nicely formatted (and thus easier to read), included a de-duped list of contributors at the end so I could check who worked on the page without printing off the history as well, and was in a single pdf that I could both point other people to and also download to my computer, email to myself, etc. So about a minute of clicking saved me quite a bit of frustration and work, and made me quite a bit more efficient when it came to reviewing the strategy proposal. My only point here is that if you provide the tool people will put it to surprising and useful purposes. I think Erik clarified that the extension is something we can and intend to use regardless of PediaPress (as can any MediaWiki installation -- I intend to install it on my workplace wiki, when I get around to it) and I think Liam raises a good point that if there are other organizations doing what PediaPress does in the printing department we should consider adding them to the list as well (which we can certainly do, as it is a non-exclusive partnership). And yes, the Foundation's mission *is* to help disseminate knowledge, and specifically to encourage the dissemination of our project content, in any way that is useful to our readers and potential audience -- whether that's by DVD, wikireader, OLPC laptop, regular laptop, printed book, mobile phone... that's why we have a free license. -- phoebe Based upon my own experience, I tried to get into the printed Wikimedia game at about the same time as PediaPress first started to get involved, but was openly dismissed and in fact my efforts thwarted. I admit that the group I was working with at the time wasn't quite thinking of the direction that PediaPress went with their tool chain and there were some differences, but in the end it does explain some of the reception we got from the WMF board in terms of support for our little project (made up of mainly volunteers from Wikibooks at the time). There have been other groups who have tried to get into the role of printing materials from Wikimedia projects besides PediaPress, and I think it is disingenuous to suggest that the relationship is non-exclusive. At the very least, the process for getting accepted as an approved partner has been very murky at best and seems more like political back scratching. I'm willing to let bygones stay in the past and move forward from this point on, although it would be nice to know what it would take for support from the WMF in terms of putting together some other competing group that is printing and distributing Wikimedia materials. Yes, I'm fully aware that you can simply take the raw HTML pages from the projects and manipulate them into content to produce materials (I did that on multiple occasions) and that the Special:Book tool produces PDF files that can also be used for publication purposes as well by independent printers. As far as I've seen, however, the PediaPress deal was rather exclusive and I'm stating here for the record that other printing/publishing groups were not considered when the deal was being made nor have those other groups been given similar kind of coverage. -- Robert Horning Refinance Now 3.4% FIXED $160,000 Mortgage: $547/mo. No Hidden Fees. No SSN Req. Get 4 Quotes! http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL3241/4cde50ac8ec31cd32est06vuc ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On 11/12/2010 10:05 AM, Magnus Manske wrote: Wikimedia policy is to use only free software, at least on the customer-facing side. That includes the PDF-generation process, which runs on our servers AFAIK. Requiring this from sites we (in essence) link to seems excessive. We link to Google Maps via an intermediate page, similar to PediaPress, and their code is not 100% open source either, last time I looked. Cheers, Magnus The link to Google Maps is certainly not exclusive and includes links to other mapping services including government mapping agencies and the Open Street Map Project, whose database and toolchain is 100% open source. As a mater of fact, I was introduced to Open Street Map through Wikipedia and its link when I was trying to look up the geo coordinates on a couple of articles done with the Geotagging Wikiproject. Explicitly, I was looking for a mapping tool that I didn't have the copyright problems that Google Maps have and I wasn't interested in pushing fair-use for the side project I was working on. -- Robert Horning Refinance Now 3.4% FIXED $160,000 Mortgage: $547/mo. No Hidden Fees. No SSN Req. Get 4 Quotes! http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL3241/4cde52e5ebd961ca75cst03duc ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 5:55 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: The problem I have with statements like these is that they feel disingenuous. The mission statement is as vague or as specific as the person arguing deems it to be. There are thousands of potential projects that Wikimedia could engage in that would fit perfectly within the current mission statement[1] and thousands more that would loosely fit in. It's mostly a matter of how many steps removed you choose to allow a particular venture to be. If I sell Wikimedia T-shirts, I'm building the Wikimedia brand, which leads to more donations during the fundraiser, which leads to more servers, which further enables the dissemination of educational content. Does that mean that selling T-shirts is within Wikimedia's mission? What is and isn't mission-relevant seems to be (perhaps intentionally) completely ambiguous. Ultimately, who decides whether a partnership with a company like PediaPress is mission-relevant? The Board of Trustees? The Executive Director? The Head of Business Development? And beyond who makes the decision, is there any guarantee that it will be a valid one? Given the vagueness of the mission statement, how much of a stretch is acceptable? Shockingly, making decisions like this does not necessarily involve reasoning, but judgement. Yes, the answers are not simple and logical — because you have to weigh the costs against the benefits. -- Andrew Garrett http://werdn.us/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 8:56 AM, Robert S. Horning robert_horn...@netzero.net wrote: On 11/12/2010 10:05 AM, Magnus Manske wrote: Wikimedia policy is to use only free software, at least on the customer-facing side. That includes the PDF-generation process, which runs on our servers AFAIK. Requiring this from sites we (in essence) link to seems excessive. We link to Google Maps via an intermediate page, similar to PediaPress, and their code is not 100% open source either, last time I looked. Cheers, Magnus The link to Google Maps is certainly not exclusive and includes links to other mapping services including government mapping agencies and the Open Street Map Project, whose database and toolchain is 100% open source. As a mater of fact, I was introduced to Open Street Map through Wikipedia and its link when I was trying to look up the geo coordinates on a couple of articles done with the Geotagging Wikiproject. And if you can find some other publishing entity (printing, DVDs, etc.) that could be used interchangeably for the PediaPress button, and this entity is denied a button next to the PediaPress one, /then/ a moral uproar might be justified. So far, I do not believe any such entity has stepped forward. Web-only services, like Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap, can be sustained cheaply enough to be free of charge for the user, which leads to many alternatives in the online maps category. Producing and shipping physical objects like books is still a business-only market, at least until everyone has a universal 3D printer sitting on his desk. For mass-printed books, there are lots of companies, which is why we have lots of them on out ISBN special page. However, there are relatively few print-on-demand businesses out there, and a total market of a few thousand unique books per year is apparently of little interest to all except one of them. If they want a share, let them have their own button; otherwise, be glad there is at least one of them, for there would likely be no PDF and OpenDocument (and soon OpenZIM) export function without their initiative. Cheers, Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
In a message dated 11/13/2010 6:44:18 AM Pacific Standard Time, magnusman...@googlemail.com writes: And if you can find some other publishing entity (printing, DVDs, etc.) that could be used interchangeably for the PediaPress button, and this entity is denied a button next to the PediaPress one, /then/ a moral uproar might be justified. So far, I do not believe any such entity has stepped forward. Disengeneous (if that's how you spell it). Open the location to citizen modification and I guarentee you there will be another competitor shortly. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 5:18 PM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: In a message dated 11/13/2010 6:44:18 AM Pacific Standard Time, magnusman...@googlemail.com writes: And if you can find some other publishing entity (printing, DVDs, etc.) that could be used interchangeably for the PediaPress button, and this entity is denied a button next to the PediaPress one, /then/ a moral uproar might be justified. So far, I do not believe any such entity has stepped forward. Disengeneous (if that's how you spell it). You don't. And insults don't really make your POV more popular. Open the location to citizen modification and I guarentee you there will be another competitor shortly. I'm all for that. But, did anyone actually ask the Foundation to have his button included there (besides spammers et al.)? It's not like an email is hard to write... Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On 13 November 2010 17:53, Magnus Manske magnusman...@googlemail.com wrote: I'm all for that. But, did anyone actually ask the Foundation to have his button included there (besides spammers et al.)? It's not like an email is hard to write... Robert Horning has noted in this very thread: === Based upon my own experience, I tried to get into the printed Wikimedia game at about the same time as PediaPress first started to get involved, but was openly dismissed and in fact my efforts thwarted. I admit that the group I was working with at the time wasn't quite thinking of the direction that PediaPress went with their tool chain and there were some differences, but in the end it does explain some of the reception we got from the WMF board in terms of support for our little project (made up of mainly volunteers from Wikibooks at the time). There have been other groups who have tried to get into the role of printing materials from Wikimedia projects besides PediaPress, and I think it is disingenuous to suggest that the relationship is non-exclusive. At the very least, the process for getting accepted as an approved partner has been very murky at best and seems more like political back scratching. === http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-November/062385.html I leave the question of disingenuity to the reader. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 6:16 PM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: In a message dated 11/13/2010 9:53:41 AM Pacific Standard Time, magnusman...@googlemail.com writes: I'm all for that. But, did anyone actually ask the Foundation to have his button included there (besides spammers et al.)? It's not like an email is hard to write... Why should *this* be a Foundation issue in your mind, when adding a source to Special Books is not. To me it's an identical situation. How is it different to you It's not, in principle, and you just quoted me with I'm all for that (replying to your citizen modification), so you know it's not different to me. I just don't see a reason for drama that it's not available right now. I can see three reasons why it is different /in practice/ right now: 1. Given the limited of number services (one, plus Robert's which I missed in the thread, if it still exists), it probably seemed pointless 2. Any service would have to develop the appropriate interface to MediaWiki first, and also integrate with Wikimedia servers, as far as I can tell; therefore, users adding buttons would be non-functional without Foundation's active help anyway 3. PediaPress might have bought a head start with the extension. This is pure speculation on my part, though. Looking at the implementation of the button, it actually has a partner field. So, more partners are in the technical design. This would lead me to conclude that the thing missing to have more partners for book printing is ... partners. Unless it's a Foundation-PediaPress conspiracy, and the technical implementation is just a clever guise. Cue the Morley's smoker... Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
Hello Sarah, I searched a little on meta and the oldest thing I found related to this is from the Foundation Report of January 2008 [1]. So I cannot tell you how the contract came into being. As you know, the Foundation moved in the spring of 2008 from Florida to San Francisco and rebuilt itself afterwards. Before the move the organisational maturity is still quite weak. I am sure that today such contract would be handled in other ways and the board would surely be informed. The reason why I changed your example is exactly because I wanted to avoid the topic of paid edit. As you know, this topic is very controversial inside of the community. We just had a quite long thread about this running through this list. To include that topic into this discussion makes it only even more difficult. I recognize what MZMcBride pointed out, that my modification is not comparable with your original example and is also not comparable to the PediaPress case. I simply have no good example at the hand. May I try with another example: One of our problem was always translation. Our movement is supposed to be a global movement, but in a lot of cases our working language is English. A lot of very important discussions here, on meta, in commons, are in English. Although we try very hard to work more multilingual, but in alot of cases if someone don't know English, he may not even able to know that a topic is just discussed somewhere, that may have inpact on his work on our projects. So, let's say the Virgin Ventures has a genious service that can help us to overcome this problem. It has a magic button translate this page or this thread, and if I hit it, Vergin Ventures can provide me, with automatically or manually performed services, after a reasonable time, a comprehensible translation of the discussions, so that everyone can take part on our discussion. I really don't see any reason why the Foundation should not handle out a contract with Vergin Ventures so that we take get this service and at the same time Vergin Ventures can get a share as a business model. I know that also this example is not without flaw, as comparisons always are. What I want to say is, if a company can provide us a service that we really desperately need and we cannot get elsewhere, and it shares the same value as we are, I think it is a correct decision to take that service. I am sure this answer is maybe not satisfactory, but I hope it can explain a little what my personal opinion is. Greetings Ting [1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Report,_January_2008 On 13.11.2010 08:57, wrote SlimVirgin: On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 00:53, Ting Chenwing.phil...@gmx.de wrote: Hello Sarah, I would put it somehow differently. If Virgin Ventures has a tool with which a newbie (or also an oldbie) can in a very intuitive way construct a well formatted article from the scrap, so something like that magic editor we had talked about for long time and never realized until now, and it is open source, I would certainly consider a button in the toolbox like Use the wizard to start an article. On 12.11.2010 07:44, wrote SlimVirgin: If I were to set up Virgin Ventures to write high-quality, policy-compliant articles for companies and people that needed them -- benefiting the subjects, the readers, and Wikipedia -- might I be given a button in the toolbox too? Red link? Click here for the Virgin! Hello Ting, The concern is this: the argument is that because the people behind [[PediaPress]] in Germany -- who I assume were Wikipedians -- put their time into creating the create book software, they should be allowed a return on their investment, unlike Wikipedia's writers who are expected to donate their skills for free. Therefore, the Foundation gave them access to some of cyberspace's most expensive real estate in the sidebar, and the company is allowed to keep 90 percent of the profit by printing articles in book form. And I believe it's not actually PediaPress doing the printing. They have a contract with yet another company for that -- [[Lightning Source]] -- a print-on-demand subsidiary of Ingram Industries Inc. http://mickrooney.blogspot.com/2010/06/lsi-expandpartnership-with-pediapress.html PediaPress is owned by Brainbot Technologies, which says on its website that it aims to exploit Wikipedia content commercially, and it was to this end that PediaPress was set up. http://brainbot.com/services/wikis/ Google translate -- http://translate.google.com/#de|en| It raises lots of questions, but two big ones: 1. How was PediaPress/Brainbot chosen to do this, out of all the companies in the world that would have paid the Foundation for access to a create book function in the sidebar? and 2. It presupposes that technical know-how can be monetized, but editorial input on Wikipedia -- the material Brainbot/PediaPress wants to sell -- should be done without payment. Wikipedians who
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On 11/13/2010 11:08 AM, Ryan Kaldari wrote: What's the URL for Robert's service? I would love to try it out. If the service isn't mature yet, is there a code repository somewhere? Ryan Kaldari Much of what I was trying to get started was covered on this very mailing list. If you go into the archives and look up Wikijunior to see some of the efforts that were made, including some initial publications that were made through Lulu (that were also removed from Lulu at the request of the WMF). The organizing efforts were being done on Wikibooks as much as could be done, and that was pretty much where it ended too. The problem was that PediaPress offered money, which we didn't. There isn't really a name to the group as it was only loosely organized, but there were several volunteers working with me at the time we were trying to put things together. I also paid out of my own pocket for a couple of trial runs to see how the system could work, and tried to make a business case for the effort. I was also looking for some kind of partnership and noting that handing money was quickly going to be a major issue. It was also something that the WMF did not want to get directly involved with for reasons that I understand completely too. Much of the motivation for the whole effort I was involved with centered on the original promise that Wikijunior was going to be set up for making printed versions of the Children's books created by that project. Apparently some money was given to the WMF by some donor with some guidelines on how the project was to be set up. To the best of my knowledge that money has never been fully accounted for other than being swallowed up by the operations of the server farm and the general operations budget of the WMF. As an administrator on Wikibooks at the time, I felt personally responsible for maintaining the Wikijunior community and to follow through with the promises that were made in terms of getting those printed versions of Wikijunior books out to the public. It never happened, however. When the PediaPress deal was announced, it sort of sucked whatever wind was left in the effort out, and some other needs in my own life came up that also took precedence. I keep holding out hope that eventually things are going to change, and I wouldn't mind trying to put together some other similar effort again to restart the momentum that was lost years ago. Unfortunately most times I try to do that it falls flat on its face with nobody else interested in helping out or even considering the idea. I was hoping to have a more volunteer effort like what is being done with the wiki projects or perhaps more like Distributed Proofreading that would help prepare and publish the books. I still think something like that is needed, but at the moment there is no home and the only URL I can give is my e-mail address at the moment. There have been some semi-recent changes in the publishing industry that I think makes a volunteer effort work out much better where everything that is going on including how the funds are raised and spent being more out in the open can happen. My problem is merely getting people together that are interested in something like that at the moment or even finding a forum to present the idea. I have hoped that Foundation-l would be that forum, but apparently it isn't. -- Robert Horning Refinance Now 3.4% FIXED $160,000 Mortgage: $547/mo. No Hidden Fees. No SSN Req. Get 4 Quotes! http://thirdpartyoffers.netzero.net/TGL3241/4cdef42d13dde1d3a9dst04duc ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 13:59, Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de wrote: I know that also this example is not without flaw, as comparisons always are. What I want to say is, if a company can provide us a service that we really desperately need and we cannot get elsewhere, and it shares the same value as we are, I think it is a correct decision to take that service. I am sure this answer is maybe not satisfactory, but I hope it can explain a little what my personal opinion is. I understand exactly what you're saying, Ting, and I appreciate your thoughtful response. I suppose my reaction is an emotional one, but I'd argue no less valid for that. It's that much of the content of Wikipedia is written and administered by a surprisingly small number of people. We do it for nothing because we believe in the concept of free (in all senses) information. But now to the left of my vision, with every edit I make, there is a create book button, where a private company is quite openly making money from our work. That feels discouraging. Sarah ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
Let me ask this question. Suppose the Wikimedia Foundation were to buy PediaPress from Brainbot, including whatever intellectual property is associated with its service such as the LaTeX export. If Wikimedia did this and brought the service in-house, assuming the LaTeX export is released as open source, it would probably continue to contract with Lightning Source or some other company to do the actual printing (our competencies are much more on computer and web technology than print publication). Assuming that all of this was possible - and I have no idea what would be a reasonable price for PediaPress, whether Brainbot would sell, or whether that would be an appropriate use of funds in the context of our mission and strategy - would people be okay with the current placement of the service, including continuing to charge people who order printed books? --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 15:10, Michael Snow wikipe...@frontier.com wrote: Let me ask this question. Suppose the Wikimedia Foundation were to buy PediaPress from Brainbot, including whatever intellectual property is associated with its service such as the LaTeX export. If Wikimedia did this and brought the service in-house, assuming the LaTeX export is released as open source, it would probably continue to contract with Lightning Source or some other company to do the actual printing (our competencies are much more on computer and web technology than print publication). Assuming that all of this was possible - and I have no idea what would be a reasonable price for PediaPress, whether Brainbot would sell, or whether that would be an appropriate use of funds in the context of our mission and strategy - would people be okay with the current placement of the service, including continuing to charge people who order printed books? If PediaPress's software is open-source the Foundation surely wouldn't need to buy it. This is what I'm finding confusing, and that's partly because of my lack of technical knowledge. But as I see it Wikimedia has developers, paid and unpaid, lots of people who are able to develop this kind of thing. So it would have made sense to ask some volunteers to develop it. Asking a private company to do these things, then giving them access to the sidebar in exchange for their input, is the same as asking a bunch of editors to set up a company and start writing articles for pay, then giving them sidebar buttons because they joyously agree. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 13/11/2010 16:59, Ting Chen wrote: I searched a little on meta and the oldest thing I found related to this is from the Foundation Report of January 2008 [1]. So I cannot tell you how the contract came into being. As you know, the Foundation moved in the spring of 2008 from Florida to San Francisco and rebuilt itself afterwards. Before the move the organisational maturity is still quite weak. I am sure that today such contract would be handled in other ways and the board would surely be informed. Maybe a scan of the contract would help clear things? -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJM3wkNAAoJEHCAuDvx9Z6LCukIAMlvvd0a44z/4w29cyGOaIBi BZUQWy4joGdQ49WnV/EhMuWzJRoRfk/ereSkwxVvq6xYpiq4ZfbLibQhqTwyLLJ0 S+URLUkMcBH15QNojY61q7cGirhO3fop9JMhq1As8a8u+pvlMHjkxLKiwaHJfJb8 UDPxxLtRYWo6tUSKo19EFX9stKVa0ReHX+UkzXXHWOPfjKuarIUarS3uQngvjI0y kAkeO8H4FfEdQrreFL4q1J5DkRHpUf3kuOCwt11Xl+sQjM4yQS0Ym0s7HPpWUG51 LESDs/aQ+mlV+l0MhiyWjPqqIXxqMKOfynjIA0857sio42K3Pl+kmSFkqiPWbfk= =w1Sc -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 13/11/2010 17:25, Robert S. Horning wrote: Much of what I was trying to get started was covered on this very mailing list. If you go into the archives and look up Wikijunior to see some of the efforts that were made, including some initial publications that were made through Lulu (that were also removed from Lulu at the request of the WMF). The organizing efforts were being done on Wikibooks as much as could be done, and that was pretty much where it ended too. Why was Lulu removed? -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJM3wnWAAoJEHCAuDvx9Z6LMwQIAIQv4dWUsTzCZ5smSmC/ohpa aWUYSbTiKc8RUiNDy+BJXAAcTD2sRLs4VINJ2c3aSZPgttIoyX61pR/j8U5Zpdjw +h12zC7g9XezF2l8Ab4Fgnohx8drZxQamV0o1XPqliT5OF/cT1333h4JCqDlkVey Z8PCHfdDg96hQ1E+3AmrbvyX967jRYK6slQZa5LCwln+By7GSPitnIUARbInl1pq 6q7IfeRXBEAmS/yMUZ3VFm3OXMSdKeMGpsxPaS4MW4YsXF0d3Ddym0AzQjvyrFMk t8Edr5BBqZTfPpxPqOSLfjmhsNzo+DfLL+1nbIXgeeVX7m7F0A5HmZjoTWbLlpE= =otK7 -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 12:51 PM, SlimVirgin slimvir...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 13:59, Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de wrote: I know that also this example is not without flaw, as comparisons always are. What I want to say is, if a company can provide us a service that we really desperately need and we cannot get elsewhere, and it shares the same value as we are, I think it is a correct decision to take that service. I am sure this answer is maybe not satisfactory, but I hope it can explain a little what my personal opinion is. I understand exactly what you're saying, Ting, and I appreciate your thoughtful response. I suppose my reaction is an emotional one, but I'd argue no less valid for that. It's that much of the content of Wikipedia is written and administered by a surprisingly small number of people. We do it for nothing because we believe in the concept of free (in all senses) information. But now to the left of my vision, with every edit I make, there is a create book button, where a private company is quite openly making money from our work. That feels discouraging. Every edit you make is also mirrored by answers.com, which quite openly makes money off of our work as well. This particular line of reasoning has not historically served as a discouragement to most of our editor base. The crux of the question seems to me to rather be who and how we directly partner with, and what services do we offer to readers (and contributors) by such partners through the site itself. In the case of PediaPress, it's fairly low-key; what you see in the sidebar is actually a link to the book creator tool, which is extension code to make a collection of pages that can then be generated as a pdf. It is only after you click through and do this that you are offered a link to Get a printed book from our print-on-demand partner and a link to PediaPress appears. People are quite free to create a pdf collection and never send it to PediaPress, which wouldn't generate a dime for them, and my instinct is that this accounts for the majority of the tool's use. I don't mean to be dismissive, though; asking about partnerships is a totally valid question, and we should at the very least keep any such partnerships open so that we can always consider if there are other and better services, extensions, etc. available to offer in addition to or in place of existing ones. -- phoebe ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On 11/13/10 12:25 PM, Robert S. Horning wrote: Much of what I was trying to get started was covered on this very mailing list. If you go into the archives and look up Wikijunior to see some of the efforts that were made, including some initial publications that were made through Lulu (that were also removed from Lulu at the request of the WMF). The organizing efforts were being done on Wikibooks as much as could be done, and that was pretty much where it ended too. The problem was that PediaPress offered money, which we didn't. So you're saying that the Foundation should have partnered with a completely proprietary service (Lulu), that wasn't interested in donating any software or income back to the Foundation? That doesn't sound like a very appealing partnership, nor can I imagine the community supporting such a decision (especially considering how skeptical they've been of the PediaPress partnership). Ryan Kaldari ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 11:10 PM, Michael Snow wikipe...@frontier.com wrote: Let me ask this question. Suppose the Wikimedia Foundation were to buy PediaPress from Brainbot, including whatever intellectual property is associated with its service such as the LaTeX export. If Wikimedia did this and brought the service in-house, assuming the LaTeX export is released as open source, it would probably continue to contract with Lightning Source or some other company to do the actual printing (our competencies are much more on computer and web technology than print publication). Assuming that all of this was possible - and I have no idea what would be a reasonable price for PediaPress, whether Brainbot would sell, or whether that would be an appropriate use of funds in the context of our mission and strategy - would people be okay with the current placement of the service, including continuing to charge people who order printed books? Well, you first need to check if it would be/is generating enough revenue that justifies the investment. and see the usage of the collection extension and how many books they already printed etc. I don't know what is wrong with charging money to print the books, if someone needs a hardcopy of an article collection, then WMF should be the one providing it, if feasible. user:alnokta ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 13/11/2010 18:10, Michael Snow wrote: Let me ask this question. Suppose the Wikimedia Foundation were to buy PediaPress from Brainbot, including whatever intellectual property is associated with its service such as the LaTeX export. If Wikimedia did this and brought the service in-house, assuming the LaTeX export is released as open source, it would probably continue to contract with Lightning Source or some other company to do the actual printing (our competencies are much more on computer and web technology than print publication). Assuming that all of this was possible - and I have no idea what would be a reasonable price for PediaPress, whether Brainbot would sell, or whether that would be an appropriate use of funds in the context of our mission and strategy - would people be okay with the current placement of the service, including continuing to charge people who order printed books? Maybe I'm not entitled to give my opinion, but here's my vision of what could be a correct behavior towards the knowledge that we are spreading: it's as free as we can make it, because we want everyone to have access to it, and nobody should have a special power nor ownership on it. So making books and selling them at the price of the cost is okay, the extreme limit: the sustainable limit. Selling them with profit is not. Spreading through healthy, citizen, public or free NGO or associations is promising. Dealing with for-profit, governmental, financial or private organisms or corporations is worsening. Etc. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJM3xawAAoJEHCAuDvx9Z6L3AgIAMeVvfvmrZDO7ZfvCdQL8TdO 4ZgCv1m1KV3cn+mhRVrOqRs9hbS/WGmCVWdReM+bnq0tWDIvgNr7PJ/p2X9SgpMQ yTa7nNe6yZu6/1vvCy/f52Fy2N9v4TUaQhwmkH7rX0tsJR+PUFhScvCpJh0uoMIK YIXmiMaP6Mx8yqGVMLQCye1qria35quZyqaA7zfG9tU/YQhBk9I06ISo1A1UHa69 TAXDBpm8RP/OnY8ylW0FAwaiMOKH9wdczTGzZxIuzDwq+m3ZqLrj5DlUtwkPwNQE Pun3zaFB/B0JLRyJ40xi688wsW8giFp7ZLVZ/M9XRchArw72bZ8T0ygRIHUF0GU= =Pb7D -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
It's pretty obvious that there are some back-justifications being made for a blatantly imperfect decision. There are both real strengths and benefits to the decision (making print copies easily accessible) as well as deep flaws (promoting an exclusive relationship with a for-profit company). It would probably be best if the PediaPress relationship were handled like Wikipedia's other link-to-outside-entities, such as Special:BookSources. On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 5:24 PM, Noein prono...@gmail.com wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 13/11/2010 17:51, SlimVirgin wrote: I understand exactly what you're saying, Ting, and I appreciate your thoughtful response. I suppose my reaction is an emotional one, but I'd argue no less valid for that. It's that much of the content of Wikipedia is written and administered by a surprisingly small number of people. We do it for nothing because we believe in the concept of free (in all senses) information. But now to the left of my vision, with every edit I make, there is a create book button, where a private company is quite openly making money from our work. That feels discouraging. Indeed. There seems to be a significant divergence in the interpretation of the Wikipedia mission between the Foundation and the community. Added to lots of other hints, it makes me wonder how much the WMF is representative of the general community. Is this gap real? Am I badly informed? In any way, shouldn't the WMF be subordinate to the community's will? I have the current understanding that this is not at all the case. Could someone take a little of his or her time to explains to me the general idea of what the relationship between the WMF and the community should be? -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJM3xACAAoJEHCAuDvx9Z6LSIAIAL+Hzv+dWSNaSymxDbyD9VbG Rsl8js50KC161+hEEKrtlqgahawnqwb8ZH79TZ+RLxVn4+o1uxIlgr8EN/h0CtqD 3ViO7+hQX0a26KNph/2kxV6VFRfPr93VguEAsQRGXqIr6QNuwwrgEvyCdlz21FHP X4vUyVOWJkvCXxJNJ50J3HaAGy1hy2RYckWvHvWrSv4Ppq6QdPUNhAJgzDIqSpyX mqdnLxsrOA6LzSetSt8B0EJ05c+AcZbaesvGhmqLHIetBlfQdsOyOqbxH8vEK52i yBsG1T2EbY4erlNQ7OAWEPFc9suLuAACtPjBZY1LFIrFW1Wxt6rl6EBLeLrAHw8= =b7Ep -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
In a message dated 11/13/2010 11:08:33 AM Pacific Standard Time, magnusman...@googlemail.com writes: 1. Given the limited of number services (one, plus Robert's which I missed in the thread, if it still exists), it probably seemed pointless 2. Any service would have to develop the appropriate interface to MediaWiki first, and also integrate with Wikimedia servers, as far as I can tell; therefore, users adding buttons would be non-functional without Foundation's active help anyway 3. PediaPress might have bought a head start with the extension. This is pure speculation on my part, though. 1) Assumption. We do not know how many services there might be. Assuming there is only one, because one one has been allowed is beating a man with his own staff. 2) This is not true. Clicking Make a book out of this page, and hold on I'm going to add some more pages to this book has nothing to do with integration. I can build a list of the pages you choose, right now, with a Php script and without any foundation approval. My button interface might not be pretty of course, but it would work. 3) Under what RFP ? How was it chosen, how was it vetted, why is the process to gain this approval now closed to any rival? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
Ryan Kaldari wrote: On 11/13/10 12:25 PM, Robert S. Horning wrote: Much of what I was trying to get started was covered on this very mailing list. If you go into the archives and look up Wikijunior to see some of the efforts that were made, including some initial publications that were made through Lulu (that were also removed from Lulu at the request of the WMF). The organizing efforts were being done on Wikibooks as much as could be done, and that was pretty much where it ended too. The problem was that PediaPress offered money, which we didn't. So you're saying that the Foundation should have partnered with a completely proprietary service (Lulu), that wasn't interested in donating any software or income back to the Foundation? That doesn't sound like a very appealing partnership, nor can I imagine the community supporting such a decision (especially considering how skeptical they've been of the PediaPress partnership). At the core of this thread are two questions, in my view: 1. What are the requirements for a partnership with Wikimedia? You've mentioned a few possible criteria (giving a percentage to Wikimedia, using open source software, etc.). Is there an actual guideline about this kind of thing? If not, should there be? 2. Who decides on partnerships? The Executive Director? The Board? The Head of Business Development? Again, this might be covered by some sort of guide. For all I know, there's already something on wikimediafoundation.org about this. I'm just asking questions. :-) MZMcBride ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 13/11/2010 19:14, phoebe ayers wrote: On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 12:51 PM, SlimVirgin slimvir...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 13:59, Ting Chen wing.phil...@gmx.de wrote: I know that also this example is not without flaw, as comparisons always are. What I want to say is, if a company can provide us a service that we really desperately need and we cannot get elsewhere, and it shares the same value as we are, I think it is a correct decision to take that service. I am sure this answer is maybe not satisfactory, but I hope it can explain a little what my personal opinion is. I understand exactly what you're saying, Ting, and I appreciate your thoughtful response. I suppose my reaction is an emotional one, but I'd argue no less valid for that. It's that much of the content of Wikipedia is written and administered by a surprisingly small number of people. We do it for nothing because we believe in the concept of free (in all senses) information. But now to the left of my vision, with every edit I make, there is a create book button, where a private company is quite openly making money from our work. That feels discouraging. Every edit you make is also mirrored by answers.com, which quite openly makes money off of our work as well. This particular line of reasoning has not historically served as a discouragement to most of our editor base. I didn't know that. How can a site be only a motor of search of our pages and at the same time charge for it? Aren't we already doing the same? We can even do it better since we're at the source of this service. With google ranking us high, we are an answer.com too, naturally. We don't need a professional counterpart, they have no plus-value to add to us that we can't add ourselves. Knowledge is not for elitists, knowledge is for everybody, and thus, as free of charges as possible. The crux of the question seems to me to rather be who and how we directly partner with, and what services do we offer to readers (and contributors) by such partners through the site itself. In the case of PediaPress, it's fairly low-key; what you see in the sidebar is actually a link to the book creator tool, which is extension code to make a collection of pages that can then be generated as a pdf. It is only after you click through and do this that you are offered a link to Get a printed book from our print-on-demand partner and a link to PediaPress appears. You mean Get a printed book from our print-on-demand partnerS and several links of several partners, among them PediaPress in alphabetical order to be exact, I presume. All of those partners should be non-profit, of course. People are quite free to create a pdf collection and never send it to PediaPress, which wouldn't generate a dime for them, and my instinct is that this accounts for the majority of the tool's use. Then the service would be pdf creator, not book creator, right? I don't mean to be dismissive, though; asking about partnerships is a totally valid question, and we should at the very least keep any such partnerships open so that we can always consider if there are other and better services, extensions, etc. available to offer in addition to or in place of existing ones. Yes. And discussing about their moral interest could our first discussion, actually. -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJM3x8aAAoJEHCAuDvx9Z6L9o0H/0xdsOlkQ+4uB/01zryFRiEw afjAAhGq++oD8Gn0IlktxHyycrhUoXCnIfVTdxyhhTbC0IDRx/0yhEap8e8lyXya MAbITzz9xQ1WHHbYBJ6ahGZlJeQwtj4f1YkNGENgzmfgvQlUzrvnaHqJad9s75Uv Gz153fv2fswtSivVBUAFIXcxxqm4zApQ2GroR6dAnr28SqSfOfWd8mnNDfeqM78U KSu+ztw4Ef9Hqn0jOOId8gr75lcjBcIQ6qc5ayZBC4GBQ63dRkVHA3wUNylqesp1 sCd3tSsNZDe7vC0CT0I1mdT7Zf2bYbRhPGW6JBpWNUa9S1tRyFusb8GmNDTquDg= =LvT7 -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 11:04 PM, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: In a message dated 11/13/2010 11:08:33 AM Pacific Standard Time, magnusman...@googlemail.com writes: 1. Given the limited of number services (one, plus Robert's which I missed in the thread, if it still exists), it probably seemed pointless 2. Any service would have to develop the appropriate interface to MediaWiki first, and also integrate with Wikimedia servers, as far as I can tell; therefore, users adding buttons would be non-functional without Foundation's active help anyway 3. PediaPress might have bought a head start with the extension. This is pure speculation on my part, though. 1) Assumption. We do not know how many services there might be. Assuming there is only one, because one one has been allowed is beating a man with his own staff. Note that I wrote seemed, not seems. I trying to list possible reasons why this facility was created the way it was. That is different to what it should develop into now. 2) This is not true. Clicking Make a book out of this page, and hold on I'm going to add some more pages to this book has nothing to do with integration. I can build a list of the pages you choose, right now, with a Php script and without any foundation approval. My button interface might not be pretty of course, but it would work. Again, please read carefully. I am not talking about the book setup, but about the actual preview/order process. You will note that the PediaPress button goes to [[Special:Books]], which then redirects to PediaPress. This, at the moment, requires integration. I does not have to, but currently it does. 3) Under what RFP ? How was it chosen, how was it vetted, why is the process to gain this approval now closed to any rival? Yet again, with the reading. You did see the words pure speculation? I'm getting tired of having to nitpick this discussion. How about something practical? It should be feasible to conjure up some JavaScript to add a new button pointing to another service, though I suspect some internal magic happens before the PediaPress redirect, handing the book structure data over. So, back to the basic question: Which service would be able to take a structured page list and spew out a book? Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
From: SlimVirgin slimvir...@gmail.com If PediaPress's software is open-source the Foundation surely wouldn't need to buy it. This is what I'm finding confusing, and that's partly because of my lack of technical knowledge. But as I see it Wikimedia has developers, paid and unpaid, lots of people who are able to develop this kind of thing. So it would have made sense to ask some volunteers to develop it. Asking a private company to do these things, then giving them access to the sidebar in exchange for their input, is the same as asking a bunch of editors to set up a company and start writing articles for pay, then giving them sidebar buttons because they joyously agree. Just for the sake of transparency -- 1. Does anyone on the board, or the board of Wikimedia Germany, have a remunerated directorship or a consultancy job with PediaPress, or receive any other perks from this or any other similar partnerships? 2. What is PediaPress's present turnover, and thus, what is the income for the Foundation, in dollars? 3. Given that the foundation is currently asking for donations, wouldn't it make more sense for the Foundation to do the printing and generate the income themselves, to reduce the amount of donations it requires from the public? Or is PediaPress at present a loss-making business? I guess it's always been inevitable that someone would be making money from Wikipedians' work, eventually. However, a non-profit Foundation that asks for donations from the public should maximise the revenue it can generate itself from its products to cover its costs. 10% (did I get that right?) does not seem much. It also seems to me that it would be more consistent with the ideals of the project if most of the money made should go to support a non-profit cause. Andreas ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 I'm forwarding this message from Cyrano. - On 12/11/2010 02:06, Erik Moeller wrote: A bit of general background: The Collection/Book creator feature allows managing, organizing and exporting content in PDF and in OpenDocument (the latter is still very buggy). We're planning to work with PediaPress to add OpenZIM support (useful for offline readers like Kiwix); EPUB is a possibility. The feature supports pulling specific article revisions, or the current revision, and it has some nice features like automatic suggestion of articles, easy addition of articles to collections while browsing, etc. Although PediaPress are the developers behind the feature, it's completely separate from their services (providing printed books). The code of this feature is open-source and has been reviewed by developers from the community, I assume. It seems that PediaPress was entirely created (their site is from 2006) for the edition of wikipedia books: I couldn't find a single book not written by Wikipedians. So again, what were the so interesting profile of this society... Were other alternatives like http://www.lulu.com/en/about/index.php considered? PediaPress says that A portion of the proceeds of each book will be donated to the Wikimedia Foundation to support their mission. [http://pediapress.com/]. How much exactly? Look at that: PediaPress was founded in July 2007 as a spin-off from brainbot technologies AG and is located in Mainz, Germany. [http://pediapress.com/about/] And brainbot is: This cooperation enables brainbot technologies to rapidly transform state of the art research results into marketable products. [http://brainbot.com/home_en/] Can you see the big picture, the plan? Wikimedians and internauts build the info, and Brainbot/PediaPress/DFKI [http://www.dfki.de/web/welcome?set_language=encl=en] profit on it! Great plan. I'm sure the wikimedians would love to have a say, though. If PediaPress were to disappear tomorrow, we'd continue providing the remaining functionality. In fact, at this point in time, uses of the feature for digital offline distributions are more interesting to us from a strategic point of view than print distribution. Because images and other media quickly inflate any offline export, content selections may often be the more viable method to create digital offline distributions of WP content. The 1,400 selections already compiled using the Collection extension provide a great starting point for this. It's also conceivable to work with validation partners to create trusted selections of content for schools etc. We have a non-exclusive business partnership with PediaPress (a small for-profit company) with regard to their provision of print services, which is commission-based. From a mission standpoint, it's nice for both our audience and our contributors to have the print options available, which is supported by demand (about 2,000 per quarter -- we'll soon have a WikiStats report on book sales) and user feedback. It can also be great outreach tool. In fact, as Tim pointed out, the idea of printed selections is a very old idea that very many Wikipedians have worked on over the years. The goal of the relationship with PediaPress was to have an open toolset that any and all efforts towards print or other export formats could build upon. PediaPress has been a model partner -- they're super-responsive, and interact directly with the community to service all aspects of the technology. I'm personally very pleased that the hardcover and color options are now available. There are so many fantastic photos and illustrations in Wikimedia projects that the black/white books really didn't do them justice. It's certainly not for everyone, but for those of us who like to show our family and friends what this whole Wikipedia thing we spend so much time on is all about, it can be pretty awesome. Kindle or not, a printed book gives a very tangible reality to our efforts. I am certain that this conversation is not about the cover. Our concerns are real. On 12/11/2010 03:32, Tim Starling wrote: On 12/11/10 13:23, MZMcBride wrote: They negotiated with Wikimedia? Where and when? How many thousands of companies would like their links in the sidebar of the fifth most-visited website in the world? Are they really that good at negotiating? On the English Wikipedia, there's a Book namespace and the sidebar has a completely separate print/export section that comes from the Collection extension. That's worth a percentage of the book sales? Potential parternships are assessed by mission-relevance, not just revenue potential. Offline distribution is part of the Foundation's mission, as is open source software development. PediaPress were offering to do those two things. Pediapress is promising a donation for each sell. I think
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 6:37 AM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Liam Wyatt wrote: I suspect that the issue lies not with the fact that you are only a couple of clicks away from the PediaPress bookprinting service from every Wikipedia article, but more the fact that the PediaPress system is the *only *service listed on the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Book As Erik mentioned in the previous email, the relationship with PediaPress is non-exclusive and entirely independent from the Book Creator code. I enjoyed your examples of for-profit companies' products being integrated with Wikimedia. I wonder, if a company like CafePress wanted to sell Wikimedia apparel and would donate a percentage of their revenue to Wikimedia, would they get a sidebar link (or section) as well? The response from Erik seems to be well, having printed copies of our work makes us feel good, which is perfectly fine, but so does a fitted T-shirt with the Wikipedia logo on the front. Would a company like CafePress be allowed to have a link in the sidebar to their Wikimedia-related products? What are the exact criteria for getting to be only a couple of clicks away for millions of visitors? Wikimedia is owned and operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit foundation dedicated to bringing free content to the world. For us, PediaPress brings free (as in freedom) content to the world. CafePress brings T-shirts to the world. You might be able to spot the difference. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia. We work on it online, because that is the most efficient and convenient way to do it. I have an offline copy of it on my iPhone. I have an (outdated) German DVD with a copy. Many people have WikiReaders. I am sure many people without net access would be happy with a single-volume Wikipedia V1.0 desk encyclopaedia. If a company would take the export function and write an open source extension to produce multi-platform DVDs that allow you to browse a snapshot of the selected articles, their link should go right next to the PediaPress one. Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
What people seem to have been stepping around in this thread so far is the fact that Pediapress's software chain includes some components that they have NOT released as open source. There seems to be ongoing confusion about this. If there was an open source toolchain for doing what Pediapress currently does, then Wikimedia itself or any third party organization or individual could use it to create manuscripts suitable for printing, and use any printer they liked to achieve that end. I think the crux of the argument should be: is it OK for Wikimedia to have a partnership with a service provider who uses closed source software as an integral part of the service they provide. Pediapress sets a precedent that says yes, that's completely fine. And maybe it is, but it is then just wrong to refer to this as an open source way of working. On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 6:07 AM, Liam Wyatt liamwy...@gmail.com wrote: If we're concerned about the WMF referring in its blog to a for-profit organisation that happens to be working with us in a way that is open-source, offline and furthering our mission to distribute our content widely, why did no one complain about the OpenMoko Wikireader being in the WMF blog: ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 1:24 PM, Joe Corneli holtzerman...@gmail.com wrote: What people seem to have been stepping around in this thread so far is the fact that Pediapress's software chain includes some components that they have NOT released as open source. There seems to be ongoing confusion about this. If there was an open source toolchain for doing what Pediapress currently does, then Wikimedia itself or any third party organization or individual could use it to create manuscripts suitable for printing, and use any printer they liked to achieve that end. I think the crux of the argument should be: is it OK for Wikimedia to have a partnership with a service provider who uses closed source software as an integral part of the service they provide. Pediapress sets a precedent that says yes, that's completely fine. And maybe it is, but it is then just wrong to refer to this as an open source way of working. Wikimedia policy is to use only free software, at least on the customer-facing side. That includes the PDF-generation process, which runs on our servers AFAIK. Requiring this from sites we (in essence) link to seems excessive. We link to Google Maps via an intermediate page, similar to PediaPress, and their code is not 100% open source either, last time I looked. Cheers, Magnus ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
Wikimedia policy is to use only free software, at least on the customer-facing side. That includes the PDF-generation process, which runs on our servers AFAIK. Requiring this from sites we (in essence) link to seems excessive. We link to Google Maps via an intermediate page, similar to PediaPress, and their code is not 100% open source either, last time I looked. I'm just saying the reason to kvetch about Pediapress is not that they produce books or that they are a company that makes money. The more serious complaint is that they are presently have monopoly status, and that this monopoly is mostly made possible because there is no free/open source toolchain that does what they offer. There's nothing to stop the interested party from linking to OpenStreetMap (http://www.openstreetmap.org/) instead of Google Maps, and their code is available too (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/The_Rails_Port). But in any case, no one refers to Google Maps as an open source product. Referring to something as open source when it isn't is a bad practice. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
2010/11/12 Joe Corneli holtzerman...@gmail.com: I'm just saying the reason to kvetch about Pediapress is not that they produce books or that they are a company that makes money. The more serious complaint is that they are presently have monopoly status, and that this monopoly is mostly made possible because there is no free/open source toolchain that does what they offer. What's open: - the Collection extension - the MediaWiki parser (mwlib) - export support for PDF (via ReportLab), ODT, DocBook, XHTML at different states of completeness; PDF being the only one I would characterize as mature - a few helper tools (All the code used on WMF servers plus some code not currently used by us.) Available via: http://code.pediapress.com/git/ What's proprietary: - the LaTeX export used by PediaPress.com for rendering printed books - all aspects of the PediaPress.com web service I'd love for the LaTeX export to be made available as open source as well. Heiko and I have talked a few times about this -- obviously it's understandable why they prefer to at least keep some secret sauce. Policy-wise, what's key to us is that everything running on the WMF side is open, but it'd be in the spirit of the partnership to make the full toolchain open source (ideally without killing a tiny company that's done all the work in favor of a bigger one benefiting from it). -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
I'd love for the LaTeX export to be made available as open source as well. Heiko and I have talked a few times about this -- obviously it's understandable why they prefer to at least keep some secret sauce. Policy-wise, what's key to us is that everything running on the WMF side is open, but it'd be in the spirit of the partnership to make the full toolchain open source (ideally without killing a tiny company that's done all the work in favor of a bigger one benefiting from it). But the thing is, it's not really so much of a secret, i.e., one of these days someone will write a free/open LaTeX export and that will be that. Pediapress will then have to rethink their business model. Or they could get started rethinking it now, and once they've gotten it sorted out, they could just release their LaTeX export and be done with it. So, in order to help them out, we should ask, what IS the business model in the endgame where proprietary code isn't part of the picture? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 09:55, Amir E. Aharoni amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il wrote: I also don't understand who would want a printed copy of a Wikipedia article. Me neither, but if some people want it, why not. Like: - to show non-internet people that that wikipedia thing is not another stupid homepage but look, it could produce a real, serious, reliable (no, really!) book - to use it as demo material - give it as an award - books look real and serious, phychologically have more value than a webpage - using a book means more focused attention and less possible deviations from the topic by clicking unrelated links It's just another media for the information to be shared. We should be happy to have the possibility, helps our goal. Peter ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On 11/11/10 19:47, MZMcBride wrote: I don't understand why this specific company/organization has been given special status (when there are surely thousands of companies looking to partner with Wikimedia). They had a custom MediaWiki extension installed[2] that has a very prominent place in the sidebar of one of the most popular sites in the world. Why? I also don't understand who would want a printed copy of a Wikipedia article. It seems antithetical to the point of the Internet and the creation of an online encyclopedia. These two paragraphs contradict each other. You say that there must be thousands of companies willing to do what PediaPress did, and then you say that their product is pointless and you don't see why anyone would buy it. PediaPress developed the PDF export system (Collection, mwlib) with their own money, and released them under an open source license. There was nobody else offering to do such a thing. They had no way to tell whether they would be able to recover this development cost, and their other startup costs, from book sales. But to give themselves a fighting chance, they negotiated with Wikimedia to get sidebar placement. From Wikimedia's point of view, the proposition was hard to resist. Offline copies were always part of the Foundation's mission, and the Foundation has a history of partnering with commercial organisations to do distribution. For example, there was a CD of the German Wikipedia for sale in November 2004. This distribution concept predates the Foundation, and has been consistently supported by Jimmy and others. It's not antithetical to anything. See for instance from 2001: http://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_FAQ Q. What legalities must be considered in creating conventional printed snapshots of Wikipedia? Are there any plans for any? Re the second question: No specific plans on the part of Bomis yet, anyway (there has been vague talk and long-term dreams)--that doesn't mean someone else couldn't do it, even right now. This is open content, after all. From January 2003: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Paper_Wikipedia From August 2003: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Pushing_to_1.0oldid=1319379 -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
Tim Starling wrote: On 11/11/10 19:47, MZMcBride wrote: I don't understand why this specific company/organization has been given special status (when there are surely thousands of companies looking to partner with Wikimedia). They had a custom MediaWiki extension installed[2] that has a very prominent place in the sidebar of one of the most popular sites in the world. Why? I also don't understand who would want a printed copy of a Wikipedia article. It seems antithetical to the point of the Internet and the creation of an online encyclopedia. These two paragraphs contradict each other. You say that there must be thousands of companies willing to do what PediaPress did, and then you say that their product is pointless and you don't see why anyone would buy it. Not really. The first point was that thousands of companies (whether print-related or not) are trying to partner with Wikimedia, if for no other reason than Wikipedia is a really popular website. PediaPress broke through and now has really prominent placement on, among other sites, the English Wikipedia. The second point is that this particular venture that Wikimedia entered into (inexplicably, in my view) is rather silly. PediaPress developed the PDF export system (Collection, mwlib) with their own money, and released them under an open source license. There was nobody else offering to do such a thing. They had no way to tell whether they would be able to recover this development cost, and their other startup costs, from book sales. But to give themselves a fighting chance, they negotiated with Wikimedia to get sidebar placement. They negotiated with Wikimedia? Where and when? How many thousands of companies would like their links in the sidebar of the fifth most-visited website in the world? Are they really that good at negotiating? On the English Wikipedia, there's a Book namespace and the sidebar has a completely separate print/export section that comes from the Collection extension. That's worth a percentage of the book sales? This distribution concept predates the Foundation, and has been consistently supported by Jimmy and others. It's not antithetical to anything. I think focusing energy and efforts on creating print versions of Wikipedia articles is antithetical to the idea of creating an online encyclopedia. The benefits of the Internet (and more specifically Wikipedia) include the ability to centralize information in one place and the ability to update information in a quicker manner. The idea that it's a good idea to distribute hard copies of these articles, negating two huge benefits of the Internet and of Wikipedia, is baffling to me. The business model seems to mostly consist of hey, look, we've reverted to the printing press! The people living in places without readily available Internet access don't seem like the same people who would want to order a printed copy of List of The Simpsons episodes. I've read Wikimedia's PediaPress press release[1] a few times now and I still can't figure out if PediaPress is a non-profit organization or a for-profit company. I think there's a large distinction between the Wikimedia Foundation taking a community project and encouraging a for-profit company to make money off of it (through sidebar links and installing a custom extension) and working with a non-profit organization to distribute free content. MZMcBride [1] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikis_Go_Printable ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 I've read Wikimedia's PediaPress press release[1] a few times now and I still can't figure out if PediaPress is a non-profit organization or a for-profit company. I think there's a large distinction between the Wikimedia Foundation taking a community project and encouraging a for-profit company to make money off of it (through sidebar links and installing a custom extension) and working with a non-profit organization to distribute free content. MZMcBride [1] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Wikis_Go_Printable I agree with you. It's funny how this topic echoes the way the recent thread about advertising on wikipedia ended: On 08/11/2010 22:04, Fred Bauder wrote: An interesting idea would be a standalone static copy of wikipedia that really tried their utmost to make the product visually appealing, and used the generated money from the advertisements purely to fund ever more timely database dumps It would be interesting to see how frequent database dumping could be financed by advertisement on such a site; the synergy should be obvious -- the more money they generate from adverts, the more resources they can devote to making ever more frequent dumps, so the more timely is the content, which will again make therir product more attractive, and so on -- Jussi-Ville Heiskanen, ~ [[User:Cimon Avaro]] Whether this is great idea or not I don't know, but this is the kind of out of the box thinking that is potentially productive. We could produce periodic polished editions. Fred -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (MingW32) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJM3KjEAAoJEHCAuDvx9Z6LI/YH+QFjDatXS0A78wi5rfF6wWkk NdEth2bFS/X/mXUUUE4xz7uhfZfi7U7V5D1DTtlA8PavcY3hgvtHCNeFip1mMsaK a/YXhzuHqyOR3X8qOvC64zBNHNUsSd5CnEWN0CT98IJmcy49zk+6yk0+QVoy1McX cqPXoq47CvYzo8YH6NoYlWNjOLI/iFOpUAB6QPvsr0sPhJ4mTHVA/OVCCi7LPaSu BDKqZTl1Jxu+Y9bsQqAZ118M1A1atVNUsQ5VGCWeScGxrSR3kJQf/OTDWqyqZD8z 9+JEr15WudoeeH4Xl2DyVtZ/STpbQnRlXH/CczS9FKM7JlBAWuXoXk7Fm5EhWNg= =Op94 -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
In a message dated 11/11/2010 6:23:45 PM Pacific Standard Time, z...@mzmcbride.com writes: I think focusing energy and efforts on creating print versions of Wikipedia articles is antithetical to the idea of creating an online encyclopedia. The benefits of the Internet (and more specifically Wikipedia) include the ability to centralize information in one place and the ability to update information in a quicker manner. The idea that it's a good idea to distribute hard copies of these articles, negating two huge benefits of the Internet and of Wikipedia, is baffling to me. The business model seems to mostly consist of hey, look, we've reverted to the printing press! The people living in places without readily available Internet access don't seem like the same people who would want to order a printed copy of List of The Simpsons episodes. While I agree with part of your aim, that PediaPress's prominent placement (alliterative aren't I?) is an issue going forward, I think this part of your argument is a no-starter. Why should any of us care, if someone else has an extra ability to print a copy? Why they want to, is really secondary. *That* they want to, or alternatively that it doesn't harm us at all to *let* them, is the issue from where I sit. What if I really really want to read that enormous list of who might ascend to the British throne and the next 500 claimaints... in order... which we have. What if I really want to study that list, but I have to go catch a train and I don't have a wireless laptop or the train doesn't? I could print it out and read it in the john if I want. I don't think we should waste effort on *why* someone wants to print it out. The main issue is whether or not we are profiting a company. W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 1:23 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Tim Starling wrote: .. This distribution concept predates the Foundation, and has been consistently supported by Jimmy and others. It's not antithetical to anything. I think focusing energy and efforts on creating print versions of Wikipedia articles is antithetical to the idea of creating an online encyclopedia. The benefits of the Internet (and more specifically Wikipedia) include the ability to centralize information in one place and the ability to update information in a quicker manner. The idea that it's a good idea to distribute hard copies of these articles, negating two huge benefits of the Internet and of Wikipedia, is baffling to me. The business model seems to mostly consist of hey, look, we've reverted to the printing press! I dont understand how it is antithetical. The act of creating an 'online' encyclopedia is about how we build it, and how we publish it. How others distribute and use it is limited by the needs which we don't fulfill. That said, I don't like the idea of print editions of Wikipedia ending up in libraries without having gone through appropriate levels of editing by real editors, as is reportly being done by Books Llc and VDM Publishing. I hope WMF is sufficiently in control of this partnership to ensure that they are not in bed with a company which stoops to that level. -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 20:23, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: I've read Wikimedia's PediaPress press release[1] a few times now and I still can't figure out if PediaPress is a non-profit organization or a for-profit company. PediaPress is a limited company (GmbH) and seems to be part of Brainbot Technologies AG. http://brainbot.com/technologien/ http://brainbot.com/services/wikis/ Brainbot appears to be a spin-off of DFKI (German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence). http://www.dfki.de/web/ueber/spin-offs DFKI's major shareholders include Microsoft, Daimler, Deutsche Telecom. http://www.dfki.de/web/ueber/gesellschafter This is just from a quick Google search; can't guarantee accuracy or whether it's up to date. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 2:12 PM, SlimVirgin slimvir...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 20:23, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: I've read Wikimedia's PediaPress press release[1] a few times now and I still can't figure out if PediaPress is a non-profit organization or a for-profit company. PediaPress is a limited company (GmbH) and seems to be part of Brainbot Technologies AG. http://brainbot.com/technologien/ http://brainbot.com/services/wikis/ Brainbot appears to be a spin-off of DFKI (German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence). http://www.dfki.de/web/ueber/spin-offs DFKI's major shareholders include Microsoft, Daimler, Deutsche Telecom. http://www.dfki.de/web/ueber/gesellschafter We are calling it a non-profit .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Research_Centre_for_Artificial_Intelligence I think de.wp gets it right, calling it a public-private partnership http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsches_Forschungszentrum_f%C3%BCr_K%C3%BCnstliche_Intelligenz -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 21:20, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 2:12 PM, SlimVirgin slimvir...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Nov 11, 2010 at 20:23, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: I've read Wikimedia's PediaPress press release[1] a few times now and I still can't figure out if PediaPress is a non-profit organization or a for-profit company. PediaPress is a limited company (GmbH) and seems to be part of Brainbot Technologies AG. http://brainbot.com/technologien/ http://brainbot.com/services/wikis/ Brainbot appears to be a spin-off of DFKI (German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence). http://www.dfki.de/web/ueber/spin-offs DFKI's major shareholders include Microsoft, Daimler, Deutsche Telecom. http://www.dfki.de/web/ueber/gesellschafter We are calling it a non-profit .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Research_Centre_for_Artificial_Intelligence I think de.wp gets it right, calling it a public-private partnership http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsches_Forschungszentrum_f%C3%BCr_K%C3%BCnstliche_Intelligenz That wouldn't mean that Brainbot or PediaPress were non-profit. They look like for-profit companies. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
wjhon...@aol.com wrote: In a message dated 11/11/2010 6:23:45 PM Pacific Standard Time, z...@mzmcbride.com writes: I think focusing energy and efforts on creating print versions of Wikipedia articles is antithetical to the idea of creating an online encyclopedia. The benefits of the Internet (and more specifically Wikipedia) include the ability to centralize information in one place and the ability to update information in a quicker manner. The idea that it's a good idea to distribute hard copies of these articles, negating two huge benefits of the Internet and of Wikipedia, is baffling to me. The business model seems to mostly consist of hey, look, we've reverted to the printing press! The people living in places without readily available Internet access don't seem like the same people who would want to order a printed copy of List of The Simpsons episodes. While I agree with part of your aim, that PediaPress's prominent placement (alliterative aren't I?) is an issue going forward, I think this part of your argument is a no-starter. Why should any of us care, if someone else has an extra ability to print a copy? Why they want to, is really secondary. *That* they want to, or alternatively that it doesn't harm us at all to *let* them, is the issue from where I sit. What if I really really want to read that enormous list of who might ascend to the British throne and the next 500 claimaints... in order... which we have. What if I really want to study that list, but I have to go catch a train and I don't have a wireless laptop or the train doesn't? I could print it out and read it in the john if I want. I don't think we should waste effort on *why* someone wants to print it out. The main issue is whether or not we are profiting a company. I think there's some conflation here. Nobody is arguing that you shouldn't be able to print out a Wikipedia article (at your home computer, at the library, wherever). But you're not going to be ordering a bound book of heirs to the throne if you want to read it on the next train. There are a limited amount of resources available. In this case, as Tim said, the resources (namely the extension development) were essentially donated, but nothing in life is free. They were donated seemingly because this company wanted to turn a profit. There's nothing wrong with that and PediaPress certainly isn't unique in wanting to monetize off of Wikipedia. What does appear to be unique is that this particular company gets what I'd describe as star treatment. This includes having their custom code enabled, a prominent section in the sidebar, and even blog posts on the Wikimedia blog shilling for their products. Again, I still can't readily determine if this is a non-profit organization or a for-profit company. I think there's definitely a difference between the two. My gut feeling is that this is a for-profit company (I don't see any reason why a non-profit would try to mask their non-profit status), which begs the question of why this particular for-profit company is exceptional. MZMcBride ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
A bit of general background: The Collection/Book creator feature allows managing, organizing and exporting content in PDF and in OpenDocument (the latter is still very buggy). We're planning to work with PediaPress to add OpenZIM support (useful for offline readers like Kiwix); EPUB is a possibility. The feature supports pulling specific article revisions, or the current revision, and it has some nice features like automatic suggestion of articles, easy addition of articles to collections while browsing, etc. Although PediaPress are the developers behind the feature, it's completely separate from their services (providing printed books). If PediaPress were to disappear tomorrow, we'd continue providing the remaining functionality. In fact, at this point in time, uses of the feature for digital offline distributions are more interesting to us from a strategic point of view than print distribution. Because images and other media quickly inflate any offline export, content selections may often be the more viable method to create digital offline distributions of WP content. The 1,400 selections already compiled using the Collection extension provide a great starting point for this. It's also conceivable to work with validation partners to create trusted selections of content for schools etc. We have a non-exclusive business partnership with PediaPress (a small for-profit company) with regard to their provision of print services, which is commission-based. From a mission standpoint, it's nice for both our audience and our contributors to have the print options available, which is supported by demand (about 2,000 per quarter -- we'll soon have a WikiStats report on book sales) and user feedback. It can also be great outreach tool. In fact, as Tim pointed out, the idea of printed selections is a very old idea that very many Wikipedians have worked on over the years. The goal of the relationship with PediaPress was to have an open toolset that any and all efforts towards print or other export formats could build upon. PediaPress has been a model partner -- they're super-responsive, and interact directly with the community to service all aspects of the technology. I'm personally very pleased that the hardcover and color options are now available. There are so many fantastic photos and illustrations in Wikimedia projects that the black/white books really didn't do them justice. It's certainly not for everyone, but for those of us who like to show our family and friends what this whole Wikipedia thing we spend so much time on is all about, it can be pretty awesome. Kindle or not, a printed book gives a very tangible reality to our efforts. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
If we're concerned about the WMF referring in its blog to a for-profit organisation that happens to be working with us in a way that is open-source, offline and furthering our mission to distribute our content widely, why did no one complain about the OpenMoko Wikireader being in the WMF blog: http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2009/10/13/openmoko-launches-wikireader/ There are several examples of commercial services being used in Wikimedia projects that are integrated in a way that is acceptable because they further our mission of sharing free-cultural resources effectively: - The Geohack tool that you see when clicking on any geocode link in an article (e.g. Eiffel Tower: http://toolserver.org/~geohack/geohack.php?pagename=Eiffel_Towerparams=48.8583_N_2.2945_E_type:landmark_region:FR-75) This brings up a list of for-profit and non-profit mapping services notably Google Maps and OpenStreetMap respectively. - The ISBN lookup tool (e.g. Anna Karenina http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/978-1-84749-059-9 ) brings up an extensive list of commercial book services and public/university libraries. - The template:social bookmarks that appears at the bottom of every Wikinews article http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Template:Social_bookmarks (and briefly appeared recently next to every commons file recently) refers our users to several commercial organisations to share/like/fan/digg/tweet/stumble/dent a Wikinews article. All three of those systems are community-developed and no one is reasonably complaining that we are sending our readers to those commercial services because they are integrated in a way that is relevant/appropriate for the kind of re-use that is A Good Thing™. I suspect that the issue lies not with the fact that you are only a couple of clicks away from the PediaPress bookprinting service from every Wikipedia article, but more the fact that the PediaPress system is the *only *service listed on the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Book As Erik mentioned in the previous email, the relationship with PediaPress is non-exclusive and entirely independent from the Book Creator code. If there is another organisation out there that offers a printing-and-binding service that is comparable to what PediaPress offers then we could/should add it to the list but I don't believe there is. -Liam wittylama.com/blog Peace, love metadata ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On 12/11/10 13:23, MZMcBride wrote: They negotiated with Wikimedia? Where and when? How many thousands of companies would like their links in the sidebar of the fifth most-visited website in the world? Are they really that good at negotiating? On the English Wikipedia, there's a Book namespace and the sidebar has a completely separate print/export section that comes from the Collection extension. That's worth a percentage of the book sales? Potential parternships are assessed by mission-relevance, not just revenue potential. Offline distribution is part of the Foundation's mission, as is open source software development. PediaPress were offering to do those two things. Note that PediaPress's software is useful even if you don't want to buy a book. It offers free PDF downloads, generated by mwlib. It would have been a useful thing to have in the sidebar, even without the print-on-demand feature. If PediaPress goes out of business, the sidebar link will stay there. So I think it would be more accurate to say that PediaPress are getting a box on [[Special:Book]], not a sidebar link. I think focusing energy and efforts on creating print versions of Wikipedia articles is antithetical to the idea of creating an online encyclopedia. You're entitled to your opinion, but this is not the Foundation's position. Print versions have always been supported by both the community and the Foundation. I've read Wikimedia's PediaPress press release[1] a few times now and I still can't figure out if PediaPress is a non-profit organization or a for-profit company. It says it's a startup, which means a startup company, i.e. for-profit. I think there's a large distinction between the Wikimedia Foundation taking a community project and encouraging a for-profit company to make money off of it (through sidebar links and installing a custom extension) and working with a non-profit organization to distribute free content. Yes, it is an important distinction. The reason our content licenses are friendly to commercial use is to allow companies to make money by distributing Wikipedia's content. The theory is that commercial activity can help to further our mission, more effectively than the non-profit sector working alone. The Foundation's mission is to educate, not to educate as much as is possible without anyone making any money. From another post: There are a limited amount of resources available. In this case, as Tim said, the resources (namely the extension development) were essentially donated, but nothing in life is free. They were donated seemingly because this company wanted to turn a profit. I don't think it's accurate to call it a donation. It was an investment. There's nothing wrong with that and PediaPress certainly isn't unique in wanting to monetize off of Wikipedia. What does appear to be unique is that this particular company gets what I'd describe as star treatment. This includes having their custom code enabled, a prominent section in the sidebar, and even blog posts on the Wikimedia blog shilling for their products. The reason they are treated differently is that their activities further our mission. I understand that you don't agree with that part of our mission. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
Liam Wyatt wrote: I suspect that the issue lies not with the fact that you are only a couple of clicks away from the PediaPress bookprinting service from every Wikipedia article, but more the fact that the PediaPress system is the *only *service listed on the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Book As Erik mentioned in the previous email, the relationship with PediaPress is non-exclusive and entirely independent from the Book Creator code. I enjoyed your examples of for-profit companies' products being integrated with Wikimedia. I wonder, if a company like CafePress wanted to sell Wikimedia apparel and would donate a percentage of their revenue to Wikimedia, would they get a sidebar link (or section) as well? The response from Erik seems to be well, having printed copies of our work makes us feel good, which is perfectly fine, but so does a fitted T-shirt with the Wikipedia logo on the front. Would a company like CafePress be allowed to have a link in the sidebar to their Wikimedia-related products? What are the exact criteria for getting to be only a couple of clicks away for millions of visitors? The larger context of this thread (for me, at least) is that, given that (a) Wikipedia is about to turn ten, (b) Wikipedia gets millions of views per day, and (c) people are always looking for ways to make money, why is it that so few companies have partnered with Wikimedia in the way that PediaPress has? Tim mentioned the Wikipedia DVD, which I'd forgotten about and don't quite remember the details of. There was also a Virgin (Mobile?) ad in the fundraising banners at some point. However, these examples seem rather limited and sparse. I'm not arguing that that's a bad thing, but it still feels rather odd to me, especially when I look at a company at PediaPress and try to figure out what made them seemingly special. MZMcBride ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 00:07, Liam Wyatt liamwy...@gmail.com wrote: There are several examples of commercial services being used in Wikimedia projects that are integrated in a way that is acceptable because they further our mission of sharing free-cultural resources effectively: Liam, none of the examples you give has a presence on every article. The issue is that this private company has a button at the side of every page on one of the most popular sites on the Web. If I were to set up Virgin Ventures to write high-quality, policy-compliant articles for companies and people that needed them -- benefiting the subjects, the readers, and Wikipedia -- might I be given a button in the toolbox too? Red link? Click here for the Virgin! I would promise to give Wikimedia 50 percent of the profits. I hope you'll consider this generous offer. Sarah -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SlimVirgin ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
Hello Sarah, I would put it somehow differently. If Virgin Ventures has a tool with which a newbie (or also an oldbie) can in a very intuitive way construct a well formatted article from the scrap, so something like that magic editor we had talked about for long time and never realized until now, and it is open source, I would certainly consider a button in the toolbox like Use the wizard to start an article. Greetings Ting On 12.11.2010 07:44, wrote SlimVirgin: On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 00:07, Liam Wyattliamwy...@gmail.com wrote: There are several examples of commercial services being used in Wikimedia projects that are integrated in a way that is acceptable because they further our mission of sharing free-cultural resources effectively: Liam, none of the examples you give has a presence on every article. The issue is that this private company has a button at the side of every page on one of the most popular sites on the Web. If I were to set up Virgin Ventures to write high-quality, policy-compliant articles for companies and people that needed them -- benefiting the subjects, the readers, and Wikipedia -- might I be given a button in the toolbox too? Red link? Click here for the Virgin! I would promise to give Wikimedia 50 percent of the profits. I hope you'll consider this generous offer. Sarah -- Ting Ting's Blog: http://wingphilopp.blogspot.com/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
Tim Starling wrote: On 12/11/10 13:23, MZMcBride wrote: They negotiated with Wikimedia? Where and when? How many thousands of companies would like their links in the sidebar of the fifth most-visited website in the world? Are they really that good at negotiating? On the English Wikipedia, there's a Book namespace and the sidebar has a completely separate print/export section that comes from the Collection extension. That's worth a percentage of the book sales? Potential parternships are assessed by mission-relevance, not just revenue potential. Offline distribution is part of the Foundation's mission, as is open source software development. PediaPress were offering to do those two things. [...] I think there's a large distinction between the Wikimedia Foundation taking a community project and encouraging a for-profit company to make money off of it (through sidebar links and installing a custom extension) and working with a non-profit organization to distribute free content. Yes, it is an important distinction. The reason our content licenses are friendly to commercial use is to allow companies to make money by distributing Wikipedia's content. The theory is that commercial activity can help to further our mission, more effectively than the non-profit sector working alone. The Foundation's mission is to educate, not to educate as much as is possible without anyone making any money. [...] The reason they are treated differently is that their activities further our mission. I understand that you don't agree with that part of our mission. The problem I have with statements like these is that they feel disingenuous. The mission statement is as vague or as specific as the person arguing deems it to be. There are thousands of potential projects that Wikimedia could engage in that would fit perfectly within the current mission statement[1] and thousands more that would loosely fit in. It's mostly a matter of how many steps removed you choose to allow a particular venture to be. If I sell Wikimedia T-shirts, I'm building the Wikimedia brand, which leads to more donations during the fundraiser, which leads to more servers, which further enables the dissemination of educational content. Does that mean that selling T-shirts is within Wikimedia's mission? What is and isn't mission-relevant seems to be (perhaps intentionally) completely ambiguous. Ultimately, who decides whether a partnership with a company like PediaPress is mission-relevant? The Board of Trustees? The Executive Director? The Head of Business Development? And beyond who makes the decision, is there any guarantee that it will be a valid one? Given the vagueness of the mission statement, how much of a stretch is acceptable? MZMcBride [1] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission_statement ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
In a message dated 11/11/2010 10:08:33 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, liamwy...@gmail.com writes: If there is another organisation out there that offers a printing-and-binding service that is comparable to what PediaPress offers then we could/should add it to the list but I don't believe there is. I think that misses the mark a bit. It is not our mission to decide that one provider is better than others and then use them to the exclusion of anyone else. We don't pick Amazon over the American Book Exchange, we provide both links. So the real issue here shouldn't be whether any other book binder is comparable, but rather whether any other book binder *wants* to be listed. W ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 08:06, wjhon...@aol.com wrote: So the real issue here shouldn't be whether any other book binder is comparable, but rather whether any other book binder *wants* to be listed. Right on spot. Does any? Are there any others? I'm for listing them all. g ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
Ting Chen wrote: I would put it somehow differently. If Virgin Ventures has a tool with which a newbie (or also an oldbie) can in a very intuitive way construct a well formatted article from the scrap, so something like that magic editor we had talked about for long time and never realized until now, and it is open source, I would certainly consider a button in the toolbox like Use the wizard to start an article. I don't understand this. Why are you suggesting that an article wizard tool is comparable to the submission form/human work combination that PediaPress uses? PediaPress takes the user input and then humans create and ship a book. Sarah is suggesting taking user input and then having humans create and publish an article. There isn't a requirement that magic be involved, though I think it's reasonable to say that the form submission code should be open source. If the form submission code were open source, would it be acceptable to put a link to such an article-writing service on every page? MZMcBride ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] PediaPress
On 12/11/10 17:55, MZMcBride wrote: There are thousands of potential projects that Wikimedia could engage in that would fit perfectly within the current mission statement[1] and thousands more that would loosely fit in. I use the word mission in the broad sense, i.e. what we are trying to do as an organisation. I'm not referencing any particular tagline or mission statement. Defining our mission and interpreting our mission statement is the role of the Board, the executive and the strategy process. They have produced various documents and decisions which help to guide the staff. -- Tim Starling ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] pediapress in English... and in hardcover?
Hi there, 2010/5/9 Delphine Ménard notafi...@gmail.com: On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 3:44 PM, Mike.lifeguard mike.lifegu...@gmail.com wrote: On 37-01--10 03:59 PM, Samuel Klein wrote: Lost in the recent email flood: pediapress is fully working for English. http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/06/wikipedia-and-pediapress-now-allow-you-to-create-books-from-content-in-english/ Does anyone have photos of prototype hardcover books? Are the hardcover books new? IIRC, they were only paperback when this Not quite there yet. was first introduced. But I'd be surprised if they didn't have some images for promotional purposes. I don't suppose we could ask them oh-so-nicely to release them under a free license? :D Well, given that all the other ones have always been released under a free license, I don't see why not ;) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:PediaPress I've asked for a pic of a hard cover. I'll upload it to commons. As promised, here is a taste of what it will look like. PediaPress is still experimenting with the whole thing and those pics are not of the best quality, but it's a start. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pediapress_couleur_inside.jpg http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tranche_pediapress_book.jpg http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pediapress_hardcover_sample.jpg Cheers, Delphine -- ~notafish NB. This gmail address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails will get lost. Intercultural musings: Ceci n'est pas une endive - http://blog.notanendive.org ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] pediapress in English... and in hardcover?
Cool. On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 9:51 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: Lost in the recent email flood: pediapress is fully working for English. http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/06/wikipedia-and-pediapress-now-allow-you-to-create-books-from-content-in-english/ Does anyone have photos of prototype hardcover books? Sam. Delphine uploaded them already to Commons. By the way, you guys may be aware Extention:Book is now activated on several other projects including meta. I tested it and found it has several problems so serious as not to serve the purpose to prepare a readable pdf; wrong selection of fonts and glyphs or just failure of rendering etc. At least it doesn't work for Japanese and I suppose it may be same in other non-European/non-latin-script languages. So I'd like you to test it and file a bug for better quality. ... and here my question: Is Bugzilla the place where to file bugs at this time too? Cheers, ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- KIZU Naoko http://d.hatena.ne.jp/Britty (in Japanese) Quote of the Day (English): http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/WQ:QOTD ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] pediapress in English... and in hardcover?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 37-01--10 03:59 PM, Samuel Klein wrote: Lost in the recent email flood: pediapress is fully working for English. http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/06/wikipedia-and-pediapress-now-allow-you-to-create-books-from-content-in-english/ Does anyone have photos of prototype hardcover books? Sam. Are the hardcover books new? IIRC, they were only paperback when this was first introduced. But I'd be surprised if they didn't have some images for promotional purposes. I don't suppose we could ask them oh-so-nicely to release them under a free license? :D BTW, User:Whiteknight on enwikibooks likely has some images of paperback ones. - -Mike -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.10 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkvmvD8ACgkQst0AR/DaKHv+jACfcpQQyQMUxI7RjNFcSX17qraR +CQAn3RddZHhIK1oeYm8YCotyz+WDplu =ML+z -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] pediapress in English... and in hardcover?
On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 3:44 PM, Mike.lifeguard mike.lifegu...@gmail.com wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 37-01--10 03:59 PM, Samuel Klein wrote: Lost in the recent email flood: pediapress is fully working for English. http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/06/wikipedia-and-pediapress-now-allow-you-to-create-books-from-content-in-english/ Does anyone have photos of prototype hardcover books? Are the hardcover books new? IIRC, they were only paperback when this Not quite there yet. was first introduced. But I'd be surprised if they didn't have some images for promotional purposes. I don't suppose we could ask them oh-so-nicely to release them under a free license? :D Well, given that all the other ones have always been released under a free license, I don't see why not ;) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:PediaPress I've asked for a pic of a hard cover. I'll upload it to commons. Cheers, Delphine -- ~notafish NB. This gmail address is used for mailing lists. Personal emails will get lost. Intercultural musings: Ceci n'est pas une endive - http://blog.notanendive.org ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
