[Wikimedia-l] Distinction between service and content (Re: Monetizing Wikimedia APIs)

[Rob Lanphier]

Hi everyone,

Splitting the thread off to avoid hijacking it

On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 9:50 AM, Mitar  wrote:

> I think this conversation is diverging from the question of the
> *service* we should offer to others to licensing of the content.
> Licensing does not say anything about the service one should offer for
> the content. Any service, any API, is more or less something one does
> extra on top of the licensing requirements. We could just offer dumps
> of data and this is it. But if we offer more, some specialized
> services, uptime and availability and so on, that does not have much
> with the licensing of the content. That discussion should thus be on
> some other layer. Investigating licensing will not give us much
> insight into the question if we should go into the business of
> offering data services or not.


I think this is a useful way of thinking about the problem.  One thing we
discussed quite a bit at the Wikimedia Developer Summit earlier this month
is the distinction between the content format (see "content format" <
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T119022>) and the APIs that we use to
access the content (see "content access":  <
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T119029>).

The two are incredibly easy to conflate, in part because one could argue
that the content format is merely a translatable expression of the
underlying data model.  That said, it seems to me that we have to stop
abstracting things *somewhere*, to avoid getting deeply lost in too many
layers of abstraction.  If nothing else, we need a "free format" per the
Free Content definition ().

Mitar, is your layer distinction between "service" and "content" the same
one that I'm trying to draw between "content format" and "content access"?
I have further thoughts on this, but I just want to make sure we're talking
about the same distinction.

Rob
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] [Engineering] IRC office hour this Thursday: reconnecting with the shared hosting community

[Rob Lanphier]

Hi Gilles,

Thanks for leading this!  My reading of your agenda leads me to believe
that this is intended as a "problem solving" meeting, as described in
User:RobLa-WMF/Meetings#Taxonomy.  To quote that article:

*Problem-solving* - Discuss a problem that we don’t know how to solve.
> "Conversation for possibility" as described by 1999 article
> 
>
>- Successful outcome: an idea or a reasonably complete list of ideas
>for how to solve the problem
>
>
>- Successful outcome: consensus on the priority about the importance
>of solving this problem (or consensus that it isn’t a problem after all)
>
>
>- Non-goal: a decision for how to solve the problem
>
>
Does that seem like an accurate characterization for what you have planned
on Thursday?  I recommend structuring the conversation (and figure out
action items) to achieve your imagined goal.

Rob

On Mon, Nov 16, 2015 at 11:59 AM, Gilles Dubuc  wrote:

> As part of T113210 [1], which is a broader discussion on track for the
> developer summit, I am hosting an IRC office hour [2] this Thursday at
> 19:00 UTC.
>
> Since shared hosting is a broad topic, this session will focus
> specifically on brainstorming ways to reconnect with the shared hosting
> community. Shared hosting mediawiki users are currently underrepresented in
> the greater mediawiki community. We rarely run into them in phabricator, on
> gerrit or on the mailing lists. Which means that people often have to think
> on their behalf about their use cases and issues, instead of getting direct
> input.
>
> There must be practical ways to bring those thousands of mediawiki users
> back into the fold, so to speak. Hopefully we can come up with interesting
> ideas to achieve that.
>
> And if you happen to be a shared hosting user, by all means, please join
> this IRC office hour :)
>
> [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T113210
> [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours#Upcoming_office_hours
>
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>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] RfC: Should we support MP4 Video on our sites?

[Rob Lanphier]

On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 10:32 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote:

 It is important to note that WMF itself is not in any way neutral on
 this issue: adding MPEG4 is explicitly listed as a 2014 goal for the
 Multimedia team.

 That is, it has already been determined that this is *going to happen*.

 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/2013-14_Goals#Activities
 https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=File:Multimedia_Quarterly_Review_12-03-2013.pdfpage=61


The goals page says Establish an audio/video codec strategy about
licensing codecs like MPEG4  This RFC is part of establishing that
strategy.  If the answer from this RFC is no MP4, then whatever
strategy we have will work within that constraint.

The slide deck was published from a meeting where I can assure you
Fabrice said something to the effect of of course, this all depends
on the result of the RFC  :-)

I can definitively state that this question of supporting MP4 has not
been determined.  We will not support MP4 without community consensus.

Rob

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