Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Andreas Kolbe]

On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 5:46 PM, Mitar  wrote:

> Hi!
>
> Please see below the reply by Rob from MusicBrainz (forwarding because
> he is not on the mailing list):
>
> [...]



> There is no requirement for supporting us, but we're quick to
> point out that a company that makes financial gains using our data
> really ought to give something back to us in order for us to keep the
> lights on and improve what we do.
>
> And, this is working!
>


Thanks for sharing this, Mitar (and Rob!). It's an interesting approach.

We generally approach private donors with an argument that boils down to
"if Wikipedia is useful to you, give something back to keep it going and
growing".

The same argument surely applies to corporate donors. If Wikipedia is
useful to them, they too should give something back, no strings attached.
There is no need for large corporate donors to style themselves -- or be
styled by us -- as "philanthropists" if they give $100,000, any more than
the small donor who gives $15 thereby imagines they are becoming a
philanthropist. It's just an aspect of good citizenship, right?

Are we seeing corporates contributing in that spirit? I'm not sure we are.
And if we're not, then this can indeed be framed as a moral issue, along
the lines of what Rob, as I understand him, suggests in his mail.

Now, for such a moral argument to gain traction, the public at large needs
to understand who profits financially from our work. If -- and only if --
the general public understand that, then it will become a PR problem for a
major company to be seen to benefit financially from a volunteer effort,
without giving anything back.

So perhaps there is work to be done here to build wider awareness of the
income streams that are based on Wikimedia content. Ultimately, providing
such information is also consistent with the movement's goal of
transparency.

Andreas
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[Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Steinsplitter Wiki]

I found http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/wiki/foundation/670044

Just FYI for all those who don't read all mailinglists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnHlksSfMEE
  
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Isaac David]

Le lun. 18 janv. 2016 à 3:17, Andrea Zanni  
a écrit :
On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 9:59 AM, David Goodman  
wrote:


 Nor am I concerned that our information might be used by people who 
oppose

 our
 principles. We ask just the same of our contributors--that the 
information

 they contribute may be used for ''any'' purpose.




My concern is when our CC-BY-SA (or CC0) user-generated information 
is not

shared-alike AND it is a cost for the movement (ie a cost in terms of
bandwidth and electricity).
If Google harvests our information, using massively the API we 
provide, and

they just make it a silo for them to use (for the Knowledge Graph, for
example) and this hurts us, I'm wondering if
we can do something about it. There are only very few players who can 
take
all our information and use it as an internal asset, enriching it and 
NOT

sharing it.

I don't think in binary, so for me there is no contradiction to have a
CC-BY-SA content, but some caveat for big, big, big players.
I'm not saying (nobody is) that we have to shift to a NC license. Just
that  I don't want our movement to be hurt by multi-billion dollars
companies: I'm not an expert of the commons (I bet many people in 
this list
are) so I'm genuinely interested in hearing opinions about this. Is 
such

thing as "tragedy of the digital commons"? Can Google (or Amazon or
Facebook) exploits us?

Now please tell me (gently, :-D) where is my mistake in this line of
thought.

Aubrey


CC-BY-SA allows everyone (including big companies) to modify (for 
instance, to enrich)
and not share-alike AS LONG AS their extended work is kept private. 
That means
Facebook pages and Google infoboxes based on CC-BY-SA content ought to 
carry
the CC-BY-SA license too, because they are distributed to an audience 
wider than the

changes' copyright owners (usually the companies themselves).

CC0 obviously permits everything, including not sharing back at all.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Andrea Zanni]

On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 9:59 AM, David Goodman  wrote:

> Nor am I concerned that our information might be used by people who oppose
> our
> principles. We ask just the same of our contributors--that the information
> they contribute may be used for ''any'' purpose.
>


My concern is when our CC-BY-SA (or CC0) user-generated information is not
shared-alike AND it is a cost for the movement (ie a cost in terms of
bandwidth and electricity).
If Google harvests our information, using massively the API we provide, and
they just make it a silo for them to use (for the Knowledge Graph, for
example) and this hurts us, I'm wondering if
we can do something about it. There are only very few players who can take
all our information and use it as an internal asset, enriching it and NOT
sharing it.

I don't think in binary, so for me there is no contradiction to have a
CC-BY-SA content, but some caveat for big, big, big players.
I'm not saying (nobody is) that we have to shift to a NC license. Just
that  I don't want our movement to be hurt by multi-billion dollars
companies: I'm not an expert of the commons (I bet many people in this list
are) so I'm genuinely interested in hearing opinions about this. Is such
thing as "tragedy of the digital commons"? Can Google (or Amazon or
Facebook) exploits us?

Now please tell me (gently, :-D) where is my mistake in this line of
thought.

Aubrey
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[David Goodman]

Our users are the world in general; the decision not  to make our license
-NC is a basic part of our fundamental understanding. If were were asked by
a commercial entity to provide a service beyond what we could afford, then
I can see the need for some sort of arrangement, for it is better to
provide information even for money than not to provide it. But this is not
the case--we can afford what is asked of us. While people access knowledge
 through commercial systems, we should provide the knowledge. The world is
as it is. It the same principle as  WP Zero.

It is important that we never become a commercial player  in the world of
information. Let others do what they will, our mission is to support the
idea that knowledge can be free, and we prove it by what we do. Nor am I
concerned that our information might be used by people who oppose our
principles. We ask just the same of our contributors--that the information
they contribute may be used for ''any'' purpose.  We ask them to
acknowledge that honest  information is always and unreservedly a good
thing in itself.  Even if a industrial enterprise should pervert out
information, even if a government should use our knowledge to pervert
democracy, the basic provision of the knowledge is our purpose. The evil
will use it for evil, as they use everything else for evil. If we believe
our principles ,that the good will use  - will use it is more important,
and that we not discriminate in favor of what we think to be good is part
of the principle of honest reporting as distinct from advocacy.  We Our
customers are the world in general; the decision not  to make our license
-NC is a basic part of the fundamental understanding. If were were asked by
a commercial entity to provide a service beyond what we could afford, then
I can seethe need for some sort of arrangement, for it is better to provide
information even for money than not to provide it. But this is not the
case--we can afford what is asked of us. I hold no brief for the commercial
world and might not even describe myself as a supporter of the capitalist
system. But while people access knowledge  through commercial systems, we
should provide the knowledge. The world is as it is. It the same principle
as  WP Zero.

It is important that we never become a commercial player  in the world of
information. Let others do what they will, our mission is to support the
idea that knowledge can be free, and we prove it by what we do. Nor am I
concerned that our information might be used by people who oppose our
principles. We ask just the same of our contributors--that the information
they contribute may be used for ''any'' purpose.  We ask them to
acknowledge that honest  information is always and unreservedly a good
thing in itself.  Even if a industrial enterprise should pervert out
information, even if a government should use our knowledge to pervert
democracy, the basic provision of the knowledge is our purpose. The evil
will use it for evil, as they use everything else for evil. If we believe
our principles, that the good will use it is more important, and that we
not discriminate in favor of what we think to be good is part of the
principle of honest reporting and honest research as distinct from
advocacy.

Advocacy is good also. The WMF and the people who support it should engage
in advocacy for free knowledge. That the Foundation supports this freedom,
and opposes those who would restrict it, is important; one of the
justifications for having the Foundation is to concentrate and mobilize the
power of our users for effective action.  This too is part of our mission,
but it is separate from providing access to the encyclopedia.

On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 2:22 AM, Legoktm 
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On 01/16/2016 06:11 PM, Denny Vrandecic wrote:
> > To give a bit more thoughts: I am not terribly worried about current
> > crawlers. But currently, and more in the future, I expect us to provide
> > more complex and this expensive APIs: a SPARQL endpoint, parsing APIs,
> etc.
> > These will be simply expensive to operate. Not for infrequent users -
> say,
> > to the benefit of us 70,000 editors - but for use cases that involve tens
> > or millions of requests per day. These have the potential of burning a
> lot
> > of funds to basically support the operations of commercial companies
> whose
> > mission might or might not be aligned with our.
>
> Why do they need to use our APIs? As I understand it, the Wikidata
> SPARQL service was designed so that someone could import a Wikidata
> dump, and have their own endpoint to query. I'm sure that someone who
> has the need to make millions of requests per day also has the technical
> resources to set up their own local mirror. I don't think setting up a
> MW mirror would be quite so simple, but it should be doable.
>
> One problem with relying on dumps is that downloading them is often
> slow, and there are rate limits[1]. If Google or other some other 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Mitar]

Hi!

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.


Mitar

On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 9:02 AM, John Mark Vandenberg  wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 2:38 AM, Isaac David  
> wrote:
>>
>> Le lun. 18 janv. 2016 à 3:17, Andrea Zanni  a
>> écrit :
>>>
>>> On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 9:59 AM, David Goodman  wrote:
>>>
  Nor am I concerned that our information might be used by people who
 oppose
  our
  principles. We ask just the same of our contributors--that the
 information
  they contribute may be used for ''any'' purpose.

>>>
>>>
>>> My concern is when our CC-BY-SA (or CC0) user-generated information is not
>>> shared-alike AND it is a cost for the movement (ie a cost in terms of
>>> bandwidth and electricity).
>>> If Google harvests our information, using massively the API we provide,
>>> and
>>> they just make it a silo for them to use (for the Knowledge Graph, for
>>> example) and this hurts us, I'm wondering if
>>> we can do something about it. There are only very few players who can take
>>> all our information and use it as an internal asset, enriching it and NOT
>>> sharing it.
>>>
>>> I don't think in binary, so for me there is no contradiction to have a
>>> CC-BY-SA content, but some caveat for big, big, big players.
>>> I'm not saying (nobody is) that we have to shift to a NC license. Just
>>> that  I don't want our movement to be hurt by multi-billion dollars
>>> companies: I'm not an expert of the commons (I bet many people in this
>>> list
>>> are) so I'm genuinely interested in hearing opinions about this. Is such
>>> thing as "tragedy of the digital commons"? Can Google (or Amazon or
>>> Facebook) exploits us?
>>>
>>> Now please tell me (gently, :-D) where is my mistake in this line of
>>> thought.
>>>
>>> Aubrey
>>
>>
>> CC-BY-SA allows everyone (including big companies) to modify (for instance,
>> to enrich)
>> and not share-alike AS LONG AS their extended work is kept private. That
>> means
>> Facebook pages and Google infoboxes based on CC-BY-SA content ought to carry
>> the CC-BY-SA license too, because they are distributed to an audience wider
>> than the
>> changes' copyright owners (usually the companies themselves).
>
> By this logic, and it is reasonable but debatable, if a Google search
> infobox should be CC-BY-SA, then Wikidata items that contain all the
> same infobox values from a Wikipedia article should also be CC-BY-SA.
>
> --
> John Vandenberg
>
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> 



-- 
http://mitar.tnode.com/
https://twitter.com/mitar_m

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Mitar]

Hi!

Please see below the reply by Rob from MusicBrainz (forwarding because
he is not on the mailing list):

> On Jan 17, 2016, at 04:51, Mitar  wrote:
>
> I would suggest that anyone interested in monetizing APIs check how
> MusicBrainz (https://musicbrainz.org/) is doing it.
>
> An open encyclopedia for music metadata. Their data is all open,
> collaboratively made, and APIs are free to use, but big users are
> asked to pay. In this way they are getting money from Google, for
> example. You should contact them and check how they feel about issues
> raised here: Do they feel that they get strings attached for receiving
> money from Google? How do their contributors feel about them getting
> money in this way? How do they achieve that big players pay, but
> community projects, researchers, and others do not? What is the
> process to determine that? In fact, I am CCing Rob from MusicBrainz
> here.

Hello!

I wanted to give you an update on our business model, since we pivoted
on that back in May. If this sounds bad, it isn't -- we're actually
following along the path that Creative Commons has envisioned for
people using their licenses. For over 10 years we used Creative
Commons licenses to determine if people should or should not pay us
for the data they use in their business. That got us to $250k/year and
then we leveled off. (This is akin to an aspiring CC artist releasing
their content as they work to become known).

But then there comes a point when the business/aspiring artist can
stand on its/their own and start making its/their own rules. And this
is where we've arrived now -- today we have a support model where
people who make commercial use of our data are encouraged to support
us. There is no requirement for supporting us, but we're quick to
point out that a company that makes financial gains using our data
really ought to give something back to us in order for us to keep the
lights on and improve what we do.

And, this is working! Have a look at our growing list of supporters:

   https://metabrainz.org/supporters

The only major music tech company left that isn't supporting us is
Apple and maybe SoundCloud, but they are on my hit list for this year.
Have a look at the tiers of support we setup:

   https://metabrainz.org/supporters/account-type

Note that the tiers have guidelines that are a vague suggestion of
data usage and company size. While people get an idea what "support"
means, it isn't fully clear, so most will sign up as "stealth
start-up", which is great, because it lets us start a conversation
about their data use. In the course of the conversation we can
determine a fair level of support that suits the company's current
needs and ability to pay. Note that we hardly talk about "products" in
this case anymore -- we don't really care how people use our data.
(I've long joked about us operating under a drug dealer business
model, that "the first one is free". But, really, this is exactly what
we're doing. Lots of companies got hooked on our data and now we're
looping around asking for support)

I hope this makes sense -- if not, hit me up for questions!


--

--ruaok Excel is not a database!

Robert Kaye -- r...@musicbrainz.org --http://musicbrainz.org

-- 
http://mitar.tnode.com/
https://twitter.com/mitar_m

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[John Mark Vandenberg]

On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 2:38 AM, Isaac David  wrote:
>
> Le lun. 18 janv. 2016 à 3:17, Andrea Zanni  a
> écrit :
>>
>> On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 9:59 AM, David Goodman  wrote:
>>
>>>  Nor am I concerned that our information might be used by people who
>>> oppose
>>>  our
>>>  principles. We ask just the same of our contributors--that the
>>> information
>>>  they contribute may be used for ''any'' purpose.
>>>
>>
>>
>> My concern is when our CC-BY-SA (or CC0) user-generated information is not
>> shared-alike AND it is a cost for the movement (ie a cost in terms of
>> bandwidth and electricity).
>> If Google harvests our information, using massively the API we provide,
>> and
>> they just make it a silo for them to use (for the Knowledge Graph, for
>> example) and this hurts us, I'm wondering if
>> we can do something about it. There are only very few players who can take
>> all our information and use it as an internal asset, enriching it and NOT
>> sharing it.
>>
>> I don't think in binary, so for me there is no contradiction to have a
>> CC-BY-SA content, but some caveat for big, big, big players.
>> I'm not saying (nobody is) that we have to shift to a NC license. Just
>> that  I don't want our movement to be hurt by multi-billion dollars
>> companies: I'm not an expert of the commons (I bet many people in this
>> list
>> are) so I'm genuinely interested in hearing opinions about this. Is such
>> thing as "tragedy of the digital commons"? Can Google (or Amazon or
>> Facebook) exploits us?
>>
>> Now please tell me (gently, :-D) where is my mistake in this line of
>> thought.
>>
>> Aubrey
>
>
> CC-BY-SA allows everyone (including big companies) to modify (for instance,
> to enrich)
> and not share-alike AS LONG AS their extended work is kept private. That
> means
> Facebook pages and Google infoboxes based on CC-BY-SA content ought to carry
> the CC-BY-SA license too, because they are distributed to an audience wider
> than the
> changes' copyright owners (usually the companies themselves).

By this logic, and it is reasonable but debatable, if a Google search
infobox should be CC-BY-SA, then Wikidata items that contain all the
same infobox values from a Wikipedia article should also be CC-BY-SA.

-- 
John Vandenberg

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Legoktm]

Hi,

On 01/16/2016 06:11 PM, Denny Vrandecic wrote:
> To give a bit more thoughts: I am not terribly worried about current
> crawlers. But currently, and more in the future, I expect us to provide
> more complex and this expensive APIs: a SPARQL endpoint, parsing APIs, etc.
> These will be simply expensive to operate. Not for infrequent users - say,
> to the benefit of us 70,000 editors - but for use cases that involve tens
> or millions of requests per day. These have the potential of burning a lot
> of funds to basically support the operations of commercial companies whose
> mission might or might not be aligned with our.

Why do they need to use our APIs? As I understand it, the Wikidata
SPARQL service was designed so that someone could import a Wikidata
dump, and have their own endpoint to query. I'm sure that someone who
has the need to make millions of requests per day also has the technical
resources to set up their own local mirror. I don't think setting up a
MW mirror would be quite so simple, but it should be doable.

One problem with relying on dumps is that downloading them is often
slow, and there are rate limits[1]. If Google or other some other large
entity wanted to donate some hosting space and bandwidth by re-hosting
our dumps, I think that would be a win-win situation all around - they
get their dumps and can directly rsync from us, as well as taking
pressure off of our infrastructure and letting other people access our
content more easily.

[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T114019#1892529

-- Legoktm

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Gerard Meijssen]

; > > and
> > > > >> rapidly creating them today are important, but are not quite at
> the
> > > core
> > > > >> of
> > > > >> the issue we are facing.
> > > > >>
> > > > >> Today Wikimedia is the largest internet channel for open free
> > > knowledge
> > > > in
> > > > >> the world. But the trends are against us. We have to face them
> > > together.
> > > > >> We
> > > > >> have to have the answers on how. The strategic discussion next
> week
> > > will
> > > > >> help guide us.
> > > > >>
> > > > >> Over the last year we looked at the trends in Wikimedia traffic,
> > > > internet
> > > > >> as a whole and user behaviors. It took a lot of research. When we
> > > > started
> > > > >> the process we have not had solid internal data about unique
> > visitors
> > > or
> > > > >> human vs. crawler usage on the site. For a top 10 website this is
> a
> > > big
> > > > >> issue; it hurts our ability to make smart decisions. We've
> learned a
> > > > lot.
> > > > >>
> > > > >> We found data that supports Leigh's point -- our permissive
> license
> > > > >> supports our core value, we are (I know I am) here for free
> > knowledge.
> > > > Yet
> > > > >> it allows others to use the content in ways that truncates,
> > simplifies
> > > > and
> > > > >> reduces it. More importantly this type of reuse separates our
> > readers
> > > > from
> > > > >> our site, disconnecting readers from our contributors (no edit
> > > buttons)
> > > > >> and
> > > > >> ultimately reduces traffic. Is this a problem? I'd like to hear if
> > > > people
> > > > >> on this list see it as such. And how we sustain contributions over
> > > time.
> > > > >>
> > > > >> Meanwhile estimated half of our hosting is used to support
> crawlers
> > > that
> > > > >> scan our content. This has an associated cost in infrastructure,
> > > power,
> > > > >> servers, employees to support some well-funded organizations. The
> > > > content
> > > > >> is used for a variety of commercial purposes, sometimes having
> > nothing
> > > > to
> > > > >> do with putting our contributor's work in front of more readers.
> > > Still,
> > > > we
> > > > >> can say this is tangentially supportive of our mission.
> > > > >>
> > > > >> As these two trends increase without our intervention, our traffic
> > > > decline
> > > > >> will accelerate, our ability to grow editors, content and cover
> > costs
> > > > will
> > > > >> decline as well.
> > > > >>
> > > > >> The first question on the upcoming consultation next week will be
> > > > squarely
> > > > >> on this. Please help us. API conversation is a consequence of this
> > > > >> challenge. If we were to build more for reuse: APIs are a good way
> > to
> > > do
> > > > >> so. If we are to somehow incentivize users of SIri to come back to
> > > > >> Wikipedia, what would we need to do? Should we improve our site so
> > > more
> > > > >> people come to us directly as the first stop? How do we bring
> people
> > > > into
> > > > >> our world vs. the world of commercial knowledge out there? How do
> we
> > > > fund
> > > > >> this if the people moved to access our content through other
> > > interfaces
> > > > (a
> > > > >> trend that has been accelerating)?
> > > > >>
> > > > >> Those are the core questions we need to face. We will have to have
> > > some
> > > > >> uncomfortable, honest discussions as we test our hypothesis this
> > year.
> > > > The
> > > > >> conversation next week is a good start to prioritize those. Please
> > > join
> > > > >> it.
> > > > >>
> > > > >> Lila
> > > > >>
> > > > >>
> > > > >>
> 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Keegan Peterzell]

I've been thinking about it and this is just bothering me too much.

On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 5:48 PM, Todd Allen  wrote:

> Folks (WMF board, and those closely related), do we really have to hold a
> vote of no confidence to get your attention? Do you have any doubt that
> it'd pass?
>
>
​The Wikimedia Foundation is a private non-profit corporation registered in
Florida. It is not structured as a membership organization (after all,
every human being is technically a member), it is but a single part of the
Wikimedia movement. You have no standing for such a vote, and neither do I.



> Absent that, please start listening to the volunteers. Listening, as in
> doing what they'd like you to do. Otherwise, I'll be putting forth that
> no-confidence vote shortly.
>

​You mean to say, "please start listening to the volunteers ***that agree
with me*. Listening, as in doing what *the people that I agree with* would
like you to do."

Personally, I agree with your position against monetizing any part of our
services.​

​I'm pleasantly surprised that some people that I thought would agree with
me are at least open to the theory, it makes for very interesting
discussion. I do not think that making threats on behalf of everyone, when
it's clear that we are not all in agreement, is useful at all, particularly
when they are toothless.

Personal opinion from a personal account as a longtime Wikimedian, as the
line three bars down after the signature indicates.​

-- 
~Keegan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan

This is my personal email address. Everything sent from this email address
is in a personal capacity.
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Adam Wight]

layer) to
> add
> > > an "edit" button to knowledge graph. Sort of a "knowledge vs. users"
> > > agreement.
> > >
> > > So, we definitely need a long term strategy which the Foundation will
> > > pursue in *negotiating* with anyone who wants a big scale access to
> *our
> > > resources* (while access to our knowledge will have no limits, as
> usual).
> > >
> > > Vito
> > >
> > >
> > > Il 16/01/2016 19:21, Lila Tretikov ha scritto:
> > >
> > >> To share some context of the discussion the board had around this -- I
> > >> don't think the minutes give enough detail. APIs -- as we are freely
> and
> > >> rapidly creating them today are important, but are not quite at the
> core
> > >> of
> > >> the issue we are facing.
> > >>
> > >> Today Wikimedia is the largest internet channel for open free
> knowledge
> > in
> > >> the world. But the trends are against us. We have to face them
> together.
> > >> We
> > >> have to have the answers on how. The strategic discussion next week
> will
> > >> help guide us.
> > >>
> > >> Over the last year we looked at the trends in Wikimedia traffic,
> > internet
> > >> as a whole and user behaviors. It took a lot of research. When we
> > started
> > >> the process we have not had solid internal data about unique visitors
> or
> > >> human vs. crawler usage on the site. For a top 10 website this is a
> big
> > >> issue; it hurts our ability to make smart decisions. We've learned a
> > lot.
> > >>
> > >> We found data that supports Leigh's point -- our permissive license
> > >> supports our core value, we are (I know I am) here for free knowledge.
> > Yet
> > >> it allows others to use the content in ways that truncates, simplifies
> > and
> > >> reduces it. More importantly this type of reuse separates our readers
> > from
> > >> our site, disconnecting readers from our contributors (no edit
> buttons)
> > >> and
> > >> ultimately reduces traffic. Is this a problem? I'd like to hear if
> > people
> > >> on this list see it as such. And how we sustain contributions over
> time.
> > >>
> > >> Meanwhile estimated half of our hosting is used to support crawlers
> that
> > >> scan our content. This has an associated cost in infrastructure,
> power,
> > >> servers, employees to support some well-funded organizations. The
> > content
> > >> is used for a variety of commercial purposes, sometimes having nothing
> > to
> > >> do with putting our contributor's work in front of more readers.
> Still,
> > we
> > >> can say this is tangentially supportive of our mission.
> > >>
> > >> As these two trends increase without our intervention, our traffic
> > decline
> > >> will accelerate, our ability to grow editors, content and cover costs
> > will
> > >> decline as well.
> > >>
> > >> The first question on the upcoming consultation next week will be
> > squarely
> > >> on this. Please help us. API conversation is a consequence of this
> > >> challenge. If we were to build more for reuse: APIs are a good way to
> do
> > >> so. If we are to somehow incentivize users of SIri to come back to
> > >> Wikipedia, what would we need to do? Should we improve our site so
> more
> > >> people come to us directly as the first stop? How do we bring people
> > into
> > >> our world vs. the world of commercial knowledge out there? How do we
> > fund
> > >> this if the people moved to access our content through other
> interfaces
> > (a
> > >> trend that has been accelerating)?
> > >>
> > >> Those are the core questions we need to face. We will have to have
> some
> > >> uncomfortable, honest discussions as we test our hypothesis this year.
> > The
> > >> conversation next week is a good start to prioritize those. Please
> join
> > >> it.
> > >>
> > >> Lila
> > >>
> > >>
> > >>
> > >> On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 6:11 AM, Leigh Thelmadatter <
> > osama...@hotmail.com
> > >> >
> > >> wrote:
> > >>
> > >> If we are concerned about Google taking unfair advantage of Wikipedia,
> >

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Vituzzu]

Il 17/01/2016 00:49, Risker ha scritto:

Hmm.  The majority of those crawlers are from search engines - the very
search engines that keep us in the top 10 of their results (and often in
the top 3), thus leading to the usage and donations that we need to
survive. If they have to pay, then they might prefer to change their
algorithm, or reduce the frequency of scraping (thus also failing to catch
updates to articles including removal of vandalism in the lead paragraphs,
which is historically one of the key reasons for frequently crawling the
same articles).  Those crawlers are what attracts people to our sites, to
read, to make donations, to possibly edit.  Of course there are lesser
crawlers, but they're not really big players.
As usual you nailed it! That's why I wrote "negotiation" implying any 
extra cost should be fairly modulated but also it shouldn't force over 
the tops to leave our services.


I'm at a loss to understand why the Wikimedia Foundation should take on the
costs and indemnities associated with hiring staff to create a for-pay API
that would have to meet the expectations of a customer (or more than one
customer) that hasn't even agreed to pay for access.  If they want a
specialized API (and we've been given no evidence that they do), let THEM
hire the staff, pay them, write the code in an appropriately open-source
way, and donate it to the WMF with the understanding that it could be
modified as required, and that it will be accessible to everyone.

+1 is not enough let's +1e12


It is good that the WMF has studied the usage patterns.  Could a link be
given to the report, please?  It's public, correct?  This is exactly the
point of transparency.  If only the WMF has the information, then it gives
an excuse for the community's comments to be ignored "because they don't
know the facts".  So let's lay out all the facts on the table, please.



From Lila's ongoing choices I'm pretty sure they will.

Il 17/01/2016 03:11, Denny Vrandecic ha scritto:

To give a bit more thoughts: I am not terribly worried about current
crawlers. But currently, and more in the future, I expect us to provide
more complex and this expensive APIs: a SPARQL endpoint, parsing APIs, etc.
These will be simply expensive to operate. Not for infrequent users - say,
to the benefit of us 70,000 editors - but for use cases that involve tens
or millions of requests per day. These have the potential of burning a lot
of funds to basically support the operations of commercial companies whose
mission might or might not be aligned with our.
Then a good synthesis would be "let's Google(*) fund scholarships/summer 
of codes/whatever to build new functionalities then make Google 
reimburse (**) our facilities' usage/increase our userbase(***)".


Notes:
(*) by "Google" I mean any big player
(**) by "reimburse" I mean give us a fairly and proportionally 
determined amount of money based upon *actual* exploitation of our 
hardware/networking resources. This "reimburse" could also be colo space 
or whatever we'd need.
(***) as several people already pointed out we're in a symbiotic 
relationship with Google (and others): they need our knowledge, we need 
their traffic. As long as our sectors are distinct all is right with the 
symbiosis.


IMHO there's room to increase our advantages without breaking the 
symbiosis but, above all, without missing our mission.


Vito

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Andy Mabbett]

On 16 January 2016 at 18:21, Lila Tretikov  wrote:

> I don't think the minutes give enough detail.

Well, quite.

-- 
Andy Mabbett
@pigsonthewing
http://pigsonthewing.org.uk

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Andrea Zanni]

Do you think?

I'm genuinely not sure.
I think that the difference in scale from what Google does with our data
and the general developer/researcher is pretty big. One million times big.
I actually think that "over-the-top" players like Google do actually
exploit free licensed materials like Wikipedia... I mean, their Knowledge
Vault is probably 100 bigger than Wikidata, but they are not supposed to
share it. It's an internal asset. And it's not matter of CC0 or CCBYSA:
they can keep it hidden.

There very, very few players who can exploit commons like this: do we
need/have the right to address this? Is it a problem?

Aubrey

On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 12:59 PM, Craig Franklin 
wrote:

> On 16 January 2016 at 19:23, Pete Forsyth  wrote:
>
> > I'm interested to hear some perspectives on the following line of
> thinking:
> >
> > Lisa presented some alternative strategies for revenue needs for the
> > Foundation, including the possibility of charging for premium access to
> the
> > services and APIs,
>
>
> Brace yourselves...
>
>
> > expanding major donor and foundation fundraising,
> > providing specific services for a fee, or limiting the Wikimedia
> > Foundation's growth. The Board emphasized the importance of keeping free
> > access to the existing APIs and services, keeping operational growth in
> > line with the organization's effectiveness, providing room for innovation
> > in the Foundation's activities, and other potential fundraising
> strategies.
> > The Board asked Lila to analyze and develop some of these potential
> > strategies for further discussion at a Board meeting in 2016.
> > Source: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/2015-11-07
>
>
> Looking for additional revenue sources isn't a bad idea, but charging for
> premium access is likely to annoy the community to a degree that will make
> the great Visual Editor revolt look like some quiet and polite murmuring.
>
> Cheers,
> Craig
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Leigh Thelmadatter]

If we are concerned about Google taking unfair advantage of Wikipedia, one 
simple solution is to allow content donations with a non-commercial 
restriction. Right now, the concept of "free" include commercial use. An added 
bonus to this is that we would get a lot more institutional donations of 
content if we allowed an non-commercial option.
My problem with allowing for paying for "premium access" is that we are 
allowing Google to have a priviledged position.  There is no way around that.
What is the impetus behind this proposal? Its not like we are lacking money.  
And limiting growth of the Foundation is not a bad thing... at least not to the 
community.


> To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> From: ricordisa...@openmailbox.org
> Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2016 14:13:06 +0100
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs
> 
> "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freemiumly share 
> in the sum of all knowledge." XD
> 
> Il 16/01/2016 10:23, Pete Forsyth ha scritto:
> > I'm interested to hear some perspectives on the following line of thinking:
> >
> > Lisa presented some alternative strategies for revenue needs for the
> > Foundation, including the possibility of charging for premium access to the
> > services and APIs, expanding major donor and foundation fundraising,
> > providing specific services for a fee, or limiting the Wikimedia
> > Foundation's growth. The Board emphasized the importance of keeping free
> > access to the existing APIs and services, keeping operational growth in
> > line with the organization's effectiveness, providing room for innovation
> > in the Foundation's activities, and other potential fundraising strategies.
> > The Board asked Lila to analyze and develop some of these potential
> > strategies for further discussion at a Board meeting in 2016.
> > Source: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/2015-11-07
> > -Pete[[User:Peteforsyth]]
> > ___
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> 
> 
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Dariusz Jemielniak]

> Looking for additional revenue sources isn't a bad idea, but charging for
> premium access is likely to annoy the community to a degree that will make
> the great Visual Editor revolt look like some quiet and polite murmuring.

That's definitely a conversation worth having, as it helps us understand
what we want to do, and who we want to be.

Do we want to charge for knowledge? Of course not. But do we want to be
able to introduce cool new tools for everyone faster, because e.g. Google
is willing to pay for their development if they can use it for some time
earlier as "premium"? I don't know yet. Let's talk.

I don't intuitively object to Google paying for some additional features,
they ride on the back of our content in many situations, and we don't even
know how many people see it (content is cached).

I do, however, believe that if we ever decide to do this, with the
community's backing, any charging should resemble grants a bit (there
should be a clear time horizon when what we are able to develop as "
premium" becomes standard and free; if it is also useful for the general
public).

Best,

Dj
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Craig Franklin]

On 16 January 2016 at 22:09, Dariusz Jemielniak  wrote:

> Do we want to charge for knowledge? Of course not. But do we want to be
> able to introduce cool new tools for everyone faster, because e.g. Google
> is willing to pay for their development if they can use it for some time
> earlier as "premium"? I don't know yet. Let's talk
>
Realistically, the only way that I can see that the community would stand
for this is if the tool in question was something that was unquestionably
of use to a large segment of the community as a whole, and if the WMF
clearly did not have the resources to build it themselves without outside
assistance.  But perhaps I'm wrong there.


> I do, however, believe that if we ever decide to do this, with the
> community's backing, any charging should resemble grants a bit (there
> should be a clear time horizon when what we are able to develop as "
> premium" becomes standard and free; if it is also useful for the general
> public).
>
If we're going to go down this road, I agree with this.

Cheers,
Craig
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Risker]

 costs will
>> decline as well.
>>
>> The first question on the upcoming consultation next week will be squarely
>> on this. Please help us. API conversation is a consequence of this
>> challenge. If we were to build more for reuse: APIs are a good way to do
>> so. If we are to somehow incentivize users of SIri to come back to
>> Wikipedia, what would we need to do? Should we improve our site so more
>> people come to us directly as the first stop? How do we bring people into
>> our world vs. the world of commercial knowledge out there? How do we fund
>> this if the people moved to access our content through other interfaces (a
>> trend that has been accelerating)?
>>
>> Those are the core questions we need to face. We will have to have some
>> uncomfortable, honest discussions as we test our hypothesis this year. The
>> conversation next week is a good start to prioritize those. Please join
>> it.
>>
>> Lila
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 6:11 AM, Leigh Thelmadatter <osama...@hotmail.com
>> >
>> wrote:
>>
>> If we are concerned about Google taking unfair advantage of Wikipedia, one
>>> simple solution is to allow content donations with a non-commercial
>>> restriction. Right now, the concept of "free" include commercial use. An
>>> added bonus to this is that we would get a lot more institutional
>>> donations
>>> of content if we allowed an non-commercial option.
>>> My problem with allowing for paying for "premium access" is that we are
>>> allowing Google to have a priviledged position.  There is no way around
>>> that.
>>> What is the impetus behind this proposal? Its not like we are lacking
>>> money.  And limiting growth of the Foundation is not a bad thing... at
>>> least not to the community.
>>>
>>>
>>> To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>>>> From: ricordisa...@openmailbox.org
>>>> Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2016 14:13:06 +0100
>>>> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs
>>>>
>>>> "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freemiumly share
>>>> in the sum of all knowledge." XD
>>>>
>>>> Il 16/01/2016 10:23, Pete Forsyth ha scritto:
>>>>
>>>>> I'm interested to hear some perspectives on the following line of
>>>>>
>>>> thinking:
>>>
>>>> Lisa presented some alternative strategies for revenue needs for the
>>>>> Foundation, including the possibility of charging for premium access
>>>>>
>>>> to the
>>>
>>>> services and APIs, expanding major donor and foundation fundraising,
>>>>> providing specific services for a fee, or limiting the Wikimedia
>>>>> Foundation's growth. The Board emphasized the importance of keeping
>>>>>
>>>> free
>>>
>>>> access to the existing APIs and services, keeping operational growth in
>>>>> line with the organization's effectiveness, providing room for
>>>>>
>>>> innovation
>>>
>>>> in the Foundation's activities, and other potential fundraising
>>>>>
>>>> strategies.
>>>
>>>> The Board asked Lila to analyze and develop some of these potential
>>>>> strategies for further discussion at a Board meeting in 2016.
>>>>> Source: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/2015-11-07
>>>>> -Pete[[User:Peteforsyth]]
>>>>> ___
>>>>> Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
>>>>>
>>>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
>>>
>>>> New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>>>>> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
>>>>>
>>>> <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
>>>
>>>>
>>>> ___
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>>
>>
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Todd Allen]

ns with a non-commercial
>>> restriction. Right now, the concept of "free" include commercial use. An
>>> added bonus to this is that we would get a lot more institutional
>>> donations
>>> of content if we allowed an non-commercial option.
>>> My problem with allowing for paying for "premium access" is that we are
>>> allowing Google to have a priviledged position.  There is no way around
>>> that.
>>> What is the impetus behind this proposal? Its not like we are lacking
>>> money.  And limiting growth of the Foundation is not a bad thing... at
>>> least not to the community.
>>>
>>>
>>> To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>>>> From: ricordisa...@openmailbox.org
>>>> Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2016 14:13:06 +0100
>>>> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs
>>>>
>>>> "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freemiumly share
>>>> in the sum of all knowledge." XD
>>>>
>>>> Il 16/01/2016 10:23, Pete Forsyth ha scritto:
>>>>
>>>>> I'm interested to hear some perspectives on the following line of
>>>>>
>>>> thinking:
>>>
>>>> Lisa presented some alternative strategies for revenue needs for the
>>>>> Foundation, including the possibility of charging for premium access
>>>>>
>>>> to the
>>>
>>>> services and APIs, expanding major donor and foundation fundraising,
>>>>> providing specific services for a fee, or limiting the Wikimedia
>>>>> Foundation's growth. The Board emphasized the importance of keeping
>>>>>
>>>> free
>>>
>>>> access to the existing APIs and services, keeping operational growth in
>>>>> line with the organization's effectiveness, providing room for
>>>>>
>>>> innovation
>>>
>>>> in the Foundation's activities, and other potential fundraising
>>>>>
>>>> strategies.
>>>
>>>> The Board asked Lila to analyze and develop some of these potential
>>>>> strategies for further discussion at a Board meeting in 2016.
>>>>> Source: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/2015-11-07
>>>>> -Pete[[User:Peteforsyth]]
>>>>> ___
>>>>> Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
>>>>>
>>>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
>>>
>>>> New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>>>>> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
>>>>>
>>>> <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
>>>
>>>>
>>>> ___
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>>>
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>>>
>>
>>
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Mitar]

Hi!

I have been recently investigating business models for community based
and collaborative online services. You do not have to reinvent the
wheel (or discussions), there is some experience in this field from
other projects. So, to move the discussion away from just opinions and
feelings...

I would suggest that anyone interested in monetizing APIs check how
MusicBrainz (https://musicbrainz.org/) is doing it.

An open encyclopedia for music metadata. Their data is all open,
collaboratively made, and APIs are free to use, but big users are
asked to pay. In this way they are getting money from Google, for
example. You should contact them and check how they feel about issues
raised here: Do they feel that they get strings attached for receiving
money from Google? How do their contributors feel about them getting
money in this way? How do they achieve that big players pay, but
community projects, researchers, and others do not? What is the
process to determine that? In fact, I am CCing Rob from MusicBrainz
here.

You could also check Crossref, another non-profit serving APIs to the
community and commercial entities. To my knowledge their approach is
that they provide free API for everyone, but if you require uptime and
SLAs then you pay. CCing Geoffrey from Crossref.

Another project to look at is Arxiv, an archive of academic articles'
preprints. Their model is to look from which
universities/organizations the most requests are coming based on IPs
and then contacting them and suggesting that they pay/donate for their
service. In this way the service is free for users, but organizations
behind big groups of users are paying for service to be online for
everyone.


Mitar

On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 1:23 AM, Pete Forsyth  wrote:
> I'm interested to hear some perspectives on the following line of thinking:
>
> Lisa presented some alternative strategies for revenue needs for the
> Foundation, including the possibility of charging for premium access to the
> services and APIs, expanding major donor and foundation fundraising,
> providing specific services for a fee, or limiting the Wikimedia
> Foundation's growth. The Board emphasized the importance of keeping free
> access to the existing APIs and services, keeping operational growth in
> line with the organization's effectiveness, providing room for innovation
> in the Foundation's activities, and other potential fundraising strategies.
> The Board asked Lila to analyze and develop some of these potential
> strategies for further discussion at a Board meeting in 2016.
> Source: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/2015-11-07
> -Pete[[User:Peteforsyth]]
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-- 
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https://twitter.com/mitar_m

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[WereSpielChequers]

If we are running dedicated services for free on behalf of a major search
engine as  part of our symbiotic relationship with them, then kudos to Lila
for putting it on the trustees agenda and getting some discussion in the
movement.

I can understand how we get into a situation where a known major search
engine is allowed a level of web crawling that would be treated as a denial
of service attack if it came from elsewhere.

Echoing Andreas and Denny I can see the case for asking for some
contribution to cost recovery when we do something extra for a major reuser
of our data. But I would prefer this to be couched as part of a wider
strategic dialogue with those entities.

My particular concern is with attack pages, and if we are providing the
service that crawls all edits including new pages then I think we can do
what has in the past been dismissed as impossible or outside our control:
Shift the new page process to one where unpatrolled pages are not crawled
by search engine bots until after someone has patrolled them.
Treat "flagged for deletion" as a third status in addition to patrolled and
unpatrollled..
If we do this then when someone creates an article about their high school
prom queen and her unorthodox method for getting good grades from male
teachers, we should be able to delete it without it being mirrored for
hours by search engines.

Others might want the dialogue to be more about how much content can be
shown in an uneditable unattributed way by being treated as simply
extracted facts and thereby public domain.

I'm keen that the WMF board has oversight of these arrangements,  I
appreciate that some data about crawl frequencies and algorithms will be
confidential to the commercial entities involved, So I could understand if
some discussions or  briefing papers to the board were confidential.

What I don't want is for cost recovery to be the first item on the agenda
when we talk about these relationships. Less mirroring of vandalism and
attack pages, better compliance with CC-BY-SA and other licenses and more
opportunities for readers to edit are more important to me, and considering
our current financial health should be to us all..

This does of course bring us back to the discussion about conflicts of
interest and the need for staff and trustees to recuse, not just when their
employer's crawler is being discussed, but also when making decisions about
entities in which they own any shares. I think we should also add when the
trustees are discussing their employer's direct competitors. It might also
help if more of the trustees had the detachment and neutrality of say a
Canadian Medic as opposed to a silicon valley insider whose future
employers could easily be other tech giants.

WereSpielChequers/Jonathan



Message: 3
> Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2016 18:11:51 -0800
> From: Denny Vrandecic <dvrande...@wikimedia.org>
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs
> Message-ID:
> <
> calurxatfxjs9a3oo-kz_w+prdqshgfxhye5kq23rgfhetax...@mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> I find it rather surprising, but I very much find myself in agreement with
> most what Andreas Kolbe said on this thread.
>
> To give a bit more thoughts: I am not terribly worried about current
> crawlers. But currently, and more in the future, I expect us to provide
> more complex and this expensive APIs: a SPARQL endpoint, parsing APIs, etc.
> These will be simply expensive to operate. Not for infrequent users - say,
> to the benefit of us 70,000 editors - but for use cases that involve tens
> or millions of requests per day. These have the potential of burning a lot
> of funds to basically support the operations of commercial companies whose
> mission might or might not be aligned with our.
>
> Is monetizing such use cases really entirely unthinkable? Even under
> restrictions like the ones suggested by Andreas, or other such restrictions
> we should discuss?
> On Jan 16, 2016 3:49 PM, "Risker" <risker...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hmm.  The majority of those crawlers are from search engines - the very
> > search engines that keep us in the top 10 of their results (and often in
> > the top 3), thus leading to the usage and donations that we need to
> > survive. If they have to pay, then they might prefer to change their
> > algorithm, or reduce the frequency of scraping (thus also failing to
> catch
> > updates to articles including removal of vandalism in the lead
> paragraphs,
> > which is historically one of the key reasons for frequently crawling the
> > same articles).  Those crawlers are what attracts people to our sites, to
> > read, to make donations, to possibly edit.  Of course there are lesser
> > crawlers, but they're no

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Ricordisamoa]

"Imagine a world in which every single human being can freemiumly share 
in the sum of all knowledge." XD


Il 16/01/2016 10:23, Pete Forsyth ha scritto:

I'm interested to hear some perspectives on the following line of thinking:

Lisa presented some alternative strategies for revenue needs for the
Foundation, including the possibility of charging for premium access to the
services and APIs, expanding major donor and foundation fundraising,
providing specific services for a fee, or limiting the Wikimedia
Foundation's growth. The Board emphasized the importance of keeping free
access to the existing APIs and services, keeping operational growth in
line with the organization's effectiveness, providing room for innovation
in the Foundation's activities, and other potential fundraising strategies.
The Board asked Lila to analyze and develop some of these potential
strategies for further discussion at a Board meeting in 2016.
Source: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/2015-11-07
-Pete[[User:Peteforsyth]]
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[WereSpielChequers]

If an API license raised a meaningful amount of money then whoever bought
it would have some influence over the organisation, and if it didn't raise
a meaningful amount of money I  doubt it would be worth doing.

There are other options that should be less contentious:

Emailing donors, explaining that we have now launched an endowment fund and
inviting them to mention Wikimedia in their will. We currently email donors
annually - a mid year endowment fund email should not conflict with that.

License the logos for some merchandising aimed at the public. I would
happily buy a couple of Wikimedia calendars to give as Christmas/New Year
gifts, and yes I appreciate that for timing reasons that would mean using
the Wiki Loves Monuments 2015 winners to illustrate a 2017 calendar.

Shift from asking for one off donations to asking people to sign up for a
regular donation. I don't know about other countries, but this would be an
easy move in the UK - it's what every efficient charity fundraiser would do.

Where you can take legally advantage of the tax man, go for it.  In the UK
if you have registered charity status as WMUK does, then under the Gift Aid
system the Taxman will add 25% to every donation where the donor confirms
they are a UK taxpayer. I would be disappointed if WMUK couldn't get a
clear majority of UK donors to tick the box  if they took over fundraising
in the UK. But having looked at the current WMF system  I seriously doubt
the WMF gets even a quarter of UK donors to go through Gift Aid.

WereSpielChequers


>
>
>
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2016 21:59:50 +1000
> From: Craig Franklin <cfrank...@halonetwork.net>
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs
> Message-ID:
> <
> cahf+k39bidmp4ycdda+7ncalkjjpigdnffad25+46g4asp8...@mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> On 16 January 2016 at 19:23, Pete Forsyth <petefors...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I'm interested to hear some perspectives on the following line of
> thinking:
> >
> > Lisa presented some alternative strategies for revenue needs for the
> > Foundation, including the possibility of charging for premium access to
> the
> > services and APIs,
>
>
> Brace yourselves...
>
>
> > expanding major donor and foundation fundraising,
> > providing specific services for a fee, or limiting the Wikimedia
> > Foundation's growth. The Board emphasized the importance of keeping free
> > access to the existing APIs and services, keeping operational growth in
> > line with the organization's effectiveness, providing room for innovation
> > in the Foundation's activities, and other potential fundraising
> strategies.
> > The Board asked Lila to analyze and develop some of these potential
> > strategies for further discussion at a Board meeting in 2016.
> > Source: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/2015-11-07
>
>
> Looking for additional revenue sources isn't a bad idea, but charging for
> premium access is likely to annoy the community to a degree that will make
> the great Visual Editor revolt look like some quiet and polite murmuring.
>
> Cheers,
> Craig
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Peter Southwood]

What do they cost the foundation for their access? If they put up the costs 
significantly in way of bandwidth or servers or anything like that, it would be 
reasonable for them to support the extra costs.
Peter

-Original Message-
From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of 
Andrea Zanni
Sent: Saturday, 16 January 2016 2:08 PM
To: Craig Franklin; Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

Do you think?

I'm genuinely not sure.
I think that the difference in scale from what Google does with our data and 
the general developer/researcher is pretty big. One million times big.
I actually think that "over-the-top" players like Google do actually exploit 
free licensed materials like Wikipedia... I mean, their Knowledge Vault is 
probably 100 bigger than Wikidata, but they are not supposed to share it. It's 
an internal asset. And it's not matter of CC0 or CCBYSA:
they can keep it hidden.

There very, very few players who can exploit commons like this: do we need/have 
the right to address this? Is it a problem?

Aubrey

On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 12:59 PM, Craig Franklin <cfrank...@halonetwork.net>
wrote:

> On 16 January 2016 at 19:23, Pete Forsyth <petefors...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I'm interested to hear some perspectives on the following line of
> thinking:
> >
> > Lisa presented some alternative strategies for revenue needs for the 
> > Foundation, including the possibility of charging for premium access 
> > to
> the
> > services and APIs,
>
>
> Brace yourselves...
>
>
> > expanding major donor and foundation fundraising, providing specific 
> > services for a fee, or limiting the Wikimedia Foundation's growth. 
> > The Board emphasized the importance of keeping free access to the 
> > existing APIs and services, keeping operational growth in line with 
> > the organization's effectiveness, providing room for innovation in 
> > the Foundation's activities, and other potential fundraising
> strategies.
> > The Board asked Lila to analyze and develop some of these potential 
> > strategies for further discussion at a Board meeting in 2016.
> > Source: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/2015-11-07
>
>
> Looking for additional revenue sources isn't a bad idea, but charging 
> for premium access is likely to annoy the community to a degree that 
> will make the great Visual Editor revolt look like some quiet and polite 
> murmuring.
>
> Cheers,
> Craig
> ___
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[MZMcBride]

Pete Forsyth wrote:
>Lisa presented some alternative strategies for revenue needs for the
>Foundation, including the possibility of charging for premium access to
>the services and APIs, expanding major donor and foundation fundraising,
>providing specific services for a fee, or limiting the Wikimedia
>Foundation's growth. The Board emphasized the importance of keeping free
>access to the existing APIs and services, keeping operational growth in
>line with the organization's effectiveness, providing room for innovation
>in the Foundation's activities, and other potential fundraising
>strategies.

This reminds me of the Wikimedia update feed service:
. The
Wikimedia Foundation basically allowed large search engines to access a
private faster and dedicated stream of recent changes to Wikimedia wikis
for a fee. While Google isn't mentioned on the Meta-Wiki page, I have a
vague memory that they were (and maybe still are) involved.

Somewhat related, there is also search.wikimedia.org:
. This service
was designed to give Apple a fast and dedicated stream for title prefix
searches. Apple's built-in Dictionary application has been the primary
consumer of this feed, though I believe it's open to anyone.

MZMcBride



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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Peter Southwood]

I agree with Todd on most, possibly all points, but if Google want to finance 
faster access for their search engine, in way of hardware, software or 
development, with no strings attached, as long as it puts no-one at a 
disadvantage at the time or in future, then why not?
Peter

-Original Message-
From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of 
Todd Allen
Sent: Saturday, 16 January 2016 6:02 PM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

I wonder how many ways there are to say "No"? Well, let's start with "no".
(My actual thoughts on this idea would probably get me put on moderation, so 
I'll refrain.)

I helped build this project to be freely available to all reusers for all 
purposes. The WMF's job should be to provide as many ways as possible to make 
that reuse easy by anyone who wants to, whether that reuser be a multibillion 
dollar tech company or a kid in sub-Saharan Africa. It is a fundamental 
principle that no one, ever, should be charged to access, reuse, whatever have 
you, Wikimedia content. Not even if they could afford to pay.

Conversely, Google should never get a foot in the door to control Wikimedia or 
Mediawiki. And anyone who's writing a check holds some cards. Big check, lot of 
cards. If they want to donate to Wikimedia (and it'd be in their interest to, 
they certainly make significant use of our content), great! If they want to 
donate with strings attached, thanks but no thanks. We're certainly not hurting 
for money. If they want to pull a recurring donation if we do or don't do 
something, the answer should always be "Sorry to see you go. Thanks for the 
donations in the past."

I am becoming more and more convinced that the formal vote of no confidence Fae 
keeps putting forth is in fact necessary. And I don't exactly often agree with 
Fae, nor am I the Wikipediocracy "Beat up Wikipedia and Wikimedia at every 
opportunity" type. Rather, it's out of deep concern and care for the project 
I've spent a lot of time helping to build, and a lot of other people have too. 
I don't want to take that step, but this has got to stop, here and now.

Todd

On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 8:24 AM, Peter Southwood < 
peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:

> What do they cost the foundation for their access? If they put up the 
> costs significantly in way of bandwidth or servers or anything like 
> that, it would be reasonable for them to support the extra costs.
> Peter
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On 
> Behalf Of Andrea Zanni
> Sent: Saturday, 16 January 2016 2:08 PM
> To: Craig Franklin; Wikimedia Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs
>
> Do you think?
>
> I'm genuinely not sure.
> I think that the difference in scale from what Google does with our 
> data and the general developer/researcher is pretty big. One million times 
> big.
> I actually think that "over-the-top" players like Google do actually 
> exploit free licensed materials like Wikipedia... I mean, their 
> Knowledge Vault is probably 100 bigger than Wikidata, but they are not 
> supposed to share it. It's an internal asset. And it's not matter of CC0 or 
> CCBYSA:
> they can keep it hidden.
>
> There very, very few players who can exploit commons like this: do we 
> need/have the right to address this? Is it a problem?
>
> Aubrey
>
> On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 12:59 PM, Craig Franklin < 
> cfrank...@halonetwork.net>
> wrote:
>
> > On 16 January 2016 at 19:23, Pete Forsyth <petefors...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > I'm interested to hear some perspectives on the following line of
> > thinking:
> > >
> > > Lisa presented some alternative strategies for revenue needs for 
> > > the Foundation, including the possibility of charging for premium 
> > > access to
> > the
> > > services and APIs,
> >
> >
> > Brace yourselves...
> >
> >
> > > expanding major donor and foundation fundraising, providing 
> > > specific services for a fee, or limiting the Wikimedia Foundation's 
> > > growth.
> > > The Board emphasized the importance of keeping free access to the 
> > > existing APIs and services, keeping operational growth in line 
> > > with the organization's effectiveness, providing room for 
> > > innovation in the Foundation's activities, and other potential 
> > > fundraising
> > strategies.
> > > The Board asked Lila to analyze and develop some of these 
> > > potential strategies for further discussion at a Board meeting in 2016.
> > > Source: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minute

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Lila Tretikov]

To share some context of the discussion the board had around this -- I
don't think the minutes give enough detail. APIs -- as we are freely and
rapidly creating them today are important, but are not quite at the core of
the issue we are facing.

Today Wikimedia is the largest internet channel for open free knowledge in
the world. But the trends are against us. We have to face them together. We
have to have the answers on how. The strategic discussion next week will
help guide us.

Over the last year we looked at the trends in Wikimedia traffic, internet
as a whole and user behaviors. It took a lot of research. When we started
the process we have not had solid internal data about unique visitors or
human vs. crawler usage on the site. For a top 10 website this is a big
issue; it hurts our ability to make smart decisions. We've learned a lot.

We found data that supports Leigh's point -- our permissive license
supports our core value, we are (I know I am) here for free knowledge. Yet
it allows others to use the content in ways that truncates, simplifies and
reduces it. More importantly this type of reuse separates our readers from
our site, disconnecting readers from our contributors (no edit buttons) and
ultimately reduces traffic. Is this a problem? I'd like to hear if people
on this list see it as such. And how we sustain contributions over time.

Meanwhile estimated half of our hosting is used to support crawlers that
scan our content. This has an associated cost in infrastructure, power,
servers, employees to support some well-funded organizations. The content
is used for a variety of commercial purposes, sometimes having nothing to
do with putting our contributor's work in front of more readers. Still, we
can say this is tangentially supportive of our mission.

As these two trends increase without our intervention, our traffic decline
will accelerate, our ability to grow editors, content and cover costs will
decline as well.

The first question on the upcoming consultation next week will be squarely
on this. Please help us. API conversation is a consequence of this
challenge. If we were to build more for reuse: APIs are a good way to do
so. If we are to somehow incentivize users of SIri to come back to
Wikipedia, what would we need to do? Should we improve our site so more
people come to us directly as the first stop? How do we bring people into
our world vs. the world of commercial knowledge out there? How do we fund
this if the people moved to access our content through other interfaces (a
trend that has been accelerating)?

Those are the core questions we need to face. We will have to have some
uncomfortable, honest discussions as we test our hypothesis this year. The
conversation next week is a good start to prioritize those. Please join it.

Lila



On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 6:11 AM, Leigh Thelmadatter <osama...@hotmail.com>
wrote:

> If we are concerned about Google taking unfair advantage of Wikipedia, one
> simple solution is to allow content donations with a non-commercial
> restriction. Right now, the concept of "free" include commercial use. An
> added bonus to this is that we would get a lot more institutional donations
> of content if we allowed an non-commercial option.
> My problem with allowing for paying for "premium access" is that we are
> allowing Google to have a priviledged position.  There is no way around
> that.
> What is the impetus behind this proposal? Its not like we are lacking
> money.  And limiting growth of the Foundation is not a bad thing... at
> least not to the community.
>
>
> > To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > From: ricordisa...@openmailbox.org
> > Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2016 14:13:06 +0100
> > Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs
> >
> > "Imagine a world in which every single human being can freemiumly share
> > in the sum of all knowledge." XD
> >
> > Il 16/01/2016 10:23, Pete Forsyth ha scritto:
> > > I'm interested to hear some perspectives on the following line of
> thinking:
> > >
> > > Lisa presented some alternative strategies for revenue needs for the
> > > Foundation, including the possibility of charging for premium access
> to the
> > > services and APIs, expanding major donor and foundation fundraising,
> > > providing specific services for a fee, or limiting the Wikimedia
> > > Foundation's growth. The Board emphasized the importance of keeping
> free
> > > access to the existing APIs and services, keeping operational growth in
> > > line with the organization's effectiveness, providing room for
> innovation
> > > in the Foundation's activities, and other potential fundraising
> strategies.
> > > The Board asked Lila to analyze and develop some of these potential
> > > strategi

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Magnus Manske]

On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 4:09 PM MZMcBride  wrote:

> Pete Forsyth wrote:
> >Lisa presented some alternative strategies for revenue needs for the
> >Foundation, including the possibility of charging for premium access to
> >the services and APIs, expanding major donor and foundation fundraising,
> >providing specific services for a fee, or limiting the Wikimedia
> >Foundation's growth. The Board emphasized the importance of keeping free
> >access to the existing APIs and services, keeping operational growth in
> >line with the organization's effectiveness, providing room for innovation
> >in the Foundation's activities, and other potential fundraising
> >strategies.
>
> This reminds me of the Wikimedia update feed service:
> . The
> Wikimedia Foundation basically allowed large search engines to access a
> private faster and dedicated stream of recent changes to Wikimedia wikis
> for a fee. While Google isn't mentioned on the Meta-Wiki page, I have a
> vague memory that they were (and maybe still are) involved.
>

I believe it was Yahoo. They were allowing us to use some of their servers
in Asia back in the day, and I believe they also paid for large-scale
access. There was even a special dump with the article start sections for
them.


> Somewhat related, there is also search.wikimedia.org:
> . This service
> was designed to give Apple a fast and dedicated stream for title prefix
> searches. Apple's built-in Dictionary application has been the primary
> consumer of this feed, though I believe it's open to anyone.
>
> MZMcBride
>
>
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
If anything the Wikimedia Foundation is about providing free access and
provide it to everyone who needs it on an equal basis. When this changes,
when people pay for superior service that is not available for everyone I
will really hate it and the people who had us deviate so much from where we
came from.

There is a difference for paying for a general service we do not provide
yet. There is a difference for paying for additional hardware, bandwidth
and services at cost. As long as the services are advertised openly I do
not mind. When a specialised service provides a general need, it should
become freely available.
Thanks,
  GerardM

On 16 January 2016 at 10:23, Pete Forsyth  wrote:

> I'm interested to hear some perspectives on the following line of thinking:
>
> Lisa presented some alternative strategies for revenue needs for the
> Foundation, including the possibility of charging for premium access to the
> services and APIs, expanding major donor and foundation fundraising,
> providing specific services for a fee, or limiting the Wikimedia
> Foundation's growth. The Board emphasized the importance of keeping free
> access to the existing APIs and services, keeping operational growth in
> line with the organization's effectiveness, providing room for innovation
> in the Foundation's activities, and other potential fundraising strategies.
> The Board asked Lila to analyze and develop some of these potential
> strategies for further discussion at a Board meeting in 2016.
> Source: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/2015-11-07
> -Pete[[User:Peteforsyth]]
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Todd Allen]

I wonder how many ways there are to say "No"? Well, let's start with "no".
(My actual thoughts on this idea would probably get me put on moderation,
so I'll refrain.)

I helped build this project to be freely available to all reusers for all
purposes. The WMF's job should be to provide as many ways as possible to
make that reuse easy by anyone who wants to, whether that reuser be a
multibillion dollar tech company or a kid in sub-Saharan Africa. It is a
fundamental principle that no one, ever, should be charged to access,
reuse, whatever have you, Wikimedia content. Not even if they could afford
to pay.

Conversely, Google should never get a foot in the door to control Wikimedia
or Mediawiki. And anyone who's writing a check holds some cards. Big check,
lot of cards. If they want to donate to Wikimedia (and it'd be in their
interest to, they certainly make significant use of our content), great! If
they want to donate with strings attached, thanks but no thanks. We're
certainly not hurting for money. If they want to pull a recurring donation
if we do or don't do something, the answer should always be "Sorry to see
you go. Thanks for the donations in the past."

I am becoming more and more convinced that the formal vote of no confidence
Fae keeps putting forth is in fact necessary. And I don't exactly often
agree with Fae, nor am I the Wikipediocracy "Beat up Wikipedia and
Wikimedia at every opportunity" type. Rather, it's out of deep concern and
care for the project I've spent a lot of time helping to build, and a lot
of other people have too. I don't want to take that step, but this has got
to stop, here and now.

Todd

On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 8:24 AM, Peter Southwood <
peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:

> What do they cost the foundation for their access? If they put up the
> costs significantly in way of bandwidth or servers or anything like that,
> it would be reasonable for them to support the extra costs.
> Peter
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
> Behalf Of Andrea Zanni
> Sent: Saturday, 16 January 2016 2:08 PM
> To: Craig Franklin; Wikimedia Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs
>
> Do you think?
>
> I'm genuinely not sure.
> I think that the difference in scale from what Google does with our data
> and the general developer/researcher is pretty big. One million times big.
> I actually think that "over-the-top" players like Google do actually
> exploit free licensed materials like Wikipedia... I mean, their Knowledge
> Vault is probably 100 bigger than Wikidata, but they are not supposed to
> share it. It's an internal asset. And it's not matter of CC0 or CCBYSA:
> they can keep it hidden.
>
> There very, very few players who can exploit commons like this: do we
> need/have the right to address this? Is it a problem?
>
> Aubrey
>
> On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 12:59 PM, Craig Franklin <
> cfrank...@halonetwork.net>
> wrote:
>
> > On 16 January 2016 at 19:23, Pete Forsyth <petefors...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > I'm interested to hear some perspectives on the following line of
> > thinking:
> > >
> > > Lisa presented some alternative strategies for revenue needs for the
> > > Foundation, including the possibility of charging for premium access
> > > to
> > the
> > > services and APIs,
> >
> >
> > Brace yourselves...
> >
> >
> > > expanding major donor and foundation fundraising, providing specific
> > > services for a fee, or limiting the Wikimedia Foundation's growth.
> > > The Board emphasized the importance of keeping free access to the
> > > existing APIs and services, keeping operational growth in line with
> > > the organization's effectiveness, providing room for innovation in
> > > the Foundation's activities, and other potential fundraising
> > strategies.
> > > The Board asked Lila to analyze and develop some of these potential
> > > strategies for further discussion at a Board meeting in 2016.
> > > Source: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/2015-11-07
> >
> >
> > Looking for additional revenue sources isn't a bad idea, but charging
> > for premium access is likely to annoy the community to a degree that
> > will make the great Visual Editor revolt look like some quiet and polite
> murmuring.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Craig
> > ___
> > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
> > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > Unsubscrib

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Fæ]

Thanks for raising this Pete. I am interested in both the ethics and
practicalities of this change, as a long established unpaid volunteer
API user.

Sorry to raise the obvious, but while Geshuri is on the board, someone
found in court to have acted *illegally* on behalf of Google resulting
in damages of nearly half a billion dollars, yet still voted in
unanimously by the rest of the trustees as a jolly good chap (and
praised by Lila due to his worthiness), the idea of the board
discussing fundamental ethical changes that /may benefit Google/ to
the potential disadvantage of volunteers or charitable organisations
who will then no doubt be excluded from using a "1st class API,
reserved for rich global corporations" is abhorrent.

Let's wait and see if the community needs to play a game of
brinkmanship with a formal vote of no confidence in the WMF board of
trustees, before the current Chairman is seen to raise his hands and
admit there is a problem, or do anything about the WMF board's
blatantly broken or incompetently managed system of governance (it's 9
days now since my open letter, but there has yet to be a polite
acknowledgement of receipt from the Chair). If we end up forcing major
changes to the board through a form of democratic commercial
embarrassment, then this decision need to wait until there are
trustees in place that *we* have confidence in again, not just the
majority of current trustees.

Fae

On 16 January 2016 at 09:23, Pete Forsyth  wrote:
> I'm interested to hear some perspectives on the following line of thinking:
>
> Lisa presented some alternative strategies for revenue needs for the
> Foundation, including the possibility of charging for premium access to the
> services and APIs, expanding major donor and foundation fundraising,
> providing specific services for a fee, or limiting the Wikimedia
> Foundation's growth. The Board emphasized the importance of keeping free
> access to the existing APIs and services, keeping operational growth in
> line with the organization's effectiveness, providing room for innovation
> in the Foundation's activities, and other potential fundraising strategies.
> The Board asked Lila to analyze and develop some of these potential
> strategies for further discussion at a Board meeting in 2016.
> Source: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/2015-11-07
> -Pete[[User:Peteforsyth]]
> ___
> Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: 
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
> New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, 
> 
-- 
fae...@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Andreas Kolbe]

I think if anyone were to pay, they should all pay at the same rate,
according to their usage.

Moreover, those whose usage is minimal should not pay at all. You might
have a threshold – say, if it's $X or less, no need to pay a dime.

So the Indian or African start-up would have access for free, while the
search giants might pay what is, from the WMF perspective, a considerable
sum (but peanuts for them).

What is vitally important though is that no one should be able to buy a
better service just because they are rich. That would just slant the
playing field in favour of the existing giants and suppress competition.

That would be an evil thing to do.

But if the above caveats are observed, it might be a good idea.

Andreas

On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 12:09 PM, Dariusz Jemielniak 
wrote:

> > Looking for additional revenue sources isn't a bad idea, but charging for
> > premium access is likely to annoy the community to a degree that will
> make
> > the great Visual Editor revolt look like some quiet and polite murmuring.
>
> That's definitely a conversation worth having, as it helps us understand
> what we want to do, and who we want to be.
>
> Do we want to charge for knowledge? Of course not. But do we want to be
> able to introduce cool new tools for everyone faster, because e.g. Google
> is willing to pay for their development if they can use it for some time
> earlier as "premium"? I don't know yet. Let's talk.
>
> I don't intuitively object to Google paying for some additional features,
> they ride on the back of our content in many situations, and we don't even
> know how many people see it (content is cached).
>
> I do, however, believe that if we ever decide to do this, with the
> community's backing, any charging should resemble grants a bit (there
> should be a clear time horizon when what we are able to develop as "
> premium" becomes standard and free; if it is also useful for the general
> public).
>
> Best,
>
> Dj
> ___
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>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Pierre-Selim]

2016-01-16 19:21 GMT+01:00 Lila Tretikov <l...@wikimedia.org>:

> To share some context of the discussion the board had around this -- I
> don't think the minutes give enough detail. APIs -- as we are freely and
> rapidly creating them today are important, but are not quite at the core of
> the issue we are facing.
>
> Today Wikimedia is the largest internet channel for open free knowledge in
> the world. But the trends are against us. We have to face them together. We
> have to have the answers on how. The strategic discussion next week will
> help guide us.
>
> Over the last year we looked at the trends in Wikimedia traffic, internet
> as a whole and user behaviors. It took a lot of research. When we started
> the process we have not had solid internal data about unique visitors or
> human vs. crawler usage on the site. For a top 10 website this is a big
> issue; it hurts our ability to make smart decisions. We've learned a lot.
>
> We found data that supports Leigh's point -- our permissive license
> supports our core value, we are (I know I am) here for free knowledge. Yet
> it allows others to use the content in ways that truncates, simplifies and
> reduces it. More importantly this type of reuse separates our readers from
> our site, disconnecting readers from our contributors (no edit buttons) and
> ultimately reduces traffic. Is this a problem? I'd like to hear if people
> on this list see it as such. And how we sustain contributions over time.
>

Isn't that the point of using free licence (not NC, nor ND) ? I guess we do
so
to allow people/company/the world to reuse our content  the way they want.

If we have problem attracting people to our plateform, then the problem is
not
about our API, it's about attractiveness and maybe we should focus on our
products.

I might be wrong, but what I understand when I read this discussion or the
board
minutes, is that we want to increase traffic because it's our best known way
to raise money (correlation with the endowement ?). This looks like a wrong
reason to not respect our values.

I do understand that such a discussion can reach the board, it's healthy to
list
lots of different solutions, that said I don't think it aligns with the
core values of
our movement.


>
> Meanwhile estimated half of our hosting is used to support crawlers that
> scan our content. This has an associated cost in infrastructure, power,
> servers, employees to support some well-funded organizations. The content
> is used for a variety of commercial purposes, sometimes having nothing to
> do with putting our contributor's work in front of more readers. Still, we
> can say this is tangentially supportive of our mission.
>

Isn't that part of sharing the sum of human knowledge ?


> As these two trends increase without our intervention, our traffic decline
> will accelerate, our ability to grow editors, content and cover costs will
> decline as well.
>
> The first question on the upcoming consultation next week will be squarely
> on this. Please help us. API conversation is a consequence of this
> challenge. If we were to build more for reuse: APIs are a good way to do
> so. If we are to somehow incentivize users of SIri to come back to
> Wikipedia, what would we need to do? Should we improve our site so more
> people come to us directly as the first stop? How do we bring people into
> our world vs. the world of commercial knowledge out there? How do we fund
> this if the people moved to access our content through other interfaces (a
> trend that has been accelerating)?
>
> Those are the core questions we need to face. We will have to have some
> uncomfortable, honest discussions as we test our hypothesis this year. The
> conversation next week is a good start to prioritize those. Please join it.
>
> Lila
>
>
>
> On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 6:11 AM, Leigh Thelmadatter <osama...@hotmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > If we are concerned about Google taking unfair advantage of Wikipedia,
> one
> > simple solution is to allow content donations with a non-commercial
> > restriction. Right now, the concept of "free" include commercial use. An
> > added bonus to this is that we would get a lot more institutional
> donations
> > of content if we allowed an non-commercial option.
> > My problem with allowing for paying for "premium access" is that we are
> > allowing Google to have a priviledged position.  There is no way around
> > that.
> > What is the impetus behind this proposal? Its not like we are lacking
> > money.  And limiting growth of the Foundation is not a bad thing... at
> > least not to the community.
> >
> >
> > > To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > > From: ricordisa...@openmailbox.org
&

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Vituzzu]

I agree, we shouldn't fee anything but a "reimburse" for the massive 
usage of our hardware/networking resources would be ok.


Using over the tops' facilities would be great but it would also bring 
to privacy concerns.


Finally if an over the top wants some further feature it can fund 
scholarships, easy, transparent and without any side effect.


Vito


Il 16/01/2016 17:22, Peter Southwood ha scritto:

I agree with Todd on most, possibly all points, but if Google want to finance 
faster access for their search engine, in way of hardware, software or 
development, with no strings attached, as long as it puts no-one at a 
disadvantage at the time or in future, then why not?
Peter

-Original Message-
From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of 
Todd Allen
Sent: Saturday, 16 January 2016 6:02 PM
To: Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

I wonder how many ways there are to say "No"? Well, let's start with "no".
(My actual thoughts on this idea would probably get me put on moderation, so 
I'll refrain.)

I helped build this project to be freely available to all reusers for all 
purposes. The WMF's job should be to provide as many ways as possible to make 
that reuse easy by anyone who wants to, whether that reuser be a multibillion 
dollar tech company or a kid in sub-Saharan Africa. It is a fundamental 
principle that no one, ever, should be charged to access, reuse, whatever have 
you, Wikimedia content. Not even if they could afford to pay.

Conversely, Google should never get a foot in the door to control Wikimedia or Mediawiki. 
And anyone who's writing a check holds some cards. Big check, lot of cards. If they want 
to donate to Wikimedia (and it'd be in their interest to, they certainly make significant 
use of our content), great! If they want to donate with strings attached, thanks but no 
thanks. We're certainly not hurting for money. If they want to pull a recurring donation 
if we do or don't do something, the answer should always be "Sorry to see you go. 
Thanks for the donations in the past."

I am becoming more and more convinced that the formal vote of no confidence Fae keeps 
putting forth is in fact necessary. And I don't exactly often agree with Fae, nor am I 
the Wikipediocracy "Beat up Wikipedia and Wikimedia at every opportunity" type. 
Rather, it's out of deep concern and care for the project I've spent a lot of time 
helping to build, and a lot of other people have too. I don't want to take that step, but 
this has got to stop, here and now.

Todd

On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 8:24 AM, Peter Southwood < 
peter.southw...@telkomsa.net> wrote:


What do they cost the foundation for their access? If they put up the
costs significantly in way of bandwidth or servers or anything like
that, it would be reasonable for them to support the extra costs.
Peter

-Original Message-
From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On
Behalf Of Andrea Zanni
Sent: Saturday, 16 January 2016 2:08 PM
To: Craig Franklin; Wikimedia Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

Do you think?

I'm genuinely not sure.
I think that the difference in scale from what Google does with our
data and the general developer/researcher is pretty big. One million times big.
I actually think that "over-the-top" players like Google do actually
exploit free licensed materials like Wikipedia... I mean, their
Knowledge Vault is probably 100 bigger than Wikidata, but they are not
supposed to share it. It's an internal asset. And it's not matter of CC0 or 
CCBYSA:
they can keep it hidden.

There very, very few players who can exploit commons like this: do we
need/have the right to address this? Is it a problem?

Aubrey

On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 12:59 PM, Craig Franklin <
cfrank...@halonetwork.net>
wrote:


On 16 January 2016 at 19:23, Pete Forsyth <petefors...@gmail.com> wrote:


I'm interested to hear some perspectives on the following line of

thinking:

Lisa presented some alternative strategies for revenue needs for
the Foundation, including the possibility of charging for premium
access to

the

services and APIs,


Brace yourselves...



expanding major donor and foundation fundraising, providing
specific services for a fee, or limiting the Wikimedia Foundation's growth.
The Board emphasized the importance of keeping free access to the
existing APIs and services, keeping operational growth in line
with the organization's effectiveness, providing room for
innovation in the Foundation's activities, and other potential
fundraising

strategies.

The Board asked Lila to analyze and develop some of these
potential strategies for further discussion at a Board meeting in 2016.
Source: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/2015-11-07


Looking for additional revenue sources isn't a bad idea, but
charging for premium acces

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Vituzzu]

Thank you for sharing this but, above all, to focus on digging real data.

IMHO we shouldn't forget our mission, so licenses must be as free as 
possible. Turning into something "more closed" would definitely deplete 
one of the most valuable source (the open source world) of volunteering 
we have.


Crawlers' owner should definitely share our increasing expenses but any 
kind of agreement with them should include ways to improve our userbase. 
I'm wondering about an agreement with Google (or any other player) to 
add an "edit" button to knowledge graph. Sort of a "knowledge vs. users" 
agreement.


So, we definitely need a long term strategy which the Foundation will 
pursue in *negotiating* with anyone who wants a big scale access to *our 
resources* (while access to our knowledge will have no limits, as usual).


Vito

Il 16/01/2016 19:21, Lila Tretikov ha scritto:

To share some context of the discussion the board had around this -- I
don't think the minutes give enough detail. APIs -- as we are freely and
rapidly creating them today are important, but are not quite at the core of
the issue we are facing.

Today Wikimedia is the largest internet channel for open free knowledge in
the world. But the trends are against us. We have to face them together. We
have to have the answers on how. The strategic discussion next week will
help guide us.

Over the last year we looked at the trends in Wikimedia traffic, internet
as a whole and user behaviors. It took a lot of research. When we started
the process we have not had solid internal data about unique visitors or
human vs. crawler usage on the site. For a top 10 website this is a big
issue; it hurts our ability to make smart decisions. We've learned a lot.

We found data that supports Leigh's point -- our permissive license
supports our core value, we are (I know I am) here for free knowledge. Yet
it allows others to use the content in ways that truncates, simplifies and
reduces it. More importantly this type of reuse separates our readers from
our site, disconnecting readers from our contributors (no edit buttons) and
ultimately reduces traffic. Is this a problem? I'd like to hear if people
on this list see it as such. And how we sustain contributions over time.

Meanwhile estimated half of our hosting is used to support crawlers that
scan our content. This has an associated cost in infrastructure, power,
servers, employees to support some well-funded organizations. The content
is used for a variety of commercial purposes, sometimes having nothing to
do with putting our contributor's work in front of more readers. Still, we
can say this is tangentially supportive of our mission.

As these two trends increase without our intervention, our traffic decline
will accelerate, our ability to grow editors, content and cover costs will
decline as well.

The first question on the upcoming consultation next week will be squarely
on this. Please help us. API conversation is a consequence of this
challenge. If we were to build more for reuse: APIs are a good way to do
so. If we are to somehow incentivize users of SIri to come back to
Wikipedia, what would we need to do? Should we improve our site so more
people come to us directly as the first stop? How do we bring people into
our world vs. the world of commercial knowledge out there? How do we fund
this if the people moved to access our content through other interfaces (a
trend that has been accelerating)?

Those are the core questions we need to face. We will have to have some
uncomfortable, honest discussions as we test our hypothesis this year. The
conversation next week is a good start to prioritize those. Please join it.

Lila



On Sat, Jan 16, 2016 at 6:11 AM, Leigh Thelmadatter <osama...@hotmail.com>
wrote:


If we are concerned about Google taking unfair advantage of Wikipedia, one
simple solution is to allow content donations with a non-commercial
restriction. Right now, the concept of "free" include commercial use. An
added bonus to this is that we would get a lot more institutional donations
of content if we allowed an non-commercial option.
My problem with allowing for paying for "premium access" is that we are
allowing Google to have a priviledged position.  There is no way around
that.
What is the impetus behind this proposal? Its not like we are lacking
money.  And limiting growth of the Foundation is not a bad thing... at
least not to the community.



To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
From: ricordisa...@openmailbox.org
Date: Sat, 16 Jan 2016 14:13:06 +0100
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

"Imagine a world in which every single human being can freemiumly share
in the sum of all knowledge." XD

Il 16/01/2016 10:23, Pete Forsyth ha scritto:

I'm interested to hear some perspectives on the following line of

thinking:

Lisa presented some alternative strategies for revenue needs for the
Foundation, includin

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Johan Jönsson]

2016-01-16 20:40 GMT+01:00 Pierre-Selim :

> Isn't that the point of using free licence (not NC, nor ND) ? I guess we do
> so
> to allow people/company/the world to reuse our content  the way they want.
>
> If we have problem attracting people to our plateform, then the problem is
> not
> about our API, it's about attractiveness and maybe we should focus on our
> products.
>
> I might be wrong, but what I understand when I read this discussion or the
> board
> minutes, is that we want to increase traffic because it's our best known way
> to raise money (correlation with the endowement ?). This looks like a wrong
> reason to not respect our values.

One of my main worries is that our content being reused somewhere else
means that we're losing our ability to engage new contributors, which
in the long runt could threaten the projects, at the same time as no
one else is stepping up to do our job because the traffic is still
going to our content – just not to us. There's a tradeoff between
readability and editability, especially on the small screen. Anyone
not concerned with editing will have a head start when it comes to
presenting the information in a less cluttered way, which makes it
easier to read and the experience more enjoyable.

//Johan Jönsson
--

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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Denny Vrandecic]

r
> > userbase.
> > > > I'm wondering about an agreement with Google (or any other player) to
> > add
> > > > an "edit" button to knowledge graph. Sort of a "knowledge vs. users"
> > > > agreement.
> > > >
> > > > So, we definitely need a long term strategy which the Foundation will
> > > > pursue in *negotiating* with anyone who wants a big scale access to
> > *our
> > > > resources* (while access to our knowledge will have no limits, as
> > usual).
> > > >
> > > > Vito
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Il 16/01/2016 19:21, Lila Tretikov ha scritto:
> > > >
> > > >> To share some context of the discussion the board had around this
> -- I
> > > >> don't think the minutes give enough detail. APIs -- as we are freely
> > and
> > > >> rapidly creating them today are important, but are not quite at the
> > core
> > > >> of
> > > >> the issue we are facing.
> > > >>
> > > >> Today Wikimedia is the largest internet channel for open free
> > knowledge
> > > in
> > > >> the world. But the trends are against us. We have to face them
> > together.
> > > >> We
> > > >> have to have the answers on how. The strategic discussion next week
> > will
> > > >> help guide us.
> > > >>
> > > >> Over the last year we looked at the trends in Wikimedia traffic,
> > > internet
> > > >> as a whole and user behaviors. It took a lot of research. When we
> > > started
> > > >> the process we have not had solid internal data about unique
> visitors
> > or
> > > >> human vs. crawler usage on the site. For a top 10 website this is a
> > big
> > > >> issue; it hurts our ability to make smart decisions. We've learned a
> > > lot.
> > > >>
> > > >> We found data that supports Leigh's point -- our permissive license
> > > >> supports our core value, we are (I know I am) here for free
> knowledge.
> > > Yet
> > > >> it allows others to use the content in ways that truncates,
> simplifies
> > > and
> > > >> reduces it. More importantly this type of reuse separates our
> readers
> > > from
> > > >> our site, disconnecting readers from our contributors (no edit
> > buttons)
> > > >> and
> > > >> ultimately reduces traffic. Is this a problem? I'd like to hear if
> > > people
> > > >> on this list see it as such. And how we sustain contributions over
> > time.
> > > >>
> > > >> Meanwhile estimated half of our hosting is used to support crawlers
> > that
> > > >> scan our content. This has an associated cost in infrastructure,
> > power,
> > > >> servers, employees to support some well-funded organizations. The
> > > content
> > > >> is used for a variety of commercial purposes, sometimes having
> nothing
> > > to
> > > >> do with putting our contributor's work in front of more readers.
> > Still,
> > > we
> > > >> can say this is tangentially supportive of our mission.
> > > >>
> > > >> As these two trends increase without our intervention, our traffic
> > > decline
> > > >> will accelerate, our ability to grow editors, content and cover
> costs
> > > will
> > > >> decline as well.
> > > >>
> > > >> The first question on the upcoming consultation next week will be
> > > squarely
> > > >> on this. Please help us. API conversation is a consequence of this
> > > >> challenge. If we were to build more for reuse: APIs are a good way
> to
> > do
> > > >> so. If we are to somehow incentivize users of SIri to come back to
> > > >> Wikipedia, what would we need to do? Should we improve our site so
> > more
> > > >> people come to us directly as the first stop? How do we bring people
> > > into
> > > >> our world vs. the world of commercial knowledge out there? How do we
> > > fund
> > > >> this if the people moved to access our content through other
> > interfaces
> > > (a
> > > >> trend that has been accelerating)?
> > > >>
> > > >> Those are the core questions we need to face. We will have t

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Monetizing Wikimedia APIs

[Ilario Valdelli]

Interesting.

It would make sense in general, but if we de-contextualize Wikimedia.

The potential of Wikimedia projects are connected with the question that 
they are free. Having a premium access means two kind of risks:


a) losing the community, and Wikipedia will become quickly a "big 
outdated content repository" without the community
b) managing a service, because a premium access would have a "premium 
service"


It's normal that someone else build a business on Wikimedia's content, 
but this allowed by the license, it's more difficult that Wikimedia 
Foundation can do a business with this content.


Kind regards

On 16.01.2016 10:23, Pete Forsyth wrote:

I'm interested to hear some perspectives on the following line of thinking:

Lisa presented some alternative strategies for revenue needs for the
Foundation, including the possibility of charging for premium access to the
services and APIs, expanding major donor and foundation fundraising,
providing specific services for a fee, or limiting the Wikimedia
Foundation's growth. The Board emphasized the importance of keeping free
access to the existing APIs and services, keeping operational growth in
line with the organization's effectiveness, providing room for innovation
in the Foundation's activities, and other potential fundraising strategies.
The Board asked Lila to analyze and develop some of these potential
strategies for further discussion at a Board meeting in 2016.
Source: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Minutes/2015-11-07
-Pete[[User:Peteforsyth]]
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--
Ilario Valdelli
Wikimedia CH
Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens
Association pour l’avancement des connaissances libre
Associazione per il sostegno alla conoscenza libera
Switzerland - 8008 Zürich
Tel: +41764821371
http://www.wikimedia.ch


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