On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 10:24 PM, geni <[email protected]> wrote: > On 26 June 2012 21:38, Andreas Kolbe <[email protected]> wrote: > > Are you not being a bit naive here? Seriously, if Google wanted > something, > > and were willing to pay Wikimedia another half million dollars for it, > > they'd talk to Jimbo and other WMF luminaries behind closed doors. > > You've been hanging out on wikipedia critics forums too much.
Perhaps so. :)) (But clearly, so have you.) > Like most of them you don't appear to realise to what extent wikipedians > tend to be bloody minded individualists. Cutting a deal with "WMF > luminaries" or any other cabal you care to propose simply isn't a > viable approach. I was actually thinking of the board, or just Jimbo himself, rather than any wider group of luminaries (or actual Wikipedia editors). If Google wanted something, I am sure they would speak in person to the people they have had personal contact with. I was struck by the following four-month timeline the other day: ---o0o--- October 4 to October 6, 2011: Italian Wikipedia blackout, hailed as successful in preventing Italian legislation. November 18, 2011: Media announce that Google's Sergey Brin is donating half a million dollars to Wikipedia. December 10, 2011: Jimmy first raises the topic of an anti-SOPA Wikipedia blackout on Wikipedia. January 16, 2012: English Wikipedia is blacked out for a day, in an action hailed as successful in preventing US legislation. ---o0o--- Frappant, n'est-ce pas? :) The community vote on the blackout was fairly rushed, and unlike most other important community votes was open to IPs and single-purpose accounts. They came to vote in large numbers, and editors marking non-regulars' votes in the usual way were told to stop. And it's not as though there wasn't any contact between Jimmy and Brin in the months before the blackout; their names, along with others, appear on a joint Open Letter to the US government, opposing SOPA, that appeared in mid-December. So, seen from one perspective, all the value that volunteers had created in the English Wikipedia over a decade was leveraged to support one view on copyrights, which happened to coincide with Google's business interests. And Google happened to donate half a million to Wikipedia just around that time. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
