The point about dependency on non-open infra for distribution is a good one.
Another example: Wikimedia publishes apps in the walled gardens of iOS and Google Play app stores. We never really figured out a way to make Wikipedia and Commons friendly to mobile, so most of our traffic is still probably coming to mobile web via Google. In consumer media products though, the platforms that pivoted effectively to leverage mobile apps as an engagement tool went to more like 70-80% of traffic coming to their native mobile apps within months or years. It is a cautionary tale for us that we missed the boat on that in mobile already, which is part of what's contributing to our problems in traffic. If we do it again with AI, the combination of the two will relegate us to Ask.com status in time (which recently was shut down entirely). On Tue, May 5, 2026 at 5:12 AM Luis Villa via Wikimedia-l < [email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, May 4, 2026 at 8:42 AM Jan Ainali via Wikimedia-l < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> Thank you Luis for your thoughtful reply. Your historical examples are >> particularly illustrating because they show compromises with a long term >> goal of "breaking free". They are stories of building new tools rather than >> locking themselves into the existing technologies. In our context that may >> mean that we will build upon and borrow where we can, rather than being >> just a consumer of the Big Products of the day. >> > > Sure, and/or using our weight to ensure that the Big Products bend to our > will and not the other way around. > > If we have any red lines in this compromise it surely is at a privacy >> preserving aspect. >> > > I agree. Also, by focusing on a specific aspect (that is not covered at > all by the OSI definition!) we have a more interesting and useful and > concrete discussion. > > For example, I am working on an LLM-backed tool that helps editors with > citation data. It uses a proxy to not expose editor IPs or user IDs to LLM > vendors, though I suspect it means CloudFlare has a little bit of > traceability—and you’re right that I should look more deeply at that. > > The example with the Wikipedia library is interesting because even if we >> are using works that are non-free as sources and the ethics of many >> publishers deserves to be discussed, arguably these authors at least >> knowingly (albeit begrudgedly) have some sort of deal with them. It's also >> not unreasonable to think that many of the authors are happy being cited >> and that a citation on our projects bring some, but perhaps mostly a low, >> value to them. That's a stark contrast to the ethics of how the "Frontier >> models" are being made. >> > > Two things: > (1) “arguably” is very arguable for academics, who must “publish or > perish” with the big journals and so don’t really have a lot of choice in > the terms their publishers apply. > > (2) are you suggesting we should stop using Google Book Search and > Internet Archive? Authors gave the same amount of consent to those book > scanning projects as to the big LLMs. > >> _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list -- [email protected], guidelines > at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l > Public archives at > https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/[email protected]/message/6DIZ5CFFXJSL3LD3E5UUPC2VN6M3IC7R/ > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
_______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- [email protected], guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/[email protected]/message/EHTHUIFKGGPC5Y4O7PSASBRPWGAUXPKY/ To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
