[HN Gopher] Wikimedia Enterprise: paid commercial product for re...
___________________________________________________________________
Wikimedia Enterprise: paid commercial product for reusing Wikipedia
content
Author : rvnx
Score : 96 points
Date : 2021-10-27 15:23 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wikimediafoundation.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (wikimediafoundation.org)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Related discussion from 7 months ago announcing API:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26484080
| gojomo wrote:
| Wikimedia should also let users opt-into (small, tasteful) ads
| instead of fundraising appeals - a way to contribute indirectly,
| rather than an explicit donation.
| cogburnd02 wrote:
| > (small, tasteful) ads
|
| These _did_ used to exist. They were called 120x60 px buttons.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| https://nitter.kavin.rocks/Wikimedia/status/1452686760111185...
|
| Principal link is:
| https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2021/10/25/wikimedia-fo...
| dang wrote:
| Changed from
| https://twitter.com/Wikimedia/status/1452686760111185924.
| Thanks!
| kbsspl wrote:
| Was just thinking about exactly the whole Wiki ecosystem.
|
| It's created by individuals like us and should be available via
| maybe archive.org as a complete dump for individuals to play
| with.
|
| Are they available ?
| humanistbot wrote:
| https://dumps.wikimedia.org
| kbsspl wrote:
| Thank you. Will explore.
| human wrote:
| This is an interesting (and ethical) way for Wikimedia to finance
| their operations. I have to say I find it funny that back in the
| days teachers told us not to use Wikipedia and now we'll have
| large corporations paying to train their algos using their data.
| And then those algos will decide whether you get a loan or not,
| your insurance premiums, and much more.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Wikipedia doesn't need this to finance their operations. They
| have so much money from donations they don't know what to do
| with it. If they had used it wisely they could have built a
| large enough endowment to be self-sustaining by now, but
| unfortunately they didn't.
| a_e_k wrote:
| Back in grad school I had a well-respected tenured prof point
| out that Wikipedia was great for looking up immutable and
| uncontroversial technical things (e.g., a list of refractive
| indices) and could even be good as a _starting point_ for
| learning about a topic to research it. You just can 't _stop_
| there.
| staticman2 wrote:
| You think loan decisions and insurance rates will be made based
| on a computer program trained on a Wikipedia page? That's...
| not how any of that works.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| There are deliberate distortions in Wikipedia especially in
| regards to the national surveillance state. Companies should be
| aware that they might be paying for misinformation and
| disinformation.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28808516
|
| https://www.thecanary.co/discovery/analysis-discovery/2018/0...
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-44495696
| RogerSamson wrote:
| I am currently researching an long-term editor/abuser who has a
| rather colorful history.
|
| He runs a couple of attack websites targeting universities both
| in the US and Switzerland. These are current revisions to a
| past couple of websites which still appear as sources in
| numerous articles on Wikipedia. He supposedly volunteered at
| one of the universities before he was dropped because he lied
| about his credentials.
|
| He ran in the 2018 Italian elections. His political party was
| suggested by some Italian and American sources as a fraud. He
| had tried for several years to inject articles and tidbits
| about the party into Wikipedia.
|
| The sources which negatively reported on his political party
| have often been attacked by him. He managed to get one online
| newspaper's article removed from en-wiki and it-wiki. He
| appeared to do this for SEO impact to push up sources which are
| good about him and hide those which are not.
|
| He recently tried to incorporate a dating website promoting
| himself and his search for a wife. He tried to present the site
| as a "mirror" of Wikipedia.
|
| He used to run a service to circumvent anti-plagiarism tools
| like Turnitin. He did this while volunteering at the university
| mentioned above. There are several places where his service and
| his LinkedIn stories come up in the history of Wikipedia
| articles.
|
| He wrote a book about Second Life and a couple of faux academic
| articles. He tried several times to integrate his book as a
| source on it-wiki. The faux academic articles were uploaded to
| Commons, and they were even cited in a few legit academic
| publications.
|
| He operated a school in Second Life. He created articles about
| the school on Wikipedia, and one of the faux academic articles
| was about it. These were eventually discovered and removed.
|
| He also created several articles about himself on en-wiki, it-
| wiki, simple-wiki, and ja-wiki. These have all been removed
| because several of his accounts had been blocked for
| sockpuppetry.
|
| The story grows crazier the I dig deeper.
| RNCTX wrote:
| Is this something you're doing specific to wikipedia abuses?
|
| If so, there was also a bit about them in the latest Radio
| War Nerd podcast episode about the continued propaganda edits
| related to the US Civil War and various confederate army
| officers.
|
| I suspect if you got into white supremacist tropes that
| constantly (try to) edit wikipedia you could get an article
| into book-length...
|
| https://player.fm/series/war-nerd-radio-subscriber-
| feed-2633...
| sam0x17 wrote:
| So as a script kiddie / tween I used keyword-related wikipedia
| content to get my domain parking network to pass Google's "must
| have content" requirement (that is until Google changed their TOS
| at midnight one day specifically to ban users like myself). What
| is an example of an actually legitimate use of something like
| this, and in particular, a use-case that wouldn't be properly
| served by simply downloading the current data archive on a ~daily
| or ~hourly basis as people tend to, or just by straight-up
| crawling as I did back in the day?
| treesknees wrote:
| As someone else mentioned in a commment, Wikipedia averages
| about 2 edits per second and almost 600 new articles daily.
|
| A legitimate use of something like this is having Google search
| results lookup Wikipedia pages more often and in a timely
| manner.
|
| As the article states, it also provides SLAs for the
| APIs/service. So let's for example say Big Movie Star X dies,
| but the free API for downloading content is down for the day
| for maintenance, well now Google's flagship search product is
| serving stale/outdated information. This product provides
| businesses a means of reliably depending on an updating source
| of data.
| nickvincent wrote:
| Worth emphasizing that this is described as basically just adding
| new ways to consume Wikipedia at scale, not taking anything away
| (not that that's impossible in the future, but unlikely IMO). In
| theory, systems that use a lot of Wikipedia data (search engines,
| "AI" assistant/question answering systems, language models) can
| keep doing what they're doing with Wikipedia dumps, but new APIs
| could make these services better (e.g., faster reaction time to
| current events).
|
| A big upside of testing this out is the opportunity to keep
| better track of what services are Wikipedia-dependent. While
| search results often send people to Wikipedia (see e.g.
| https://diff.wikimedia.org/2021/09/23/searching-for-wikipedi...),
| voice assistants or Q&A systems might be (i.e. likely are)
| surfacing Wikipedia content in more subtle fashion. Same with
| large language models. Under status quo, it will be increasingly
| hard to track these relationships, so exploring alternatives is
| well worth it.
| chaps wrote:
| This probably won't do that much on that side of things -- it'd
| be trivial to mask relationships through proxy orgs and such.
| trhway wrote:
| Breaking net neutrality is bad while doing that to Wikipedia is
| good. How come?
| londons_explore wrote:
| I've got a feeling it won't be long before wikimedia stop making
| database dumps available, and throttling people crawling the
| website...
|
| A bit of a shame really!
| infofarmer wrote:
| Doesn't have to be that way. For a much smaller, but relevant
| example - see MusicBrainz / MetaBrainz
| https://metabrainz.org/supporters/account-type
|
| Wikimedia is simply productizing commercial access to make it
| easier for enterprises to support it in a commercially
| justifiable way (vs pure charity) + setting up processes to
| improve enterprise-only features.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| Good.
|
| So much of the recent progress in natural language understanding
| in commercial products like Siri and Alexa is due to the richness
| and structure in Wikipedia and wiki data. Big tech should be
| paying for this stuff...
| boublepop wrote:
| > Big tech should be paying for this stuff...
|
| I don't see anything about anyone paying the content creators.
| What fairness is it to har one platform currently freeloading
| of of the work that another platform is freeloading of its
| users (while begging them for donations mind you) suddenly have
| to pay the first freeloading platform?
|
| I can't speak for others naturally, but every vontribution I
| have made to Wikipedia has been made on the basis of
| contributing you our common knowledge base, not to try to
| provide a free service for a profit driven corporation.
| arsome wrote:
| This is still being run by the non-profit, so I suspect that
| these can go into ongoing Wikimedia operating costs. They're
| incredibly efficient for the scale they operate at and I'd
| say this might improve things even further. The less reliance
| on giant donation banners, the better.
| jon-wood wrote:
| Wikipedia doesn't rely on giant donation banners - the
| Wikipedia foundation had $180M dollars available at the end
| of 2020, and an annual hosting cost of $2M/year. The vast
| majority of there expenses are $54M/year of salaries, which
| I doubt are focused on Wikipedia itself.
|
| If you want a charitable cause to donate to find one that
| needs the money.
| bawolff wrote:
| Ah yes, all those servers can just putter off by
| themselves without any attention at all.
|
| For a site called hacker news, its a wonder that people
| think system admins are a superfluous job, totally
| unnessary at scale*
|
| * and yes im aware that wmf employees a lot of people,
| most aren't sysadmins, and some are more critical than
| others. I just think its rediculous people think that
| servers just run themselves and hosting is the only core
| cost.
| fragmede wrote:
| Psh, how hard could it be. They only do 21 billion page
| views a month; 39 million edits, register 264k new users,
| and have a data change of 23 GiB. Free account at Wix.com
| ought to do it for hosting costs.
|
| jk, it's fascinating how critical people get with how
| other people spend their money when asking for donations.
| When was the last time HN took a close look at how
| Johnathan Ives spends his proceeds?
| nickvincent wrote:
| IMO, the best mental model is that this gives a more formal
| way for Google or Apple to donate to Wikipedia. Wikipedia's
| mission of free knowledge is unchanged, but hopefully tech
| companies can provide financial support in a structured,
| reliable fashion. Ideally, it's even positive sum (i.e. the
| Wikipedia-dependent services can perform better, so that the
| efforts of Wikipedia volunteers impact more people).
| testudovictoria wrote:
| > _I don't see anything about anyone paying the content
| creators._
|
| The knowledge contributed to Wikimedia is understood to be
| public knowledge. Any contributions are considered voluntary
| and available to the general public. This includes profit
| driven corporations who want to create a service wrapper
| around Wikimedia content or serve the content in a different
| presentation (licenses withstanding).
|
| > _...not to try to provide a free service for a profit
| driven corporation._
|
| I personally feel like this is a fair step. Since
| contributions are made for public consumption, it makes sense
| that for-profit corporations whose products depend on
| Wikimedia APIs would pay for access _to those APIs_. They 're
| not paying for the data; that's free to the public. They're
| paying ensure their presentation has a guaranteed level of
| availability and support[0]. The end result is the same:
| knowledge contributors aren't paid for additions or edits.
| The context behind the payments are different.
|
| [0]: https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/pricing/
| xxpor wrote:
| Ever since the very beginning of wikipedia they've been
| insistent that the only licenses that count as "open"/"free"
| are ones that allow commercial use. There's a ton of CC NC
| content out there that would have been great on Wikipedia, but
| hasn't been able to be used. It's essentially an MIT/BSD vs GPL
| debate but for text and media.
|
| It should have been extremely obvious under this paradigm that
| content would be reused by commercial entities! As a
| contributor, I don't have a problem with it. The openness of
| the wiki has been _way way way_ more valuable to me than
| anything I 've contributed back.
| jackdaniel wrote:
| > It's essentially an MIT/BSD vs GPL debate but for text and
| media.
|
| It is not. CC NC prohibits commercial use while GPL allows
| it.
| bawolff wrote:
| And on top of that, much of the ideaological backing of NC
| being bad comes from FSF calling it not free.
| dehrmann wrote:
| It depends if they run this break-even to support bulk APIs and
| improved workflows or to profit on the content. This content
| was donated to Wikimedia with the intent of being reused. This
| isn't AWS and Elasticsearch (though I also argue that you
| shouldn't open source something you don't want people using);
| Wikimedia is a middleman, not the author.
| __blockcipher__ wrote:
| > This isn't AWS and Elasticsearch
|
| Is your implication that there is something wrong about AWS
| running OSI-licensed open source software as a service?
|
| In general your comment doesn't make much sense to me. First
| of all it assumes a highly biased position in the AWS vs
| Elasticsearch war, but furthermore it's not even clear that
| the two situations aren't comparable. In both cases something
| that was free is having something built on top of it.
|
| BTW the whole idea of Wikimedia Enterprise is providing
| higher levels of service availability. It's not really about
| the "content" itself. It's analogous to when you have a user
| of some service of yours that is flooding the service with
| requests and causing performance issues. A common pattern is
| to convert them into a paying customer and give them some
| guarantees about availability, while using that revenue to
| make sure there's enough hardware / engineering time to keep
| things running smoothly.
|
| Finally, the "middleman vs author" distinction you introduce
| is entirely irrelevant. To use the Elastic example, it
| doesn't matter who wrote the software, what matters is it was
| written under a permissive license, and therefore the author
| of a given code doesn't have any "ownership". Similarly,
| someone who contributes to Wikipedia doesn't own that content
| either. In both cases the actor is contributing to the
| commons and has no expectation to put any restrictions on
| their contribution.
| achn wrote:
| Rant: Wikipedia would get my donations easily if they simply
| included a couple of line items on what they are actually doing
| to improve Wikipedia! How is Wikipedia's focus not on building
| semantic context into their pages? Or adding topical
| prerequisites? Or any number of meaningful features? Or is their
| goal to just exist in the present form?
| aaron695 wrote:
| > How is Wikipedia's focus not on building semantic context
| into their pages? This is an awful idea.
|
| > Or adding topical prerequisites? No idea what this is
|
| People are idiots so we don't want them deciding on what
| direction Wikipedia heads.
|
| What Wikipedia is working on sucks, but better than the shit
| people want them to do. Like making Wikipedia easier to edit.
| That would fuck it up so quickly. Having the trash people
| filling it with garbage.
|
| Every time someone complains about a change they made and it
| being reverted and how they gave up, go check out their edit.
| They were idiots, thank fuck they gave up.
| howenterprisey wrote:
| Well, the community would be happy to take requests, but all
| those things require work and there's not enough resources
| (both community and foundation) to go around these days.
|
| Like topical prerequisites: I'm sure if you wanted to come up
| with a bunch yourself and put them up, people would like it,
| but I - for one - would get bored after doing the fifth page or
| so.
| yorwba wrote:
| You can find out what at least their programmers are doing by
| hopping on the public Phabricator instance. E.g. tasks closed
| as resolved less than a day ago:
| https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/8esyKcP6SJ...
| I can see quite a few tasks for Abstract Wikipedia and
| Wikidata, which are both about adding semantic context, each in
| their own way.
| achn wrote:
| Thanks kindly - I wish they distilled some of these goals
| into their fundraising copy.
| 20after4 wrote:
| Disclaimer: I work for the Wikimedia Foundation but I don't
| represent them.
|
| I'm pretty sure there _is_ a team working on building semantic
| context into the wikis.
| achn wrote:
| That is great to hear! Please promote that they need to give
| their donors (I.e people who are categorically knowledge
| seekers) tangible details and data in their fundraising copy!
| kemayo wrote:
| There's Abstract Wikipedia:
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's likely that proving this to you to get your donation (and
| that of similar people) will cost more than it will bring in.
| achn wrote:
| Do you mean in the ad-effectiveness sense that many donors
| wouldn't care or would be lost?
| renewiltord wrote:
| Yeah I suspect RoI will be negative
| achn wrote:
| Perhaps, but if there was ever an ad target that could be
| categorically labeled as "knowledge seekers" it should be
| Wikipedia donors.
| treesknees wrote:
| I would donate more often if I wasn't harassed about it later
| on. I understand they want to email people who are likely to
| donate again, but between all extra messages and still getting
| huge banner popups on the website, it put me off to donating
| again.
| achn wrote:
| See I genuinely wouldn't mind a reminder email, if that email
| gave me any information (or links to it) but instead it gives
| me no context for their costs or how donations will be used.
| How far does google's millions of dollars go? Etc.
| oliwarner wrote:
| Is _keeping the lights on_ not enough? It 's about the content.
|
| Maybe implementing an Encarta Mind Maze game would do it. Maybe
| the Encarta 95 splash screen with the Nelson Mandela speech?
| Hmm, maybe I just want to be 10 again.
| achn wrote:
| They specifically state in the email "Imagine if everyone
| gave? We could transform the way knowledge is shared online."
| But they give zero indication of that vision.
| oliwarner wrote:
| Okay, yeah, that's fair enough. Absolutely should include
| some detail on that.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I would prefer they not "improve", especially so in order to
| sell donations.
|
| Wikipedia has largely stayed the same since its inception and
| that is part of its power. So many things have "improved"
| themselves into irrelevance, or wasted enormous amounts of
| resources changing things that don't need change.
|
| There is a deep pit of improving things to satisfy the loudest
| people who "want" and not realizing until far too late that
| you're optimizing to a loud majority while your overall appeal
| shrinks to nothing. (Think of it like a grocery store dropping
| the least popular half of its products every few months...
| eventually they'd be left with light beer and ketchup confused
| about why nobody comes by any more)
| fragmede wrote:
| Wikipedia, _please_ continue improving. You first came out in
| 2001, 6 years before the first iPhone and computing has
| changed since then. I don 't want a grocery store that only
| has items from 2001 and has never freshened up their products
| since then. (I wouldn't mind 2001 prices though.) Please keep
| trying new things with my donation dollars. No one can
| predict the future perfectly, and especially with how
| technology continually changes the landscape of the Internet.
| bawolff wrote:
| Some things have changed
| https://nostalgia.wikipedia.org/wiki/HomePage
| bawolff wrote:
| Its open source, you could look at git log (of course not all
| changes are wmf sponsored, but a significant portion are):
| https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/q/status:merged
|
| There is also a short weekly news letter of more breaking
| changes https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News
|
| And of course, they also publish annual reports, although those
| tend to be a bit more pr-ish.
|
| p.s. i'm not sure what you mean by semantic context? Do you
| mean structured data/semantic web type stuff, or do you mean
| some sort of thing that tries to add context to articles you
| are reading, or something else?
| achn wrote:
| Appreciate the links. They should include more factuals and
| vision in their fundraising copy.
|
| All of those are great options for context, but I
| specifically would like to see logic/math/physics/code with
| functional context for symbology, usage, and derivation.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > This will not impact smaller content reusers who can continue
| to leverage Wikimedia's data dumps and APIs freely for their own
| use.
|
| This is another way to say "if you are a big business, we're
| going to block you downloading these unless you pay".
|
| Won't be long before those data dumps require a "free account" or
| captcha to download...
| afandian wrote:
| Seems like an odd speculation. Can you provide any evidence for
| that?
| tyingq wrote:
| I'm curious what the strategy is to get companies like Google to
| pay for it. Is it _" all carrots"_ or are there any _" sticks"_?
| Like maybe rate limiting certain consumers?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| They already don't want you to just scrape stuff off Wikipedia
| because mediawiki apparently doesn't do proper caching and does
| a stupidly expensive re-rendering of every page that is
| fetched.
|
| So the option you have is using stale data dumps. They're
| reasonably workable, I even host low-markup versions of every
| wikipedia article myself in my home lab and it's like some 100
| Gb worth of compressed data, images excluded. Uncompressed I
| don't know where it ends up, but below 1 Tb at any rate.
| Manageable but very unwieldy. File systems like ext4 struggle
| with that number of files in a directory so you need to be a
| bit crafty, but it's not hard to get around. If all you want is
| an info box, you could probably squeeze it down to a couple of
| hundred gigabytes uncompressed. Definitely not something you
| need a data center for.
|
| The catch, as mentioned, is is that the data is a stale
| snapshot. The only way you are getting current data is on the
| main site, which may be a problem if you have ambitions of
| staying up to date. I personally don't mind. I figure they used
| to sell printed encyclopedias and that worked pretty well so
| having a 1 year old copy of Wikipedia isn't that bad.
|
| It's also a sort of weird domain. I can see how it might not be
| easy to host in the cloud in a way that's both affordable and
| performant. Since so many insist on cloud-based apps nowadays,
| there's probably a market for Wikipedia APIs with a good SLA.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| The NSA mirrors all of Wikipedia and Stack Overflow once
| every 24 hours from the public Internet to the classified
| Internet, so developers of classified applications can have
| references without needing to pivot to a separate
| unclassified workstation that needs to be at least six feet
| away.
|
| I never found it to be a big deal. Once a day updates were
| perfectly fine for reference usage.
| georgyo wrote:
| > They already don't want you to just scrape stuff off
| Wikipedia because mediawiki apparently doesn't do proper
| caching and does a stupidly expensive re-rendering of every
| page that is fetched.
|
| It does cache pages very aggressively. And it even has
| solutions for hard problems in computer science, cache
| invalidation.
|
| Pages are cached indefinitely until something pokes it.
|
| Proof? Add ?action=purge to a wiki page.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Maybe I'm misinterpreting them then, they seem quite
| concerned about automated page visits.
|
| Like for example this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipe
| dia:Mirrors_and_forks#Re...
|
| and this: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Live_mirrors
|
| Something resulting in 50k page fetches of cached data in a
| day is nothing. A raspberry pi could handle 50k static
| documents in an hour.
| hashar wrote:
| Hi, I have been involved with the Wikimedia
| infrastructure since roughly 2004.
|
| The 50k daily hit on
| https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Live_mirrors is merely to
| illustrate a web proxy can dramatically reduce the number
| of hits to the original site. They could have pick 42 or
| 7 billions, it is just an example.
|
| The text dates from 2009, and in April 2009 this is
| roughly what we had in term of servers
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia-
| servers-20... Arguably a little more than a Raspberry pi
|
| We already had a few million pages rather than 50k of
| them, and they were not static since pages get edited and
| made live as soon as one save their edit. Obviously, we
| already had million daily users and definitely requires a
| ton of caching all across the stack. Also good luck
| serving flat files that keeps being written too, that
| does not really work with hard drive and static files
| storage.
|
| In September 2021 we have served 21 billion pages and 73
| billions media files https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-
| projects . Almost all of them served primarily served
| from caches.
|
| That being said, the wiki pages you have mentioned are a
| decade old. We definitely had trouble with people having
| the smart idea of scrapping the whole website, often
| using either uncacheable content or hitting barely served
| articles or history that were not cached and thus caused
| a full rendering of the page. Even with the servers we
| had, a single user could cause major havoc on the
| infrastructure and keep a good part of them busy just to
| serve that single person. Hence the recommendation to use
| the database dump which are still used:
| https://dumps.wikimedia.org/
|
| cheers
| boublepop wrote:
| > because mediawiki apparently doesn't do proper caching and
| does a stupidly expensive re-rendering of every page
|
| Don't worry, they are hard at work at making workarounds for
| all their idiotic design decisions that seem to make
| absolutely no sense.. and those workarounds will be provided
| quite cheaply!!
|
| Reminds me of the saying: " It Is Difficult to Get a Man to
| Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not
| Understanding It"
|
| We can be quite sure that Wikipedias engineering will never
| improve if their income becomes dependent on providing
| workarounds for deficiencies in their solutions.
| Hamuko wrote:
| FWIW, Google is one of the main sponsors of MusicBrainz and the
| core MusicBrainz data is (effectively) in the public domain.
|
| https://musicbrainz.org/doc/About/Data_License
|
| https://metabrainz.org/sponsors
| H8crilA wrote:
| Not only that it's one of the top donors to the Wikimedia
| Foundation.
| tyingq wrote:
| I mean, they should be. Google uses Wikipedia content
| extensively on search results.
|
| Google USED TO also have lots of prominent links that would
| drive traffic (and hence, donations) to Wikipedia. Over
| time, it has removed a lot of those links and replaced them
| with ones that lead to more Google hosted content.
|
| There's a distinct drop in Google-referred traffic to
| Wikipedia over time that's in stark contrast to the
| increased number of eyeballs on Wikipedia sourced content
| on Google's pages.
|
| It's not clear to me whether Google's sponsorship reflects
| the value they've gained. And, yes, I get that they are
| under no legal obligation to do anything at all, since the
| content license allows for all of it. But as with rich
| snippets, you can't just "take", or eventually, there won't
| be anything to "take".
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Rate limiting for all would be fair. You can torrent the whole
| db anyhow.
| webmobdev wrote:
| This is quite confusing. According to Wikipedia itself:
|
| > Most text in Wikipedia, excluding quotations, has been released
| under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported
| License (CC-BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)
| (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or
| back-cover texts) and can therefore be reused only if you release
| any derived work under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-
| Alike License or the GFDL. This requires that, among other
| things, you attribute the authors and allow others to freely copy
| your work ...
|
| > Some text has been imported only under CC-BY-SA and CC-BY-SA-
| compatible licenses and cannot be reused under GFDL; such text
| will be identified either on the page footer, in the page history
| or the discussion page of the article that utilizes the text. All
| text published before June 15th, 2009 on Wikipedia was released
| under the GFDL, and you may also use the page history to retrieve
| content published before that date to ensure GFDL compatibility.
|
| > If you are unwilling or unable to use the Creative Commons
| Attribution/Share-Alike License or the GNU Free Documentation
| License for your work, use of Wikipedia content is unauthorized.
|
| Source:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ/Copyright#Can_I_...?
|
| So what exactly is Wikipedia offering here? They can't change the
| copyright. They still have to be attribued. And any deriavative
| using such content will still have to be released under the
| original viral license. When anyone can download the whole of
| Wikipedia, with adequate bandwidth and storage space, what
| advantages does this service really offer?
| IAmNotAFix wrote:
| I think it's more the way you access the information than the
| information itself.
| mmaunder wrote:
| English Wikipedia is 20 gigs which takes a few mins to download
| on a fiber connection. How is this product compelling without
| Wikipedia actively throttling downloads and access to unpaid
| users?
| Zhyl wrote:
| From the article:
|
| >In most cases, commercial entities that reuse Wikimedia
| content at a high volume have product, service, and system
| requirements that go beyond what Wikimedia freely provides
| through publicly available APIs and data dumps.
| shock-value wrote:
| I don't know if this initiative includes Wikimedia Commons but
| I'm sure they've got substantially more data than that, and
| higher typical bandwidth usage.
|
| (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page)
| mgdlbp wrote:
| Files hosted on Commons currently total just under 320 TB
| (excluding old versions, which are retained).
|
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MediaStatistics
|
| This MediaWiki special page is also available for other
| wikis; the English Wikipedia itself hosts 152 GB of files
| that were uploaded there instead of to Commons for one reason
| or another (e.g. non-free material under fair use).
| IAmNotAFix wrote:
| Wikipedia averages 598 new articles per day et 2 edits per
| second.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics
| boublepop wrote:
| Sure but you only get access to 10 of them unless you pay for
| Wikipedia premium. /comment from slightly in the future
| xmprt wrote:
| Slippery slope only applies if there's actually a slippery
| slope to slide down. Nothing about this change indicates
| that Wikipedia will start charging the general public for
| access.
| wnkrshm wrote:
| They probably want data of site visitors - who looks at what,
| visits which link, edits what etc. That's not contained in the
| pure content.
|
| If someone shops around for some product, then visits a
| Wikipedia article related to it and then buys something, you
| can maybe infer which qualities of the article or what
| information made them choose. That again, you could try and
| sell to advertisers as a service.
| 20after4 wrote:
| Disclaimer: I work for the Wikimedia foundation but this is
| just my personal opinion.
|
| I'm pretty sure that Wikimedia would never sell such a
| service.
|
| This is about access to content and network resources.
| Definitely not about access to user's browsing histories.
|
| In my experience, user privacy is taken very seriously by
| Wikimedia's staff and leadership. The privacy
| policies/practices[1] are top-notch and not just a gesture or
| PR/appearance management.
|
| [1]
| https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2018/05/21/wikimedia-
| fo...
| bawolff wrote:
| That sort of thing isn't being sold. There would be mass
| riots on wikipedia if wmf tried to pull that type of shit
| _delirium wrote:
| One use-case could be if you want faster updates for articles
| on current events. The full database dump for the English
| Wikipedia runs only twice a month. I don't think that will go
| away, but you can now pay to get streaming real-time updates.
| bawolff wrote:
| There is a real time streaming api that is available for free
| (and has existed for a long time)
|
| https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Event_Platform/EventStre.
| ..
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