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Dvorak on Google and Wikipedia
cryptoluddite writes "PC Magazine has an article by John C. Dvorak expanding on the community discussion of Google's offer for free web hosting of Wikipedia. Those against the deal point out that Google may be planning to co-opt the encyclopedia as Googlepedia (by restricting access to the complete database). In a revealing speech given by the Google founders, Larry Page says he would 'like to see a model where you can buy into the world's content. Let's say you pay $20 per month.' Should public domain information be free?" It's a pretty scary scenario painted, but one can hardly take a speech from 2001 as serious evidence these days. Update: 02/16 20:16 GMT by T : This story links inadvertently to the second page of the column; here's a link to the first page.
Can they do that? The wikipedia is governed by the GNU Free Documentation License . . .wikipedia details here.
Speculation runs rife. I guess security through well... not very obscurity's bound to get someone chatting in the end.
The deal in the short to medium term with wikipedia is expected to be the provision of about a dozen caching servers. No actual database work would be done by google. There is already a small (3) squid cluster in Paris that does this for users in the UK and France saving on some transatlantic bandwidth.
I'm fine with Google offering a faster mirror/interface to Wikipedia, because mirroring of information is always good. From the last /. article on the subject, I gathered that Google would offer their faster processing power and ub3r bandwidth to Wikipedia....but that doesn't necessarily mean they get to hijack the content....they'd just provide a faster way to get to information that's mirrored elsewhere.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
In a revealing speech given by the Google founders, Larry Page says he would 'like to see a model where you can buy into the world's content. Let's say you pay $20 per month.
/. story could have equally read "Does Google Want to Pay Wiki authors?" but of course, that would have derailed cryptoluddite's agenda to smear Google.
The only thing "revealing" about that article is that Page continues "Somebody else needs to figure out how to reward all the people who create the things that you use. " In other words, what Page would like to see is a system where "users" pay for accessing content and "contributors" are paid for providing it.
This
To the editors: when you see the words may be planning, just ignore the submission in the future. TIA.
Not only that, but the open content license also allows Google to profit from providing premium access (read: low-latency) to their own instance of the content. This sort of scenario was anticipated from the beginning when the content license was discussed, and it was considered to be an indicator of success.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
First, full discloser - I'm a long time wikipedia user and I probably accidentally played a peripheral role in breaking this story. I first heard about the google deal back in July. Google is not the first company to offer to host wikipedia. The typical offer comes from "Mom and Pop ISPs" (Jimbo's words) that really don't have any idea what they're getting themselves into (1,400 hits/sec is a helleva lot to do for free). What I have to say in reply to this story is - it is, IMHO, totally FUD. It's completely hypothetical, and it's unrealistic. You have to remember - all the text on Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License or in the public domain; all the images and audio are licensed under the GNU Free Documetnation license, or CC-by-SA, or something liberal equivalent. So even if, on the off chance, Google succumbs to the Corporate pressure to be evil, anyone can take the text and reuse it in less evil ways. Furthmore, I trust Jimbo, Angela, and Anthere (the visible members of the board) in dealing with google to make sure the deal is done right by the rest of us contributors. There's a long history on Wikipedia of being against ads of any form - the spanish wikipedia forked several years ago over hypothetical discussion of it.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
You're wrong. The problem wasn't that we didn't have enough servers, but that the servers we had were misconfigured. The slowness experienced in January was resolved when the configuration bugs were ironed out. The problem is a lack of skilled sysadmins and developers. (And for the record, we just put in an order for 10 more servers)
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
They cannot. This article is nonsensical FUD from someone who doesn't know what he is talking about. (--A wikipedia admin)
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton