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Does Amazon Owe Wikipedia For Taking Advantage of The Free Labor of Their Volunteers? (slate.com)
Slate's Rachel Withers argues that "tech companies that profit from Wikipedia's extensive database owe Wikimedia a much greater debt." Amazon's Alexa, for example, uses Wikipedia "without credit, contribution, or compensation." The Google Assistant also sources Wikipedia, but they credit the encyclopedia -- and other sites -- when it uses it as a resource. From the report: Amazon recently donated $1 million to the Wikimedia Endowment, a fund that keeps Wikipedia running, as "part of Amazon's and CEO Jeff Bezos' growing work in philanthropy," according to CNET. It's being framed as a "gift," one that -- as Amazon puts it -- recognizes their shared vision to "make it easier to share knowledge globally." Obviously, and as alluded to by CNET, $1 million is hardly a magnanimous donation from Amazon and Bezos, the former a trillion-dollar company and the latter a man with a net worth of more than $160 billion. But it's not just the fact that this donation is, in the scheme of things, paltry. It's that this "endowment" is dwarfed by what Amazon and its ilk get out of Wikipedia -- figuratively and literally. Wikipedia provides the intelligence behind many of Alexa's most useful skills, its answers to everything from "What is Wikipedia?" to "What is Slate?" (meta).
Amazon's know-it-all Alexa is renowned for its ability to answer questions, but Amazon didn't compile all that data itself; according to the Amazon developer forum, "Alexa gets her information from a variety of trusted sources such as IMDb, Accuweather, Yelp, Answers.com, Wikipedia and many others." Nor did it pay those who did: While Amazon customers pay at least $39.99 for an Echo device (and the pleasure of asking Alexa questions), Alexa freely pulls this information from the internet, leeching off the hard work performed by Wikipedia's devoted volunteers (and unlike high school students, it doesn't even bother to change a few words around). It's hardly noble for Amazon to support Wikipedia, considering how much Alexa uses its services, nor is it particularly selfless to fund the encyclopedia when it relies upon its peer-reviewed accuracy; ultimately, helping Wikipedia helps Amazon, too. [...] We all benefit from Wikipedia, but arguably no one more than the smart speakers, for which the internet's encyclopedia is a valuable and value-adding resource. It's frankly a little exploitative how little they give back. Withers goes on to note that Wikipedia seeks donations from its users -- it's a non-profit that runs entirely on donations from the general public. While one can argue that "Amazon is only packing up information that we ourselves leech for free all the time, [...] Alexa is also diverting people away from visitng Wikipedia pages, where they might noticed a little request for a donation, or from realizing they are using Wikipedia's resources at all," Withers writes.
A report from TechCrunch earlier this year pointed out that Amazon is the only one of the big tech players not found on Wikimedia's 2017-2018 corporate donor list -- one that includes Apple, Google, and even Amazon's Seattle-based sibling Microsoft, all of which matched employee donations to the tune of $50,000.
Amazon's know-it-all Alexa is renowned for its ability to answer questions, but Amazon didn't compile all that data itself; according to the Amazon developer forum, "Alexa gets her information from a variety of trusted sources such as IMDb, Accuweather, Yelp, Answers.com, Wikipedia and many others." Nor did it pay those who did: While Amazon customers pay at least $39.99 for an Echo device (and the pleasure of asking Alexa questions), Alexa freely pulls this information from the internet, leeching off the hard work performed by Wikipedia's devoted volunteers (and unlike high school students, it doesn't even bother to change a few words around). It's hardly noble for Amazon to support Wikipedia, considering how much Alexa uses its services, nor is it particularly selfless to fund the encyclopedia when it relies upon its peer-reviewed accuracy; ultimately, helping Wikipedia helps Amazon, too. [...] We all benefit from Wikipedia, but arguably no one more than the smart speakers, for which the internet's encyclopedia is a valuable and value-adding resource. It's frankly a little exploitative how little they give back. Withers goes on to note that Wikipedia seeks donations from its users -- it's a non-profit that runs entirely on donations from the general public. While one can argue that "Amazon is only packing up information that we ourselves leech for free all the time, [...] Alexa is also diverting people away from visitng Wikipedia pages, where they might noticed a little request for a donation, or from realizing they are using Wikipedia's resources at all," Withers writes.
A report from TechCrunch earlier this year pointed out that Amazon is the only one of the big tech players not found on Wikimedia's 2017-2018 corporate donor list -- one that includes Apple, Google, and even Amazon's Seattle-based sibling Microsoft, all of which matched employee donations to the tune of $50,000.
What an incredibly stupid idea.
Donating to Wikipedia is fine, but at the end of the day their a charity making a public resource. Are we running out of things to criticize Amazon for now that they've been shamed into paying living wages?
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Isn't that one of the points of the internet... to share knowledge?
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I can't accept this! - Monica Swinton, A.I.
No one owes Wikipedia anything for using it.
Wikipedia makes itself available as a free service. If it wants to GET PAID for its use, it needs to update its TOS appropriately, and start charging as it sees fit.
Amazon doesn't owe Wikipedia contributors anything. Contributions to Wikipedia are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 licensed, under which "You are free: to Share—to copy, distribute and transmit the work, and to Remix—to adapt the work, for any purpose, even commercially." You still have to attribute the work and license your modifications under similar terms. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License) Contributors agree to this license when they click "Publish changes." So maybe Amazon needs to do a better job of attribution, and million dollar gifts are always appreciated, but that about it.
This question makes no sense. Why would someone owe for free things, which there is no contract/terms-of-service/financial agreement?
Today must be a slow news day....
What they must owe the Linux foundation following this hare brained logic.
So....credit the source.
That is a well-established practice, even when dealing with freely-available information.
Amazon owes that to Wikipedia, socially if not legally.
Exactly what I thought. I know she probably isn't nerdly or old enough to read Slashdot, but:
Rachel, that attitude is scummy as fuck. The word "volunteer" means a person who freely and willingly gives their time. They don't want compensation, they are doing it out of the goodness of their heart, that's the whole fucking point. Saying "Amazon Owes Wikipedia Big-Time" is no different than saying "Wikipedia Owes Volunteers Big-Time". If you only do things for pay, then don't volunteer to do things, you entitled little millennial shit.
By the way, how much are you compensating all of the open source developers for being on the internet or using smartphones and mobile devices for commercial purposes? Don't you owe them "big time" too?
You are technically right, but the problem isn't the documentation. Morally speaking, Amazon's use of scraping other sites for free implies they see nothing wrong with doing so. Unfortunately, this is not what they actually believe, since they believe it is wrong to scrape their own site. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20160903083414/pricezombie.com/announcement
Having a TOS with onerous conditions doesn't make those conditions moral. It only most of the time makes them legal.
In short.... they seem like a sprawling non-profit that has a disproportionately large and disproportionately expensive operation leeching off the public good done by unpaid volunteers to provide personal salaries for an entity that serves itself and uses donations to grow itself and pay administrative overheads to people that own itself, whereas an organization of 10% of its size would be more than adequate to support the technical infrastructure and systems that the unpaid volunteers doing 99% of the real work require for all languages of the global free encyclopedia to exist.
I have noticed that an awful lot of people underestimate the complexity of large operations especially when the end goal seems simple. Running something with the size and reach of wikipedia is not simple.
You probably think "it's just a website" and you could host it. You couldn't.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wik...
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Legally absolutely not. Morally, absolutely. Mentioning your sources is just a good thing to do. All the rest would be OK.
Obviously not only Amazon is guilty of this. Almost everybody is (including myself).
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.