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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.
That's literally the whole point of Wikipedia, to distribute knowledge for free, is it not?
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?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Isn't that one of the points of the internet... to share knowledge?
--
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.
How about Amazon just save the donation, and instead host all of wiki (media, commons, and others) all free of charge on AWS. This cost Amazon less, and greatly reduces cost for the foundation.. win-win. Though, personally, I'd argue the site should be mirrored at least across the three largest cloud providers to keep it up at all times.
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....
This is clear distillation of the move from the late 90s internet that escaped AOL's walled garden–idealistic, DIY, open-standard based, focused on the free (and I do mean free) flow of information, naive but hopeful–to the modern internet–cynical, monetized, closed platform based, focused on emotionally charged political (of all stripes) outrage.
I don't care one bit for this development, but I don't think that top-down solutions, whether technical, monetary, or bureacratic, could be successful. This is a social issue, a reflection of our collective values of convenience over all else. We could very easily find the way out of this, if we cared to.
Google just about anything and the first result and the sidebar will have links to Wikipedia.
Amazon's Alexa, for example, uses Wikipedia "without credit, contribution, or compensation."
Amazon recently donated $1 million to the Wikimedia Endowment, a fund that keeps Wikipedia running
If you voluntarily give something away for free, you have no right to complain if people use it and don't pay you.
What, is Wikipedia hurting for cash? No. No they are not. They are swimming in cash. So much that I'm baffled by their need to do fundraising campaigns. The whole idea behind Wikipedia is that information wants to be free, and now Slate thinks it should cost money? WTF I thought they were socialists?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
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.
Sure no problem. Just change the liscene terms of Wikipedia to no commercial use unless .... then choose something viral like you open source Alexa or the AI using it. Or payment. I'd be opposed to a profit model for Wikipedia but a support model would be reasonable.
GNU GPL is essentiall that. if you use it you open source it. BSD is if you use it you cite it.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Todays thread about something that has been released under a CC licence, free for anyone to use or modify provided the attribute the source ... and then wanting to add EXTRA conditions after the fact because someone uses it in a way they don't like.
That's not how licences work. If you want more restrictions, or a non-profit clause, then use the correct licence to begin with.
Sure no problem. Just change the liscene terms of Wikipedia to no commercial use unless ....
They can not retroactively change the license. I contributed many articles and edits to Wikipedia, and I absolutely would NOT agree to "no commercial use". I contributed so that anyone can use it for any purpose, and Wikipedia has no right to change that just because they feel greedy.
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.
No one owes Wikipedia anything for using it.
In what fucked up society did you grow up that you don't owe the courtesy of indicating who you quote?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
This type of article is the type of lazy journalism that I hate. They gave one million dollars, that's a real sum for Wikipedia. It's a generous donation when none was needed. Normally no journalist would ever think to write 'does amazon owe money to wikimedia'. Yet, now it has reached the news that Amazon gave a million, they get pointed to the subject and start berating Amazon for it somehow not being to their standards (which it will never be, if it's too much they'll find something else wrong with it - Amazon powergrab on wiki or publicity stunt or whatever). The real takeaway these journalists give is to never do anything good, or they'll hunt you down.
Except the volunteers contributing content to Wikipedia have their work reverted by "an editor." I tried contributing valuable information, backed by sources including other Wikipedia articles, only to have my IP address blocked and the contribution removed and replaced by the previous incomplete and non-standard presentation. I was undertaking a data analysis project at the time which led me to supplement the existing article content as well as restructure it to facilitate web scraping. Wikipedia is nothing more than a fiefdom of lords denying the peasants.
Amazon can agree to pay Wikipedia when Wikipedia agrees to pay the volunteers who maintain and update its info.
The volunteers agreed to provide that service without compensation.
Wikipedia agreed to provide its service without compensation. If it now wants to switch to a pay model (and that's what this is - wanting to be paid for the service it's providing), it's free to do so (provided it can figure out a way to placate the volunteers who gave freely of their time and labor to make Wikipedia possible). Hint: Encyclopedia Britannica already tried the pay model.
The day Wikipedia starts licensing it's content commercially will be the day that it dies.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
Possibly they owe the volunteers writing Wikipedia contents, not Wikipedia.
I've never had sourced quality content reverted without recourse. There is only your assertion that the content was valuable. If it was repeatedly reverted, and if it was sourced and relevant, then there is recourse where you can force a community vote on the dispute. If your IP was banned, then it was for violation of a Wikipedia rule. Sounds like you got into a reversion war with someone.
I am relatively happy with Wikipedia's model. It's not perfect, but it's good and it's effective enough to have lasted. It has scaled very well and has survived the age of rampant vandalism, special interest group abuse, and trolls. I have far more confidence that the Wikipedia system worked correctly in your case, than in your (ironically, unsourced and unverified) assertions.
You: "They took it in accordance with the terms you offered."
The article: "Amazon's Alexa, for example, uses Wikipedia 'without credit, contribution, or compensation.'"
Wiki's licensing terms: "Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License"
"Credit", in other words, is a requirement of the "attribution" clause. So maybe rethink your stance?
No one owes Wikipedia anything for using it.
In what fucked up society did you grow up that you don't owe the courtesy of indicating who you quote?
© 2018 angel'o'sphere. All rights reserved.
Other Wikipedia articles are not on Wiki's list of "reliable sources." To use them you have to do stuff like click through to their sources, verify those sources support the tex ton Wikipedia, and then cite them. You don't actually ever cite the wikipedia article itself.
There is truth in that but I think you don't hear much about special interest groups on wikipedia because they won. I followed the Philip Cross case ( https://wikipedia.fivefilters.... ). The people who challenged Cross got exactly the treatment you're dealing out and it was very hard to prevail. The professionalization of Wikipedia always carries a danger. The complex rules allow people with clout to drown out those without. Not in principle, but in practice. People who want to want to take on subjects where big interests are involved quickly find out that it's very hard, especially when the big interests also manage to get their narrative into the reputable sources. And those who disagree, well, they're not reputable.
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.
Alexa is a search engine. Just like Google.
Should Google pay Wikipedia for reading results?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Isn't that called a job?
Wouldn't that defeat the entire concept behind wikipedia?
Amazon "Cool beans thanks"
Wikipedia "WTF AMAZON?!! WHY HAVEN'T YOU GIVEN US MONEY (billions)??!!"
Amazon "lol, typical"
A code of conduct is not a licence.
They cannot change their licence without approval from all contributors.
We went through this discussion during the GPL2 to GPL3 conversions.
In a market economy sense of Wikipedia being owed compensation for services rendered - absolutely not. You're right about that.
However, in a gift economy sense of maintaining a balanced flow of wealth - absolutely. Those who accept your gifts but never give gifts to you, gradually stop receiving gifts. (That was essentially what motivated the GPL3 - too many high-profile for-profit freeloaders building resentment in the community caused enough upset that some of the GPL2 community decided to further restrict the conditions of their gift, despite it costing them compatibility with the rest of the GPL2 community.)
And it seems to me that Amazon is doing just that with their donation, which from the limited information google quickly volunteered, would seem to be among the most generous contributions made.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
There is truth in that but I think you don't hear much about special interest groups on wikipedia because they won. I followed the Philip Cross case ( https://wikipedia.fivefilters.... ). The people who challenged Cross got exactly the treatment you're dealing out and it was very hard to prevail. The professionalization of Wikipedia always carries a danger. The complex rules allow people with clout to drown out those without. Not in principle, but in practice. People who want to want to take on subjects where big interests are involved quickly find out that it's very hard, especially when the big interests also manage to get their narrative into the reputable sources. And those who disagree, well, they're not reputable.
Reading the link you provided (as I've honestly never heard of this case), it seems to me like Philip Cross is a proficient editor accused of being a one man conspiracy by advocates of fringe view proponents. Googling the articles of those who claim to have been wronged is quite enlightening. It puts the finger on an interesting problem . How do you settle the debate when some people weigh facts from a very different view? To take an unrelated example: What if I held the view that Robin Hood was not as the wiki article claims "a legendary heroic outlaw", but a terrorist in violent opposition to taxation and government? Obviously any sources that has spoken against higher taxation, the government or supported anyone who has ever broken the law are biased and are only speaking from their own self-interest while my own have a fair and balanced view.
BWAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH The list of Wikipedia scandals - admins sockpuppeting, admins abusing power, etc - is a mile long. Start with Essjay, who was bosom buddies with the corrupt cadre that makes up the Wikipedia board, and it actually gets WORSE from that fraudulent little racist.
Yours is the kind of narrow argument that makes me groan inside.
Given the enormous asset base (5.7 million articles in English alone, plus all of the discussion and history behind that process), and the public visibility and reach, it's pretty easy to slap a valuation on Wikipedia well north of $5B, were it commercialized in any way similar to its closest comparables.
When you're playing on such a big stage, even if you aren't commercialized to the full potential of your underlying asset, you are actually on the radar of other enterprises worth hundreds of billions of dollars. You don't necessarily need to throw your weight around (you don't have a revenue model to protect), but you also don't want to be discouraged from operating in your natural domain because you can't even afford the coffee, on the way to the limo, on the way to the fancy conference hall.
As a ratio to a putative (but defensible) capital asset base, the management cost of Wikipedia is on the order of 1.5% annually.
Oh, profligate waste! thy name is the WikiMedia Foundation.
As a net value to society, I would say the $5B valuation greatly underestimates the present state of affairs: permanently free leads to the virtuous circle of ubiquity, where the asset is repurposed in so many ways that barely anyone knows about, because each additional marginal use is too cheap to meter (the Foundation sees only the marginal bandwidth costs).
Perhaps its a paradox too great for your axe-contracted mind to absorb, but even a socialist utopia of altruistic knowledge workers requires an interface with the capitalist world where you don't get pushed around in every possible way. The price of that interface is not tied to internal models of the cost of production, it's tied to the external model of how you sit eye-to-eye at those tables with the power brokers like Google and Amazon.
Forbes Power Women 2012: #70 Sue Gardner
There are many corporations which pay $70 million to a single executive to drive those kinds of agendas forward in the world, and they justify this by looking at their bottom line, a line which Wikipedia does not have. But if you imagine a bottom line based on their assets and clout, you'd not be hopelessly out of the ballpark of multi-million dollar executive compensation packages.
News site to investigate Big Tech, aided by Craigslist founder — 23 September 2018
s/but don't own me a freaking dime/but you don't owe me a freaking dime/
I've witnessed this failure mode many times, in myself and others. It takes roughly 95% of your brain to suppress the f-word.
Meanwhile, the other 5% of my brain was preparing to engage the cherished screed-culmination "submit" button.
No.
Thanks for asking though ...
Sheesh, I hate Indian givers. "We're so great; we're making information freely available to the world! Oh, but not to you, big meany who makes more money than I do."
Wikipedia is, indeed, a handy resource. But it's also one that sometimes seems like it wants to have things both ways; free for everyone's unlimited use AND a service that's owed some kind of regular donation if you utilize it.
Considering the content (which is the only reason the site has ANY value) is contributed by users volunteering to write it? I don't think they have much of a leg to stand on if they're upset Amazon uses it without compensating them.
In fact, the decision made to make Wikipedia a free to use resource has some negative implications for them. (EG. It's not usually considered a source one can site when writing any kind of term paper for schools.) Commercial encyclopedias are acceptable as such sources, by contrast, because the content is vetted by publishers who are responsible for maintaining their accuracy. Either you're a publisher, or you're just a content platform hosting service. Wikipedia chooses to be the later.
Morally? Yes. They should. It'd be a real nice thing to do. But... even then, the REASON I put stuff up on wikipedia is so that EVERYONE can go use it. If Amazon is using it... that still counts. This is one of it's intended use-cases.
Legally? No, I don't think so.
I suffered the same reverting of excellent and sourced facts (and professional writing.) Early days I was able to contribute occasional information in my field of expertise, but as time went on, _occasional_ careful contributions were treated dismissively.
Gradually only those with reputations in the fiefdom of Wikipedia were welcomed to contribute (bored homebounds) while careful contributions by unknowns (people with actual lives) were thoughtlessly reverted.
I assume many valuable contributions were being sidelined, not jut my own, and no longer viewed Wikipedia as a great source of information.
And stopped wasting time making careful smart edits, when it was always a dispiriting struggle against revert-ionists.
We already talked about this with the Linux Kernel Code of Conduct change.
Except that a key element in the Linux Kernel discussion was that the licence was the very thing preventing people from withdrawing their contributions.
Similarly Wikipedia contributions are inherently copyright to the contributor, who licences their work under GFDL and CC-BY SA.
No, Wikipedia can not change those licences. They can choose to cease sharing that content, but they can't legally just stick their own shiny new licence on it.
Just because you don't like it does not mean you have any control or rights over your past contributions.
Except.. yes, yes he does. He retains copyright and all the commercial and artistic legal rights that grants.
You are wrong, careful sourced contributions ARE reverted, as AC stated:
I was undertaking a data analysis project at the time which led me to supplement the existing article content as well as restructure it to facilitate web scraping.
Sounds a lot like my contributions - made while I was actively working on the topic, in my field of expertise - and flow edits, carefully made to put the article in line with Wikipedia's own flow model.
AC writes clearly and lucidly. What would you have AC do, spend an hour or two coming up with examples and quotes from long-buried Wikipedia discussion pages?
As I recall there are automatic revert 'bots as well as human editors.
Just write a bot that never reads the TOS and doesn't agree to comply with it.
Instead it can use a defined protocol to request responses from a server, and the server can choose whether to provide those responses. Maybe something like HTTP, that seems quite good at this sort of thing.
If wikipedia doesn't owe its free volunteers for taking advantage of them, why does Amazon owe wikipedia for taking advantage of them?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
If he wants to elicit credibility, then I would have him give the page. No hours of examples required. Then it's trivial to see the edits he did and the discussions on why they were reverted.
Did your own experience include getting IP banned? I suspect your behaviour didn't descend into the equivalent of Wikipedia civil disobedience.
When we release something to the community, for free, that includes commercial use. If we don't want it to, there are licenses that can make it free for personal use, but not for commercial.
The Wikimedia Foundation made a decision to make their content free for everybody, and to not restrict the usage. Same as GNU, Linux and others. Even if you are making money. Even if we don't like what you do with it. We give it away because that's what we decided to do. And nothing is owed.
It doesn't mean companies (or people) that realize financial benefit can't make a contribution to the cause. Some do. But that's completely at their discretion.
I was thinking how to reply to this but it easily becomes very long. But maybe I can summarize it with a simple rule don't escalate the effort to push out the wrong ideas and don't raise the bar to only keep the best ideas:
Different groups have different ideas of common sense. Sometimes these differences are a matter of taste. Sometimes they are better founded. In hard science they can be pretty well founded. In journalism there are some rules to give some foundation to this common sense. In Wikipedia as well. But there still is a lot of freedom in constructing a narrative. Conflicts between common sense groups are difficult to resolve because arguments lose value when they are placed in the mouth of someone from the other camp. Even when something is accepted as a truth it doesn't mean that you have to assign it importance.
When there are competing commonsense groups you can be more aggressive if the common sense ideas have a harder foundation. In real world issues there is too much room for different cases of common sense. There is no such luxury to restrict yourself to issues where there is a hard foundation. In political issues you also get a lot of efforts to distort your common sense and that makes it even worse.
PR and propaganda is all about tuning people's common sense. It tells you which sources to trust and which sources to dismiss. When PR is involved in a subject you cannot trust dominant common sense and you need to keep the debate open. The Iraq war issue is certainly such a case. This means that even if you feel that you're on the right side you have to be very careful pushing people out because your common sense is being massaged. The West has a democratic tradition, that means the amount of propaganda being put out is immense.
I see Philip Cross as a bad faith actor who played the system. what Philip Cross did was avoid direct confrontation but massage credibility. His aim was to push the dissenters more and more into the fringe, so that readers use their common sense and decide these sources can be dismissed. That they don't deserve attention. Without ever checking out what these sources even say. Cross's opponents are people who opposed the Iraq war. Why are these fringe? And why are the supporters of the Iraq war still so credible? Because of facts? the antiwar people were right overall, and the supporters of war were wrong overall. Because they clearly don't trust the system? Yes, that is likely a major factor.
Instead of aiming to resolve such issues one should maintain a window, to what extent you can allow one side to dominate. The central question from a 'management' point of view becomes how much fringe is acceptable and how much is too much.
Do you think these fringe people should be allowed as wikipedia editors? Should they be made more invisible or less?
There are systems for this, often based on ignoring this credibility part: some arguments should be treated independently of who says them.
Currently we're in an all out war on fake news. It's framed as a war against Russian influence but that is itself group think and linking to russia is a way to discredit opponents. The war on fake news is a large scale effort to push all dissent into the fringe and more into the fringe. This is more or less independent of whether this dissent is justified or not. It's just a dominant scheme trying to push out the rest.To move dissent from fringe to even more fringe .It becomes increasingly hard to even google it, which makes it more fringe if you tell someone about it and which helps your common sense to stick to the other group. Mainstream journalism has become too aligned with power and will go along with the effort. They already share the same common sense of who should be taken seriously and who not. I fear Wikipedia is also evolving in that direction, that it where it matters it will be dominated by people with 'the right ideas', who know which sources are good enough to refer to, to be quoted, and which sources are not good enough and are not allowed.
You are wrong, careful sourced contributions ARE reverted, as AC stated:
Then offer some evidence. Don't be part of the current culture that just expects the world to believe something because it came out of your pie hole. Seriously, I know very little about this, and I'd like to know more, but just batting yes / no back and forth wastes bits.
just fork it. THen close down the original. The fork gets the new license. Since the original was licesnsed for any purpose, it can be forked since that's a purpose.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
They are complaining about Amazon using something that they are giving away for free? Hell, the Wikipedia Foundation doesn't even PAY the people who post and keep articles on Wikipedia. So are they gonna stop living off the free work that those volunteers do and start paying them per article and change?
Yeah, didn't think so.
Beware of Sales Reps bearing gifts.
I just don't see what you are seeing. Philip Cross does a huge amont of work, and you can nitpick, but the examples against him aren't really convincing to me. The people against him doesn't seem to have a claim to fame by opposing the Iraq war, nor would I describe such a view as "fringe" so I don't see that connection. What I see is people expressing anti-Semitic views and supporting Assad and I consider such views "fringe".There certainly is a lot of propaganda in western media, but I don't believe that the Telegraph, Guardian and FT, would/could collectively push a government controlled narrative in the way of RT and Sputnik.
I think my point would be that what you consider fringe should not be fought by any other means than debate on content.
pie hole
Yum, pie!
You deride the "current culture that just expects the world to believe something"
and yet believe without evidence that Wikipedia editing is a Virtuous System.
and yet believe without evidence that Wikipedia editing is a Virtuous System.
I don't believe either way. I *suspect* Wikipedia is mostly factual with some bias and has blatantly incorrect information in a smaller number of cases. I'm not even crying about it either, because I'm able to see the world as neither black or white. I guess I'm just special.
If you make a claim, it's up to you to back it it. It's not up to the rest of us to disprove it. For example, I could claim your spouse is a whore. You'd probably laugh at me unless I provided some evidence of it. You probably wouldn't feel compelled to get back to me with dates and times and itineraries proving that they are not a whore. See how that works?
False comparison. He knows his wife very well. You don't know Wikipedia or the people behind it at all.
My god you are trying hard.
I tell you that Apple Computer employees are secretly being drugged by the cafeteria food to make them more "compliant" with company policy. By all accounts you ought to be running to the local police and reporting this. Of course you don't, because I'm just some random guy with a story about Apple.
A little Occam's Razor goes a long way here. What's more likely... Wikipedia is run by a secret cabal of editors that distort facts. Or you tried to make an edit to an article and had it rejected, damaging your fragile psyche. This is a terrible injustice, but you can't even tell us the page in question, nor did you bother to capture any screen shots, or describe the changes that were rejected. Well, that's typical. Because if you provided that someone would be able to disprove your claims. Poof, there goes your FUD.