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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Alexa is a search engine. Just like Google.
Should Google pay Wikipedia for reading results?
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.
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