Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-03-28/From the archives

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To be honest, my inclination is to take the opposite opinion of this than the author seems to, and see it as a good thing if people are reusing our text. I write content with the full knowledge that it's licensed under a copyleft arrangement and that it is available for use in a commercial setting. I guess legally speaking, Google and the like are maybe not fulfilling the licence by using our content without direct attribution (although there is a clear link saying "Wikipedia" there), but honestly I see it as a sort of badge of honour when I ask Google Nest a question and it spews my own words back at me, or I find some random stuff about Rwandan bus services, and accompanying map, that I wrote about 15 years ago sitting in a Cambridge published revision guide... I can see why in principle it would be good for Google et al to support the Foundation, but I don't see it as an absolute must and personally I give my time to the project principally to help make the world's knowledge freely and easily available, not because I think Wikipedia itself is the absolute be-all-and-end-all. Cheers  — Amakuru (talk) 21:46, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

(regarding attribution, the text above the "Publish changes" button even says "You agree that a hyperlink or URL is sufficient attribution under the Creative Commons license.") ~ ToBeFree (talk) 23:08, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

@ToBeFree: Ah fair enough, that makes sense. Cheers  — Amakuru (talk) 23:21, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

I wonder if that is actually correct for off-wiki use. It doesn’t seem consistent with the authorship/source attribution noted by Creative Commons [1] ☆ Bri (talk) 00:14, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

I guess the main point is that the attribution history is clearly and obviously available, which it would be if you click the page link and then click the history link. If that's not sufficient and a direct full attribution is required, then many of our processes such as WP:MERGE and WP:COPYWITHIN would also fall foul of the rules.  — Amakuru (talk) 07:21, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

I mean, going from the Creative Commons page, a link of just "Wikipedia" is the book example of an incorrect attribution. It doesn't show the title of the Wikipedia page, at least not in a way that makes it clear that it is is the title of a Wikipedia page; it doesn't show any authors, not even in the way of "Wikipedia editors" or something like that; it doesn't even mention the Creative Commons license. Most importantly, I think, is that the Knowledge box does in no way mention that the content within it is taken from Wikipedia. The link is presented simply as something leading further on, rather than a very necessary link to a source. In my eyes, this seems to be aimed at steering people away from actually clicking the link and having them stay on their respective search platforms as an effective silo of knowledge. This obviously leads to the effect I mentioned in the article where people think some employee at Google wrote the letters in the relevant Wikipedia article and made the conscious decision to edit them to fit their political agenda. This works in part because Google has decided to present itself not as a gateway to knowledge, but as a sole hub of it. And once Wikipedia gets involved in that, I think its right that the WMF pushes for more recognition of our work in this regard. Zarasophos (talk) 22:57, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

I share the author's concern, but I'm not really sure what we can do in this case. ~★ nmaia ^d 00:50, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

• One thing we can do is make sure that we don't delete our article. When patrolling deletion discussions and searching for sources, I often find that our content has been re-used elsewhere and sometimes even attributed to other people, when books are created from our content. By deleting our original, we then destroy the attribution audit trail and others can then claim ownership of our work. Andrew🐉(talk) 13:27, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

  Laying on the self-parody a bit heavily, isn't it? --JBL (talk) 15:47, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

Really clear-sighted and important article, Zarasophos. Thanks! (Personally, I found the realisation a few years ago that Google, and to an increasing extent the WMF itself, were beginning to make huge amounts of money from unpaid, volunteer labour a pretty considerable turn-off. One thing I stopped doing at that time was spending hundreds of pounds on reference material ... I started to think that that, at least, was something the Foundation and the various re-users like Google should provide, and to some small extent at least, i.e. the WMF's Wikipedia Library, this has happened. The situation with attribution is even more of an issue with Wikidata, which has a zero-attribution licence. The abortive Knowledge Engine looked like it was heading in the same direction – using Wikimedia volunteer labour as a money-spinner for some of the world's richest companies. Everyone should realise a simple fact — namely that one aspect of contributing here is that you work for free so that Google, Bing, Amazon etc. can make even more money. That's why they support the effort – and what they give is a pittance compared to what they make.) --Andreas JN466 18:53, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Thank you! Yes, I'm very interested in seeing how Enterprise shakes out and where we'll end up in a few years. Potentially, if the current monopolised structures on the internet are broken up and a freer net returns, Wikipedia will be able to take advantage of that. Zarasophos (talk) 22:57, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

Excellent article. This is one reason why I refuse to bother with Template:Short description on articles. Their main benefit seems to be to provide content for scrapers like Amazon Alexa and Google, and if those guys want me to add them they can pay me. Blythwood (talk) 20:48, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

• I've also had to deal with a four minute vandalistic edit that managed somehow to enter a Google Knowledge graph and which perpetuated a falsehood about a living person many days after Wikipedia had been corrected. What we need for dealing with these (hopefully rare) incidents is for WMF to liaise with Google to establish a direct channel of communication with them so that administrators or other trusted editors can immediately flag up gross errors to them directly, and with authority, instead of relying, as I had to, on clicking the Suggest an edit button and hoping someone might eventually get around to reading my plea to remove defamatory content. This would only be needed for really serious breaches as outlined above, but both organisations have a responsibility to ensure lies and libellous statements are rapidly removed and at the moment we're simply blaming the other and not doing much about it. Nick Moyes (talk) 13:57, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

I agree with this, more communication would definitely be good. The information relationship between Wikipedia and dominant search engines shouldn't be one-sided. Zarasophos (talk) 22:59, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

Thank you very much! Zarasophos (talk) 22:57, 30 March 2021 (UTC)