Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-10-28/Recent research

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The research on the value of Wikimedia Commons brings to mind this issue's Alexa essay. What's the commercial value of having such snippets, or the Google Knowledge Graph, also 99.99% powered by volunteer contributions? ☆ Bri (talk) 02:28, 30 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

All companies which reuse Wikipedia's content are accruing a debt to society and owe the public commons. The law is not a guidebook for what corporations should do, but only a set of minimal expectations for behavior which are far below the level of human decency. Even though it is not illegal to take from wiki without giving back, it is wrong behavior which brings shame to any person or organization associated with it. Commons and Wikimedia projects bring value to all people and organizations. Companies which get money from wiki project should give back. The employees, customers, neighbors, and anyone socially connected to anyone reusing free and open content from wiki or anywhere else has a duty to educate, pressure, and expect that anyone who uses the commons should give back to it. Blue Rasberry (talk) 13:23, 31 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

I have to politely disagree. I have contributed many images to Commons and always understood the CC-BY license to mean what it says when it allows free commercial use. Several of my images have been used that way. Sometimes I have been asked permission, which is courteous, but not necessary. In one case a major publisher had one of my images for sale in their catalog (it was in a paper they published), which is clearly not ok and they removed it on my request. Outside of that and proper attribution I expect nothing in return, nor should any other contributor. It might make sense for the Wikimedia foundation to track commercial use (perhaps with a page to accept reports of such use) and send a friendly fund-raising letter, but that is different from saying commercial users have some duty to support Commons. They don't. That's what free means.--agr (talk)

Measuring the economic value of any free product or free service is often more an exercise in scholarship than a valuation of something tendered, and of course the value of Wikimedia Commons may be more social than economic. But a study that references the waiting time between each use of content as the price of use increases may provide insight into the economic value of Commons, and as the price of use increases the distribution of waiting times would likely follow well known measures in statistics. Then again, twenty-some-odd billion dollars is a good starting point.Tamanoeconomico (talk) 20:47, 21 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]