Thanks all for the helpful answers.
Jimmy Wales wrote:
William Pietri wrote:
Say, are there examples of people who do this
well, contributing back to
Wikipedia or to the general public? [...]
Answers.com is an excellent example. They license Wikipedia content and
also license content from many other more traditional sources, and offer
it up to people who search on their site. They have always been a
strong supporter of Wikimedia and have been traditionally the #1 sponsor
of the annual Wikimania conference.
So they benefit from our work, and they give back to the community as well.
Interesting. Are there examples of organizations who give back in other
ways?
I ask with some ulterior motive. I and some pals are looking at doing a
commercial startup that would involve a substantial amount of open
content. That content would be narrower but deeper than Wikipedia, by
which I mean it would cover a much smaller set of topics, but would
include a fair bit of material that Wikipedia currently deletes for lack
of notability.
As a startup, major cash donations are unlikely, at least for a few
years. But where our material overlaps with Wikipedia, we wanted to find
ways to collaborate. I think the only item currently in our product plan
is a tool to compare related articles, so that editors of either site
can easily diff and merge parts they like from the other. Ideally, we'd
open-source that code so that it could be used to compare and sync
between other open-content sites as well.
Do folks here have other ideas that would be mutually beneficial?
Thanks,
William