[Foundation-l] PediaPress

Fri Nov 12 06:55:23 UTC 2010

Tim Starling wrote:
> On 12/11/10 13:23, MZMcBride wrote:
>> They negotiated with Wikimedia? Where and when? How many thousands of
>> companies would like their links in the sidebar of the fifth most-visited
>> website in the world? Are they really that good at negotiating? On the
>> English Wikipedia, there's a Book namespace and the sidebar has a completely
>> separate "print/export" section that comes from the Collection extension.
>> That's worth a percentage of the book sales?
> 
> Potential parternships are assessed by mission-relevance, not just
> revenue potential. Offline distribution is part of the Foundation's
> mission, as is open source software development. PediaPress were
> offering to do those two things.

[...]

>> I think there's a large distinction between the
>> Wikimedia Foundation taking a community project and encouraging a for-profit
>> company to make money off of it (through sidebar links and installing a
>> custom extension) and working with a non-profit organization to distribute
>> free content.
> 
> Yes, it is an important distinction. The reason our content licenses
> are friendly to commercial use is to allow companies to make money by
> distributing Wikipedia's content. The theory is that commercial
> activity can help to further our mission, more effectively than the
> non-profit sector working alone.
> 
> The Foundation's mission is to educate, not "to educate as much as is
> possible without anyone making any money".

[...]

> The reason they are treated differently is that their activities
> further our mission. I understand that you don't agree with that part
> of our mission.

The problem I have with statements like these is that they feel
disingenuous. The mission statement is as vague or as specific as the person
arguing deems it to be. There are thousands of potential projects that
Wikimedia could engage in that would fit perfectly within the current
mission statement[1] and thousands more that would loosely fit in.

It's mostly a matter of how many steps removed you choose to allow a
particular venture to be. If I sell Wikimedia T-shirts, I'm building the
Wikimedia brand, which leads to more donations during the fundraiser, which
leads to more servers, which further enables the dissemination of
educational content. Does that mean that selling T-shirts is within
Wikimedia's mission?

What is and isn't "mission-relevant" seems to be (perhaps intentionally)
completely ambiguous. Ultimately, who decides whether a partnership with a
company like PediaPress is mission-relevant? The Board of Trustees? The
Executive Director? The Head of Business Development? And beyond who makes
the decision, is there any guarantee that it will be a valid one? Given the
vagueness of the mission statement, how much of a stretch is acceptable?

MZMcBride

[1] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission_statement