Dvorak on Google and Wikipedia 449
cryptoluddite writes "PC Magazine has an article by John C. Dvorak expanding on the community discussion of Google's offer for free web hosting of Wikipedia. Those against the deal point out that Google may be planning to co-opt the encyclopedia as Googlepedia (by restricting access to the complete database). In a revealing speech given by the Google founders, Larry Page says he would 'like to see a model where you can buy into the world's content. Let's say you pay $20 per month.' Should public domain information be free?" It's a pretty scary scenario painted, but one can hardly take a speech from 2001 as serious evidence these days. Update: 02/16 20:16 GMT by T : This story links inadvertently to the second page of the column; here's a link to the first page.
Harsh on Google (Score:3, Insightful)
"should public domain information be free?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Public domain information is already free (free as in speech), but that doesn't mean that somebody can't also charge for it.
It's no different than the GPL -- also free as in speech, but not necessarily free as in beer.
Re:"should public domain information be free?" (Score:3, Insightful)
Statements like this are hurtful to the FOSS movement. Assuming all commercial interests are inherently evil is ignorant, being able to create profitable, Free (as in FOSS) commercial projects is vital to the survival of the whole movement. The majority of skilled programmers will eventually go where the money is, especially once they have a family, simply not having time to freely (as in $$$) contribute to FOSS projects. In a capitalist world such as we live
Re:Harsh on Google (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh really? And how do you know that? Just because you know that Google isn't an EVIL company like Microsoft?
Re:Harsh on Google (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean like Google did with Usenet Newsgroups?
Don't get me wrong, I like Google, but don't assume that they can't own the only database containing the 'free' information and provide access as they see fit. After all, they are paying to maintain it, right?
Re:Harsh on Google (Score:3, Informative)
There's a leap of logic... well, I guess if it's on the web, I can just download it? E-Donkey doesn't host everything for free. ;)
Here's a little more substantial info: http://www.google.com/terms_of_service.html [google.com]
The Google Services are made available for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use the Google Services to sell a product or service, or to increase traffic to your Web site for comm
I take issue with the submitter (Score:3, Insightful)
"It's a pretty scary scenario painted, but one can hardly take a speech from 2001 as serious evidence these days."
That's horrible.
Re:I take issue with the submitter (Score:2)
Re:I take issue with the submitter (Score:2)
Well, between the rabid Google cheerleaders, the swirly-eyed conspiracy theorists, and the rational thinkers in the middle trying to calm them both down, this story will generate a lot of ad impressions. That, when you get right down to it, is his real job as editor.
Re:I take issue with the submitter (Score:3, Interesting)
Does that sentence mean that we should disregard all speeches spoken before, say, June 14 2004? What is PC Magazine's cutoff date here?
Don't be ridiculous. He's talking about a speech gi
Contract? (Score:4, Insightful)
AT&T historical archives... (Score:2)
Google trying to strip away MS's dominance? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hookay! There goes my good favour... (Score:2, Insightful)
For a company that claims they are endevouring to never be evil, this strikes me as a pretty evil bait-and-switch type scheme to me.
I think I'm going to start checking out Yahoo's search engine. Not because I think I'll ever prefer it, but because I think I'd better start getting used to it, just in case.
Re:Hookay! There goes my good favour... (Score:4, Interesting)
$20 a month was (and is) a small price to pay for everything, if "everything" is correct and up to date.
I'd certianly pay a subscription for Google now, because their service is of value to me.
Re:Hookay! There goes my good favour... (Score:2)
Re:Hookay! There goes my good favour... (Score:2)
For those who will respond I'm not a subscriber either, I never volunteered $20 a month for content that is (and should remain) free.
Re:Hookay! There goes my good favour... (Score:5, Interesting)
Google is entirely different. It provides access to information in a format that is much more agreeable to me than other searches I've used. Unlike what others have claim, I regularly click on the ad links because they are often relevant to the information I'm looking for. I personally feel Google maps kicks the crap out of other tools. If they found a way to make their service significantly more usable, it would certainly be worth it to me.
Hints (2 Things that'd move me closer to being willing to pay):
Integrate Google maps with movie showtimes, as in IMDB's theater database. If possible, read my local paper and correlate showtimes from there, since not all my local theaters keep their times up to date online.
Correlate restaraunt searches in google maps with reviews. I'd like a review aggregate for a total star rating of nearby messages when I get directions via SMS. I'd like to be able to filter places that google believes suck, based on their their review data.
Re:Hookay! There goes my good favour... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hookay! There goes my good favour... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not much to pay at all, I call it my Internet bill and that's why I have the internet.
The internet was not created to provide a revenue model. Countless companies learned this in the dot.bomb. It's not like cable or satellite where my choices are limited and if I don't pay I don't get content. Wikipedia came about for a reason. If it goes subscription it immediately loses value because now articles are only maintained/created by subscribers.
If it goes subscription another free/open online encyclopaedia will take its place, the same way that FreeDB came about after CDDB required buying a license to use in applications.
World Domination (Score:2, Funny)
Re:World Domination (Score:2, Funny)
Google alrealy has a working profit model. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Google alrealy has a working profit model. (Score:2)
Or it could be just a PR based charity move. Think Walmart and local community charity. Walmart gives money away, no stings attached all the time. The only thing they ask in return is good will from the locals (i.e. more shoppers). Soon they have recouped the charity money and then some.
Google may be tryin
Re:Google alrealy has a working profit model. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Google alrealy has a working profit model. (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh great. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh great. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh great. (Score:4, Funny)
Sorry, I've been watching too much C-Span.
Re:Oh great. (Score:2)
Re:Oh great. (Score:2)
There could be (Score:5, Insightful)
However it must have both free and subscription based services for it to be a viable system.
Re:There could be (Score:5, Interesting)
Free not-necessarily-accurate data for everyone, fact-checked and extended commercial data for some?
Wikipedia needs hosting help, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrong. (Score:5, Informative)
What really happened that week (Score:3, Informative)
Licensing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Licensing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bottom line: again, Dvorak's talking out of his ass, just like when he claimed that there were almost no linux applications that could run on the PS2, he's making an uninformed guess based on something he heard somewhere.
Re:Licensing? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Licensing? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Licensing? (Score:3, Insightful)
They cannot restrict copying of the content, but they can limit access to it via Google's servers. The GFDL does not prevent this.
That's why it's important that there are always a few people maintaining mirrors of the entire Wikipedia.
It's also important that if Google ever stops the ability to make mirrors of the entire Wikipedia including updates and update history, that a big public fuss is made.
If you think it can't happen due to Wikipedia's license, think again: Usenet is presumably public domai
Re:Licensing? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Licensing? (Score:3, Informative)
even if it became a "premium" service,we'd survive (Score:5, Interesting)
if someone ruins it, sure it is a shame, but something else will pop up to replace it. The internet is just a big game of whack-a-mole, no matter if you are the RIAA, the Feds, a kiddie porn fiend, or a information seeker.
It's kind of the whole point...
Is this just alarmist talk from a doomsayer? (Score:5, Informative)
Can they do that? The wikipedia is governed by the GNU Free Documentation License . . .wikipedia details here [wikipedia.org].
Dvorak is a columnist, he's out for a reaction (Score:5, Insightful)
Dvorak's doing much the same thing for the tech industry that your paper's sports columnists do for the local teams. His role isn't "provide a balanced picture of such-and-so," it's more like "provoke a reaction by pushing every subject to distorted extremes."
Every sports section has at least one writer like that. Their job is to generate traffic, or responses, by staking out polemical opinions. Usually the one writer who pulls this duty paints a bleak picture of the local teams' moves, so as to get the loyalists to write in. It helps circulation. The same people work extra shifts on call-in shows, pretty often.
In this case, our sage has consistently been on the wrong side of basically every technology he's commented on in my book. He's a sort of gadfly to all things Apple, for example. (His reaction to the idea of the mouse was as spectacularly wrong as anything ever written on computers.)
Re:Is this just alarmist talk from a doomsayer? (Score:4, Informative)
'Twould be a pity (Score:3, Interesting)
This information was collected for free, and would be disseminated at a cost. While this has been done before (volunteer organisations are not new) - it would probably lead people away from making the effort in the next thing that comes along and is "by the people for the people"
This is why Jimbo didn't want the details to leak (Score:5, Informative)
The deal in the short to medium term with wikipedia is expected to be the provision of about a dozen caching servers. No actual database work would be done by google. There is already a small (3) squid [squid-cache.org] cluster in Paris [wikimedia.org] that does this for users in the UK and France saving on some transatlantic bandwidth.
Page would be unlikely to charge (Score:4, Insightful)
Whether Wikipedia should accept is another matter. I don't think that they should. It's much easier to appear independent if you have to pay your way, and for an encyclopedia, appearing independent is really pretty important.
An answer to his question (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, yes it should indeed be free. Information is the essential ingredient to the advancement of society. This is why public libraries, schools, and lectures were created, so that information could be dissemenated to all individuals who actively sought it out for themselves and for their children. Charging $20 a month for access to information is an outrageous idea and is particularly frightening when uttered by an individual whose company holds the key to so much of the electronic information on the web. I think if they continue with his "vision" of the future, Google's usage will plummet quite rapidly.
Hasn't the Open Source community taught anyone the value of free information exchange??
Re:An answer to his question (Score:4, Insightful)
Google has already done amazing things with aggregating data that is useful to the searcher. If they could take it much farther, $20 a month would be a small price to pay.
Re:An answer to his question (Score:2)
Re:An answer to his question (Score:2, Insightful)
Um.. Who is paying for all these "free" institutions? (Hint: They aren't "free") There has to be a revenue model somewhere. It could be use fees, it could be a progressive tax system, it could be a regressive tax system, but it is not free. To ignore that fact and claim that charging money to access information is evil is dising
Re:An answer to his question (Score:5, Insightful)
You may erroneously think that your local library is free, but in fact it's not. You pay taxes that fund the library. The government doesn't have some magic pot of gold that it pays for that stuff you know... it's most certainly *not* free.
Groups is Great! (Score:2)
Google Groups is still Usenet... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm fine with Google offering a faster mirror/interface to Wikipedia, because mirroring of information is always good. From the last /. article on the subject, I gathered that Google would offer their faster processing power and ub3r bandwidth to Wikipedia....but that doesn't necessarily mean they get to hijack the content....they'd just provide a faster way to get to information that's mirrored elsewhere.
Free public domain information (Score:2)
If it's not worth it, don't pay for their service, and find another means of accessing that same info. (If it's
Free VS paid content (Score:2)
Bias (Score:2)
Here's A Wikipedia Business Case for Ya (Score:2)
But... "premium members" get access to a version where the articles written by agenda-driven lunatics are color-coded in a red font and the stuff plagiarized and submitted by high school kids on a dare is in blue.
Whaddya think?
How to Stop it . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
People are fearful that Google will attempt to co-opt the Wikipedia. That's what is apparent in the Dvorak article. However, what Wikipedia needs is a slick lawyer to write a contract between Google and Wikipedia. (IANASL)
1. Google will host the Wikipedia as a donation.
2. Google will not restrict access to the Wikipedia except as mutually agreed upon by both parties, and a public page to explain what restrictions and why. At no time will restrictions be based upon subscriptions or charges.
3. Wikipedia will put a slick Google icon somewhere on the page to say "thanks Google for hosting us."
4. This agreement may be terminated with fair notice to the other party at any time.
If Wikipedia is able to maintain its autonomy, and the relationship is clearly labelled a donation of server space, then I think the Wikipedia could be hosted on Google.
DON'T PANIC (Score:5, Insightful)
Second, Google may just want to be in on the ground floor if and when Wikipedia decides to allow Adsense-type ads.
Third, companies do often do charitable things. It's a tax write-off.
Given those three things, I recommend that some commenters pay attention to the big, friendly letters in the subject line.
another Gracenote? (Score:2)
SCO already tried to 'pull a Gracenote' and it's not unreasonable to think others (not necessarily Google) would try the same with Wikipedia
CDDB not FreeDB (Score:2)
Usenet... (Score:2, Interesting)
While I will agree with him that DejaNews should NEVER have ended up in the hands of a corporate entity when the oportunity came for it to enter public hands; google havnt done a bad job of maintaining it. Its just a pitty no-one has come up with a service to compete with Google on that level since it COULD be a lot better.
Dirty tricks 101: quotes out of context (Score:5, Informative)
The only thing "revealing" about that article is that Page continues "Somebody else needs to figure out how to reward all the people who create the things that you use. " In other words, what Page would like to see is a system where "users" pay for accessing content and "contributors" are paid for providing it.
This
To the editors: when you see the words may be planning, just ignore the submission in the future. TIA.
Where to start? (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems obvious enough to me that DejaNews/Google Groups has kept Usenet far more prominent than it would have been otherwise (Dvorak doesn't seem to get that the archive isn't ownership of Usenet itself), but given that he's claiming that Groups isn't linked off the Google front page at all, why bother arguing details.
Whatever. If dumbasses who have seen Star Wars too many times enjoy droning on about how Google used to be Good and Not Evil, but is now Evil, who am I to argue? At any rate, Wikipedia isn't going anywhere.
Dvorak is stale (Score:5, Insightful)
In the days of 10Mhz 286's I used to really enjoy John's columns. Now, I don't know if I've just gotten smarter, or he's gotten dumber (heh), but I can't remember the last time he didn't seem like a technology lunatic to me.
Re:Dvorak is stale (Score:3, Insightful)
At 18 or so, I picked it up again and took a look. The Internet was becoming prevailant, and his stuff was swill. Pure nonsense, really. He was at least 6 months behind what the Internet (largely via slashdot) had already alerted me to what was going on, and going to happen. This was in 1998 or 1999.
I recognized him
Re:Dvorak is stale (Score:3, Informative)
> he's another has-been from a past era trying to pimp his FUD and general tech conspiracy theories. IMO, if you
> steadily bet AGAINST Dvorak you'll come out ahead over the long run.
You got it in one. Dvorak must have remembered that he had a column due, indulged in his intoxicant of choice, picked some random news items & used them as an excuse to indulge in some superifical reflection
Should public domain info be free? (Score:2)
I'm *not* necessarily taking Google's side here, just playing devil's advocate to see what happens with the discussion.
IANAL, but free (beer) != free (unencumbered). An encyclopedia might be PD, which means there are no restrictions on copying or using it, but you still may need to pay some sort of money to acquire the material. You *are* paying for your internet connection to get to the webopedia, right?
Likewise, IIRC, Dover Books [doverpublications.com] makes money by reprinting old textbooks that have gone PD after thei
Land Grab (Score:3, Interesting)
Some other people cloned the DB server into FreeDB [freedb.org], and jumpstarted it by datamining the CDDB server while it was still publicly accessible. We'll probably need to do that with Wikipedia. How big is it? Since "Content is available under GNU Free Documentation License", we should take a page from the FreeDB folks who saved our data from privateering clutches. How big is Wikipedia, in GB? Sounds like a job for BitTorrent, or perhaps Archive.org, or maybe a more passive archive, which would redistribute it only if access is restricted. Just distributing copies of the valuable data we've all produced would probably preempt Google, or any other "benefactor" from taking Wikipedia private. Let's not repeat the history that stole from us.
Re:Land Grab (Score:3, Insightful)
All the contributions to CDDB were merely info copied from liner notes and CD cases by fans with some free time. GraceNote was a bastard when they went closed, but it's hard to argue that the information was owned by anyone (except perhaps the original artists).
With Wikipedia, you've got original works. These are things that are copyrightable, and as far as I know, the original authors of all the articles still retain their copyr
fork it! (Score:2, Interesting)
Capitalism has checks and balances. [yahoo.com]
"serious evidence" (Score:5, Interesting)
No, what it is telling of though, is the mindset at Google at the time of writing. This little insight is important now because it's quite possible that their end goal is to monopolize information in such a way as to extract their income from it.
As they've recently made copious amounts of money and gained incredible power, it's quite possible its gone to their heads. Let's not paint them as a humanitarian group just because we like them: they are a company, after all, and have the same potential for evil that Microsoft (or any large company or government) has and does demonstrate.
Dvorak? (Score:3, Interesting)
But he incorrectly stated, not once -- but three times, that the Cell was going to be a 250 "Teraflop" processor.
Dunno about him, but everywhere I've seen info on this chip, it was a gigaflop processor, not teraflop. Don't believe me? Go pick up the most recent PC Magazine, see for yourself.
Public domain in print publishing (Score:5, Insightful)
From the speech in question (Score:4, Informative)
It seems to me that they're talking about copyrighted content here. Rather than concocting a plan to bundle up free content and make people pay Google for access, it looks to me like Page was actually talking about reasonable means of access to copyrighted information.
I'm sorry, (Score:3, Interesting)
In particular, ladies and gentlemen, consider MSN Search's fantastic Encarta Integration [imagine-msn.com] feature; you ask, for instance, "Who killed Abraham Lincoln? [msn.com] (to take MSN's own sample search string), and it gives you the answer. As much as I hate MSN, I think this makes it MSN 1 - Google 0; nope, Google's answer.com integration just doesn't match.
I'd consider Google's offer of hosting Wikipedia sites in the light of this feature offering by Microsoft.
They do not own any information in wiki (Score:3, Interesting)
As for subscription or pay-per-view information services, I am all for it, even for $100 per month, if the knowledge/art I get is not further restricted - I can burn a CD and give it to someone who can not afford access.
Noted Windbag Trolls for Page Views. /. Suckered (Score:5, Insightful)
PC Magazine is zombie, it's empire crumbled, aside from it's regular product comparison charts (which are widely blamed for much of today's feature-bloat) nobody would still be aware of it's continued existence. From that sad little bailiwick Dvorak bleats for attention and worse yet the gullible wanna-be defenders rush to dispute him.
This week he's on a smear against Google & Wikipedia. It could as well been another (willfully) know-nothing Linux FUD article, or another Mac-troll, or whatever. They're all trash and only PHB's struck in the 80's still pay the slightest attention to his "opinions" (quotes because I don't think be means a bit of what he says himself.)
The folks who run Wikipedia are notably honest. To date the folks at Google have done pretty well by their "No Evil" credo. Everything on Wikipedia is open so if need be it could be quickly reconstituted elsewhere. Thus, whatever the negotiations between Wikipedia & Google there's nothing to fear.
If the current Wikipedia administration does something heinously stupid the project will route around them. Besides which the best guesses are Google is talking bandwidth & caching, perhaps prioritized ranking, not ownership.
Dvorak, he's taking an old quote out of context and trying to create a scare. That's not reporting, or even editorializing, that's just baiting, pure & simple. Don't play into his game, he's the SCO of journalism.
This is all fud (Score:5, Informative)
Why volunteer to help a for-profit company (Score:4, Interesting)
What is interesting is that Amazon makes this work. The company is clearly a for-profit entity. Yet its crown jewels are the volunteer-created book reviews. I'm not sure what makes this work. It might be that friends-of-authors are motivated to post glowing reviews, it might be that people who disliked the book are motivated to post scathing reviews, it might be that some reviewers simply like to publish, or all of the above. Perhaps Wiki/Google-pedia could borrow this model to mix free-labor with for-profit.
Looking further into the future on an alternate path, I wonder if Googlepedia could become a fully for-profit (or at least self-sufficient) professionally run and staffed encyclopedia. With micro-royalties to authors/editors (and moderation-based revocation of payments for "bad" content), the organization would attract content creators on a for-pay basis. This aligns the motivational underpinnings of the organization with those of the content creators. The current Wikipedia is for-free people creating for-free content. A future Googlepedia could by for-pay people creating for-pay content.
One overriding lesson from Wikipedia (and Slashdot for that matter) is the ultimate necessity of sources of hard currency for online sites. As long as something is small (and below a certain scale of popularity) it can survive on donated hardware, bandwidth, or the benevolence of a monied patron (someone who pays the hosting bills out-of-pocket). But once it reaches a certain scale, the cost of serious server power, bandwidth, and professional administrators pushes the budget far beyond the hobby scale. Although pleas for donations can help, I suspect large-scale sites must, ultimately, turn to ads, tie-in product sales, and subscriptions.
What is fascinating, in a long-term trend sense, is that the cost of scale are steadily declining. Cheaper hardware, declining bandwidth costs, and improvements in systems management tools mean that sites can reach ever-larger scales before generating prohibitive burn rates on costs. The number of visitors that a hobbyist/free-site can support continues to rise. Perhaps Wike need only wait for the singularity point when the cost to reach (and serve packets to) the entire world is within the reach of a home-grown, volunteer-run organization.
Information wants to be valuable (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's talk about the "revealing speech" (Score:4, Interesting)
The speech certainly is revealing - it reveals cryptoluddite's agenda, which is anti-google.
If you look at the quote in context, I think it's pretty clear that google is not talking about doing the selling, unless they are the gateway to ALL the content. They will never be that gateway. I do think that there is a market for commercial versions of some of this media, but I think the future is that you will pay only for directed media, and for convenient access to media. For instance a newspaper will have several classes of information, based on what they think they can sell to who; There will be information that is free on the web and also in print, information that is included in the cost of the paper but for which you must pay extra on the web, and so on.
In the meantime sites like E2 and Wikipedia will probably be freely available for the forseeable future, but I would like to see them have commercial or "pro" versions of the site. For example, the pay site would have full-text searching, and the free side might not (and in both cases, currently does not.) You would also be able to enter RFBs for research papers, and you could accept them based on price and posting history. This model would work better for E2 than for Wikipedia due to Wikipedia's collaborative nature, but it is not inapplicable to Wikipedia.
Anyway, any comissioned research would become a part of the database at an appropriate time (possibly part of the license agreement) and thus everyone would benefit. At the minimum, the site would make a commission, which would definitely benefit all of the service's users.
This is precisely the way software is going, and I don't see any reason that all kinds of media won't see the same development. In fact, I see no way that any kind of media can survive without making this transition.
Storage allocation (Score:3, Insightful)
Similarly, there are two ways to stop people from reading a library book: you can remove the book from the shelf, or you can just remove it's entry in the card catalog.
We should all keep in mind that Google is becomming the "card catalog" for much of the on-line world. Many would argue that if it doesn't exist on the from page of a Google search, then for most of the world, it just doesn't exist.
I think what Page meant... (Score:3, Interesting)
Would be nice. I'd pay for it in a heartbeat.
paranoid and poorly researched (Score:3, Informative)
The most glaring omission Dvorak makes is the simple fact that due to the license Wikipedia uses, that it would be impossible for any one company to control it. If the 'end' were really near, somebody with better intentions could just download the *whole* Wikipedia and host it. But it would never come to that because the foundation would not allow it ; its very mission is to ensure free access to the projects it runs.
I'm very disappointed in Dvorak.
Re:First rule about public businesses (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:First rule about public businesses (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:First rule about public businesses (Score:2)
Re:First rule about public businesses (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Funny)
But what if Googlepedia has already changed the definition of monopoly? brrr...
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok, I'll explain. In order to run my son's educational software, I need to use Windows. In order to see my digital pictures and videos from my camera and camcorder, I need to use Windows. In order to take a practice computerized GRE, I need to use Windows. For my wife to do her job, she needs to use Windows. There is no real choice on the desktop -- in many situations, you are forced to use Windows.
Re:Hmm (Score:2, Informative)
Except Google is providing useful services that people want to use.
For free.
We get value out of using their services.
The advertisers get value out of the exposure they get, which is great, because the advertising still isn't annoying.
Google isn't squashing competitors with shady business practices, they are simply providing the best, most innovative services for the time being.
Re:Should public domain information be free? (Score:2)
So who pays for the storage/bandwidth/people to manage the info and so on? If not those who want access to the info then who?
I totally agree (was Re:Total FUD) (Score:3, Informative)
The main point that needs to be looked at is the fact that Wikipedia has been experiencing some absolutely explosive growth in demand from people both trying to add articles, as well as people simply accessing it, like numerous cross-links to Wikipedia mentioned in various