Advocacy/Studying the Economic Value of Free Knowledge

What's the economic value of things we never want to sell but everyone can use freely?

Wikimedia's and Wikipedia's economic impact have been a recurring topic of discussion. Having more information about how Wikimedia project content is reused and how it influences GDP or economic processes would help us evaluate the outcome of our work. It would also provide additional powerful evidence for the value of our projects.

Movement Discussions

• Wikipedia's benefits to the world economy consist of at least "end-in-itself benefits" and "instrumental benefits"
• Measuring Wikipedia's impact on the GDP would be great
• Some areas of value to include in a full estimate:
  • PD surplus: the value of free no-strings-attached access to knowledge that is otherwise harder to find, costly to use, and impractical to remix
  • Refinement, specialization: the value of iterating on knowledge to make it simpler and clearer; but also more targeted or better translated: something that is much harder with author ownership than with a shared public resource.
  • Structured curation: the value of good sourced and curated summaries of knowledge
• Part of this analysis would be tool that lets us measure reuse of content
  • CC has gathered numbers on this in the past; could talk to them about it?
  • commoncrawl.org could be interesting to look at
• Include public domain but also open licensing/open data/open access

Related Studies

• Brynjolfsson, Erik; Eggers, Felix; Gannamaneni, Avinash (2018). "Measuring Welfare with Massive Online Choice Experiments: A Brief Introduction". American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings (American Economic Association) 108: 473–76. ISSN 2574-0768. doi:10.1257/pandp.20181035. 
  • "Our research found that the median value that U.S. consumers place on Wikipedia is about $150 a year—but the cost is $0. That translates into roughly $42 billion in consumer surplus that isn’t reflected in the U.S. GDP."
  • How Should We Measure the Digital Economy?
  • Signpost review
• Jonathan Band and Jonathan Gerafi: Wikipedia's Economic Value (October 7, 2013)
• Deloitte Analytics: Open Data - How Should We Measure the Digital Economy? (2012)
• Abhishek Nagaraj: Does Copyright Affect Reuse? Evidence from Google Books and Wikipedia (26 Jul 2017) (PDF)
• Heald, Paul J. and Erickson, Kristofer and Kretschmer, Martin: The Valuation of Unprotected Works: A Case Study of Public Domain Photographs on Wikipedia (February 4, 2015)
• OpenLogic: OpenLogic Code Scan Reveals Increasing Open Source License Compliance Among Mobile Apps (2012)
• UK Intellectual Property Office: Copyright and the Value of the Public Domain - An empirical assessment; by Kris Erickson, Paul Heald, Fabian Homberg, Martin Kretschmer and Dinusha Mendis (26th January, 2015)
• Thompson, Neil and Hanley, Douglas: Science Is Shaped by Wikipedia: Evidence From a Randomized Control Trial (February 13, 2018)
• Hinnosaar, Marit and Hinnosaar, Toomas and Kummer, Michael and Slivko, Olga, Wikipedia Matters (July 14, 2019).
• Nicholas Vincent, Isaac L Johnson, Brent Hecht: Examining Wikipedia With a Broader Lens: Quantifying the Value of Wikipedia's Relationships with Other Large-Scale Online Communities (PDF, Signpost)
• Some other papers

Wikimedia requested studies

• Study on Contribution of PD and Open Licensing to the European Economy on the Example of the Film Industry, draft report due 16.02.2016

Possible actions

• Wikimedia could commission a study
• We could propose such studies to universities/PhD students
• We could create tools to gather data that studies will be based on
• We could work with other free/open groups to gather data that studies will be based on