Talk:Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/Supporting innovation beyond the traditional IP regime: Using Wikipedia as a model

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@MBrar: An interesting report! Will see to retweet the link from @wikiresearch once the post is up, to bring it to the attention of academics interested in research about Wikipedia. Two remarks about the current version of the draft:

  • "In the US, it is estimated that the average company lost $101.9 million in potential revenue due to the infringement of IP rights". That number appears to come from a paper published in 1990, i.e. before the existence of the World Wide Web ;) What's more, such estimates are notoriously difficult to verify, and controversial, also in our own movement (observations by James).
  • Regarding the sentence "the GLAM project issues grants to individuals who devote their time to enriching the content on Wikipedia related to a specific gallery, library, archive, or museum", it's not quite clear to me what is meant by "the GLAM project"? Also, if the sentence refers to Wikipedians in Residence at GLAM institutions, note that these are most often funded by the institution itself, and that the extent to which they should be involved in direct editing activities (especially in articles about the institution itself) is sometimes subject to controversy. Of course, if this part of the post is an intentional contribution to the recent debates about paid editing, it's fine to state such opinions on the blog.

Regards, Tbayer (WMF) (talk) 20:16, 10 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]


@Tbayer (WMF): Thank you! The retweet will definitely be useful. I see your point about the US statistic - we will delete that sentence. For your second point, I was referring to the GLAM-Wiki project, which I understand encourages individuals to add content related to these institutions. I was under the impression that WMF sometimes provided grants for such projects - is that incorrect? (this statement was not meant to be an intentional contribution to the debate)