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Introducing the Wikimedia Enterprise API

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Re: Introducing the Wikimedia Enterprise API

#71

Post by [deleted] »

ROARosen wrote: post #66
anaganisk wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The new API is an opt-in product, meaning that everyone (including those companies) can continue to use the current publicly-available tools at no cost and no restriction. The ability to freely access the knowledge across all Wikimedia projects remains unaffected–it is core to our mission. Not sure what you have to worry about.

>Not sure what you have to worry about. >From op: It's just too often that a commercial offering just disincentives bettering the 'free' product. Instead of the public foundation focusing on bettering and modernizing the public option, they are -and will continue to be - putting their efforts to create a better api to be used solely for private purposes (albeit with good intentions). Sure, it's opt-in to use the 'bet…

[deleted]

Re: Introducing the Wikimedia Enterprise API

#72

Post by OJFord »

kenrick95 wrote: post #31
OJFord wrote: post #10

Great, just a shame it isn't more 'tradititionally' transparent & democratised IMO. Claims no custom contracts, but is enterprise sales team contact us anyway, for example. .proto on GitHub is nice, but no pricing, no public docs? This is probably great for Wikimedia coffers, but at the headline I hoped for new/improved Wikidata; instead it's.. different bordering on 'don't care'.

I guess the article are targeted towards general public, not technical people I found this page which has more technical details on what it actually is: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise Also found out that it is open source: https://github.com/wikimedia/OKAPI

Those are linked from the article, (that's the .proto on GitHub I mentioned) but what're we going to do with that? (And why does everything have to be formatted like a wiki page..)

I mean, it's fine, I just got momentarily excited for something that the announcement isn't. I wanted to find a pricing page, free tier, API docs, etc. Like Wikidata but.. I don't want to say 'modernised', but made more accessible, and with APIs for higher level content like this rather than just rawer data.

Re: Introducing the Wikimedia Enterprise API

#73

Post by abbe98 »

ROARosen wrote: post #49
dannyw wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedian here. We edit because we're contributing to free information. Free information means anyone can use it for any purpose, including commercially. I think this move is great. I'd rather have this money go to the foundation, than ParseAPIco.

> Free information means anyone can use it ... Of course anyone can use it commercially and for whichever reason they like. But by creating a walled 'premium' offering you are going against the premise of 'anyone can use it' since not anyone can use the commercial api. Surely if Google or anyone wants the api so badly they're willing to pay for it, they should fund it. Why does that mean it needs to be 'locked'?

Google and co will essentially pay for the SLA, free access will be available through Wikimedia Cloud Services and I'm sure that the team is investigating how to make the API available to the wider public.

Re: Introducing the Wikimedia Enterprise API

#74

Post by pimlottc »

abbe98 wrote: post #73
ROARosen wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Free information means anyone can use it ... Of course anyone can use it commercially and for whichever reason they like. But by creating a walled 'premium' offering you are going against the premise of 'anyone can use it' since not anyone can use the commercial api. Surely if Google or anyone wants the api so badly they're willing to pay for it, they should fund it. Why does that mean it needs to be 'locked'?

Google and co will essentially pay for the SLA, free access will be available through Wikimedia Cloud Services and I'm sure that the team is investigating how to make the API available to the wider public.

Devils advocate: Google clearly already has a working pipeline to import and format Wikipedia data for its needs. Why would they stop using it and start paying Wikipedia? Will Wikipedia be able to build an enterprise API thats faster/cheaper/more reliable/more scalable than the internal one build by one of the world’s top engineering companies?

No doubt the enterprise API will add attractive value for smaller companies without the resources to process the raw dumps but I’m skeptical that this will convert Google et al into well-paying customers. Unless they start restricting the free dumps...

Re: Introducing the Wikimedia Enterprise API

#76

Post by tobylane »

notatoad wrote: post #36
jlawer wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one issue I see with this is it is always Opt Out. I feel that google really should be lining up partners to opt-in. While I am sure there is reasons why Google believe they have the right (and a good case can be made), it always feels slightly entitled to just assume that people are OK with this being done to their content. That being said, of all the sources, Wikipedia actively license their content in such a w…

if you post information publicly on the internet, google is entitled to scrape it. you've opted in by publishing it. if you want to specifically exclude one entity from accessing information that you've posted for anybody to see, i'm not sure how there's a way that could be "opt-in"

Google is entitled to scrape it, but are they entitled to display the content on their site, the results pages? Everything in the instant answers is content that deserves to be displayed on its creators page, along with whatever monetisation the creator chooses.

Re: Introducing the Wikimedia Enterprise API

#77

Post by cblconfederate »

dannyw wrote: post #45
ROARosen wrote: post #44

With all due respect to Wikipedia for what it is, I believe their success is partly because of the 'altruistic' nature of their model. Sure, they should seek donations from huge companies like Google - which make tons of money off of their data - for the services they provide, but I feel like locking down the 'better' api to the public is not the way to go about it. It's just too often that a commercial offering just…

Wikipedian here. We edit because we're contributing to free information. Free information means anyone can use it for any purpose, including commercially. I think this move is great. I'd rather have this money go to the foundation, than ParseAPIco.

see you in a year, after you hear stories about how wikipedia had to redact information that was sensitive to their valued customers

Re: Introducing the Wikimedia Enterprise API

#78

Post by fny »

dannyw wrote: post #45
ROARosen wrote: post #44

With all due respect to Wikipedia for what it is, I believe their success is partly because of the 'altruistic' nature of their model. Sure, they should seek donations from huge companies like Google - which make tons of money off of their data - for the services they provide, but I feel like locking down the 'better' api to the public is not the way to go about it. It's just too often that a commercial offering just…

Wikipedian here. We edit because we're contributing to free information. Free information means anyone can use it for any purpose, including commercially. I think this move is great. I'd rather have this money go to the foundation, than ParseAPIco.

I'm another Wikipedian and donor, and I'm pissed about this.

Creating an enterprise product with enterprise funding means Wikimedia is directing energy and resources to serve enterprise alone. These APIs were likely demanded by larger tech firms, and I imagine they discussed with Wikimedia the possibility of creating a commercial service. Now they got what they wanted, it won't be a public resource, and it's design won't be guided by the public either.

Now the lines are very blurry. A wiser strategy would have been to create a separate private entity.

Re: Introducing the Wikimedia Enterprise API

#79

Post by mrob »

esturk wrote: post #53
hkai wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The altruistic model seems to be doing not that well. The number of editors peaked in 2007 and has been going down since. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedians#Number_o...

Maybe people have moved on to wikia (now called fandom) where you can focus on a specific series or topic. The number of users seem to heavily favor fandom too.

And it's a big loss to the Internet, because unlike Wikipedia, there's AFAIK no easy way to download all the content despite most of it being under the same license, and because unlike Wikipedia, site functionality is significantly impaired unless you enable their obnoxious Javascript.

Re: Introducing the Wikimedia Enterprise API

#80

Post by abbe98 »

pimlottc wrote: post #74
abbe98 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google and co will essentially pay for the SLA, free access will be available through Wikimedia Cloud Services and I'm sure that the team is investigating how to make the API available to the wider public.

Devils advocate: Google clearly already has a working pipeline to import and format Wikipedia data for its needs. Why would they stop using it and start paying Wikipedia? Will Wikipedia be able to build an enterprise API thats faster/cheaper/more reliable/more scalable than the internal one build by one of the world’s top engineering companies? No doubt the enterprise API will add attractive value for smaller compani…

While Google already have a pipeline in place the bottleneck of that pipeline is on the Wikimedia end of things, this project addresses that. No more scraping and data dumps when they can stream changes over gRPC. WMF didn't build this without consultation with these big companies.
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