[p2p-research] publishing wikipedia articles for money, is that a scam?

[Michael Gurstein]

On a perhaps related note... I've been away from Facebook for almost two
months (behind the Great Firewall) and coming back I've noticed that FB
appears somehow automagically to have reaped a huge swath of entries from
Wikipedia and established these as individual pages (within their walled
garden) available for the various activities internal to FB--"liking",
"friending", "commenting" etc.etc.
 
I noticed this because, as part of my re-entry I did some searching
internally on FB (on "community informatics") and discovered that not only
was there a FB CI "group" which was set up some time ago by colleagues
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=10811405363 but there was also now a
CI "page"
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=10811405363#!/pages/Community-informat
ics/111193338905174 which seemed to have no evident "owner" and was
explicitly taking text from the Wikipedia CI entry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_informatics . 
 
Tootling around on other Wiki subject areas I found a number of similar such
Wiki authored "pages".
 
Since by design the flow of content from the net (Wikipedia) to FB is only
one way and thus any content generated for example, commenting on or
enhancing the Wiki derived FB page is within the FB "garden" this seems to
me to be a very insidious form of capture of the commons for the private
interest of FB.
 
I haven;t seen this commented on here or elsewhere although I might have
missed it over the last couple of months or maybe I've missed a nuance
somewhere.
 
Comments?
 
Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: p2presearch-bounces at listcultures.org
[mailto:p2presearch-bounces at listcultures.org] On Behalf Of M. Fioretti
Sent: Friday, November 26, 2010 4:02 PM
To: p2presearch at listcultures.org
Subject: Re: [p2p-research] publishing wikipedia articles for money, is that
a scam?


On Sat, Nov 27, 2010 06:38:35 AM +0700, Michel Bauwens
(michelsub2004 at gmail.com) wrote:
> see kasper souren's article here at http://guaka.org/2010/11/25/ 
> books-llc-scam-amazon


This is not news, there was a practically identical story months ago, if not
in 2009 (and obviously I can't find the link now :-( )
 
> for me, this would be legitimate, given the license, but not 
> necessarily ethical, depending on how the benefit sharing happens with 
> wikipedia and its authors,

agree 100%. This is exactly the reason why it is good, as I explained in a
couple of threads here already, to have copyright. IF/WHEN an author doesn't
want to allow this exploiting (and I have nothing at all against those who
do it, I publish things with the same license
myself) because it would damage its ability to produce that or other works,
copyright gives a basis to stop these people.

Marco

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