Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2025-07-18/Recent research

Good roundup/selective dive as usual, HaeB. I saw an early presentation of the realienation research at a conference a couple years ago (and might as well disclose I know the authors) and had an initial pragmatic-defensive reaction: Wikidata can't just switch to a different license -- it doesn't function without CC0, so what's the point? But the more I sat with it, the more I felt like there was a really important point here about alienation, wikis, wiki contributors, and licensing.
Contributors are more and more frequently separated from our work. No amount of reaffirmation of our definition of freedom changes the reality that many people in our community regularly express feelings ranging from annoyance to demotivation because they feel like their labor is exploited.
Back in 2018, for example, Bfpage wrote a Signpost article about the experience of hearing Alexa read something she wrote on Wikipedia, without attribution. The paper focuses on Wikidata, but the objection about Alexa, and one of the chief criticisms here and elsewhere about more recently relevant companies like OpenAI and Google, isn't simply that they use Wikipedia, but that they treat Wikipedia (and everything else) as if they're CC0.
Google and Wikipedia/the rest of the web have had a historically mutually beneficial relationship, but that undeniably began to erode with Knowledge Panels, which have now given way to AI Search.
It seems to me the distance created between contributors and readers, owing to companies treating our work as though it's CC0, regardless of whether it is, does take a toll worth examining. I think there are now several people/groups working to better understand just that, like the WMF's Future Audiences, but "realienation" seems like a natural frame through which to talk about it.
BTW: research or other concrete evidence about whether and how much information from Wikidata is being using in Google Search or in its knowledge panels - How much of this is available? My sense is that such information would be difficult to find, and that it is easily obscured for reasons that align with the authors' arguments, but I would be happy to be wrong about that. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 15:47, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The Wikimedia sound logo was meant to eliminate the difference between Alexa announcing that it will use Spotify to play a requested song while lifting Wikipedia text without attribution, so it is dispiriting that two years later, there is no external adoption of this Wikimedia branding. As Barbara Page pondered in that 2018 article, perhaps the WMF has calculated that large donations from reliant tech companies are better than enforcement of Wikipedia's attribution requirement especially since they do not experience the alienation. ViridianPenguin🐧 (💬) 04:22, 19 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Re the Wikidata license paper: It would be of far "deep[er] concern" if Wikidata/WMF was claiming to own simple DB connections, like who the painter of the Mona Lisa was. The author apparently acts like it's dispiriting to editors that such basic info is being shared, but it's the other way around. It would be dispiriting if the kind of stuff Wikidata does was being locked down further as they seem to advocate for. The CC0 license is a good fit for Wikidata. SnowFire (talk) 19:21, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]