Monetize the value of Wikipedia, because I’m happy to see you have that balance,” Paraskey said. “But it is a very malleable thing. You can make anything on Wikipedia fit, but none of it is as good as it might be as a randomly generated library.”
However, that’s not what Paraskekis is trying to do. The upcoming FREEzine, which will launch in July, will be a partnership between Google and Wikipedia’s editors, but Google’s chief anti-copyright strategist does not believe that’ll be a good thing for free software. He suggests that instead of trying to “come in and charge a bequest,” Google “can be our way of buying pension checks” for the Wikipedia editors.
“I think the most important thing we’re doing right now is setting the parameters for how we balance quality and quantity with us hiring people,” he said.
Similar views are shared by Google’d project coordinator Vincent Hirschfeld: “I’d like to see some of the s**t that we buy from the free community — the distribution, the loans — dealt with by Google. It’s like we have A-list talent in charge of Wikimedia and we hire them at a premium, but we pay them little regard for whether or not they give us the best thing possible.”
Hirschffel said that Hirte, a Wikibooks editor, had expressed his own frustration with Google for not letting Wikipedia operate at its current scale. Hirshfeld is also coordinating with the FCC, which is considering whether there should be a regulation restricting the amount of information Google can collect on Wikipedians when using their site.
While there are some things that could be left as open and open-source like FREAK and Wikidata, the broader goal of FREZEN is to “focus on quality and relevance. If we can find a way to increase our payouts,” he added.
“The more the public is able to be flexible, the less they want to pay or hire us,” he concluded.
The arrangement between Google, Wikipedia and the Wikicentr