Facebook's "Community" Pages are Wikipedia data with Facebook ads | Hacker News Reader

Facebook's "Community" Pages are Wikipedia data with Facebook ads

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29 pointsstarnix1725 comments

As someone who is both a user of HN and in the Wikimedia Foundation has already noted, Facebook actually arranged a deal with Wikipedia to get this content. They aren't simply scraping, they are giving Wikipedia money in exchange for this.

Edit: with the link http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1319543

So, what is your personal take on this? Is this the first time the wmf has made a syndication deal?

Seems like the first time was in April 2009 (http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Orange_an...).

Personally, I think this is a good idea. Granted, there get to be conflict of interest problems when more deals like this go down. But other than providing access to the data-feed Wikimedia seems like it doesn't have many options for revenue. Advertising and donations come to mind, and they already do the latter.

Personally I think AdSense on Wikipedia pages would both be effective (in the same way that AdSense on Google search results are useful--people go to these pages with an intent to find something), but it would also open up a can of worms. I like that Google occasionally gives Wikipedia money so it doesn't have to do that. :-)

Of course, I'm sure someone who has thought about it more could find ways to monetize Wikipedia. What if Wikipedia became so important that people would pay to edit the pages? There are corporations who would love to have the final word, and they could, so long as they paid for it, perhaps?

What I'd like to see is the importance of Wikipedia as a repository of human knowledge recognized on an international level (like the UN, perhaps) and then institutionalized the way the IMF is. A guarantee that Wikipedia will always be there, funded by the nations of the world, would be great.

Thanks for your elaborate answer.

The reason I'm curious is because I think that wikipedia is one of the best things ever to come out of the web, at least a fragment of the web seems to have realized its true potential.

It bothers me that wikipedia has to make these Faustian bargains in order to stay alive, and I agree fully with you that wikipedia ought to receive some funding from governments, as long as it does not come with 'strings attached'. I see wikipedia and facebook just about as opposite poles on the line of what the web could be like if we all cooperated with each other versus if we try to see how much we can screw each other over.

What worries me mostly is that by making more and more commercial ties that wikipedia will lose its independence, and will be beholden to those that fund it, and possibly no longer able to see clearly.

I think I'd have less of a problem with an adsense block on wikipedias pages than with these syndication deals, the fact that they could happen anyway (without benefits) doesn't really diminish that in my view.

"What if Wikipedia became so important that people would pay to edit the pages? There are corporations who would love to have the final word, and they could, so long as they paid for it, perhaps?"

This is a terrible idea and would lead to serious astroturfing of otherwise neutral articles. This would only serve to make money the final arbiter of truth.

What is the exact problem here?

The Creative Commons license was intended to allow such use, and Facebook reached out to wikipedia beforehand. Unlike some shadier uses of this, the community pages contain direct attribution to wikipedia, and direct links to edit the content. See here:

http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/21721

It just pollutes the web with content that is available in a better form elsewhere.

I'm sure it's legal, but really, if I want to know about ruby I really don't need to get the facebook fake community page.

It looks like most if not all of those so called communities were simply bot generated spam pages.

In one fell swoop facebook has de-valuated all the other communities it hosts and a whole bunch of search results.

Or do you think that someone actually made a facebook 'rapid application development' group, or one for 'business process models'?

> It just pollutes the web

That's a very apt description of 90% of Facebook.

I really don't need to receive reports about how my friend's farms are going.

"It just pollutes the web with content that is available in a better form elsewhere." - A lot of this already happens with aggregator sites, blog posts,auto-generated link bait sites etc. so this is nothing really new , so FB is only adding to the noise. The scary part i suppose is the scale of it. If FB does this for everything and it gets searched/cached by the search-engines , we are going to have to start looking at results from the 5th page onwards.

> we are going to have to start looking at results from the 5th page onwards.

Yes, that is exactly what I meant by pollution.

I don't think there are any problems with it from a legal standpoint. I just feel that it's a good example of how Facebook is trying to build a walled garden of content.

Walled garden? You don't have to log in to see those pages, so I don't get it.

At best, what you see is as useful as a Google cache of the Wikipedia page. It is non-editable, and quite possibly out of date compared to the actual content. Its only purpose is to encourage communities -- er, sorry, I mean to mine a new vein of customer information to sell upstream.

The pages make other parts of Facebook more useful. Before these pages, you had to Google people's interests to find out what they were if you didn't already know, and if the results were ambiguous, you'd have to do something crazy like actually ask the person directly. Now interests are well-defined.

Sure, the solution they picked gives them ulterior SEO benefits, but to compare it to Mahalo and suggest that it's useless doesn't make any sense.

The problem is that Facebook is scraping data from Wikipedia, your email provider, and probably other locations, but pursuing criminal charges for a startup that scrapes data from them as "criminal computer trespass".

Yeah... it was kind of creepy discovering I was the only "fan" of an obscure book which has a description that I wrote and I picture I scanned.

It's annoying to get one of those if you actually want the page for a movie or a band.

If you visit the page when not in a logged in state, you get a modal every 5 seconds or so telling you to log in.

But who wouldn't be logged in to Facebook 24 hours a day?

Wow, you're right. Does that happen throughout Facebook's site? I can't imagine that's great for usability even if most users buckle under the constant pressure.

The thing is I like the idea of building community/social pages around content like this. I had a similar idea a while back.

But I really don't like how Facebook have done it... auto generating all those pages.. and even then they are pretty static pages (no social interaction etc. worth noting).

No real net gain...

When I visit this page and I'm not logged into FB, I get a pop up after less than a minute. "Not logged in", Login to continue. Anyone else? This should be a public page.

People are just starting a witchhunt of sorts against facebook. Maybe a very small site/spammer would scrape wikipedia, but someone like FB obviously knows they would have a shitstorm rain down upon them if they "scraped" it.

Someone also said: "It just pollutes the web with content that is available in a better form elsewhere."

The thing is, we may know this, but I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people find it convenient that they landed on a page they might be interested in with useful information.

Is that scraped by facebook or by the maintainer of that community?

I'm assuming Facebook since every community page looks like this. Also, the links to other Wikipedia pages link to different Facebook pages instead.

Facebook meets mahalo, that's pretty disgusting.

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