This week at SXSW, YouTube announced a new integration to its platform which would put Wikipedia excerpts below some conspiracy videos. It’s a great idea, but awkwardly, Wikipedia was never informed that this was happening…
The Wikimedia Foundation took to Twitter the other night to share that it was “not given advance notice of this announcement,” something one might expect when dealing with entities this huge.
Technically speaking, YouTube doesn’t actually have to officially partner with Wikimedia to use information from Wikipedia in this way, but it’s odd, to say the least, that YouTube wouldn’t at least give a heads-up before announcing the functionality to the public.
The concern on Wikimedia’s end is of the “impact” this integration will have on the platform. It could end up with more traffic being sent to the site, or on the other hand, more vandalism of its information pages. The company retweeted one community member with these concerns who states:
It’s not polite to treat Wikipedia like an endlessly renewable resource with infinite free labor; what’s the impact?
The @Wikimedia Foundation statement about the recent @YouTube announcement pic.twitter.com/PFDDNtNNjn
— Wikimedia Foundation (@Wikimedia) March 14, 2018
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