I tend to be wary of contributing to crowdsourced projects run by for-profit companies for this reason, because they seem to have a tendency to go rogue once the benevolent management gets changed out, or it's sold to someone else.
Many of us in the '90s were burned by the CDDB/Gracenote debacle, which was my first unpleasant encounter with the problem. My experience contributing lyrics to songmeanings.net, which used to be a community-run/crowdsourced lyrics repository, not full of pop-up ringtone ads, was similarly negative.
Since then, I contribute only to nonprofits that seem to have some long-term credibility with their data licensing and governance, such as Wikipedia, Musicbrainz, and OpenStreetMap. In principle I'd contribute to a for-profit if it were really convincing about its long-term good faith (and provided data export), but the bar is high.
How about StackOverflow? Even though it's ran by a for-profit entity, all user-provided content is licensed as Creative Commons and they offer regular database dumps for download.
Actually yes, that's a good example; not sure why I didn't think of it. They run the community well, and the license and data dumps are a sufficient insurance policy against any kind of change in that (which I'd only expect if they were bought out).
Huh, I didn't even realize that was possible. Seems like quite a bait-and-switch to build up a community under the guise of a nonprofit, and then take it for-profit afterwards.
> My experience contributing lyrics to songmeanings.net, which used to be a community-run/crowdsourced lyrics repository, not full of pop-up ringtone ads, was similarly negative.
What is it with lyric sites and ringtone ads? LyricWiki went the same way.
Running a lyrics site is a tricky thing. Yes, there is a ton of traffic because it's essentially built for SEO. But think about the demographics who view lyrics. Typically very young and without a credit card. Translation: advertising == lower CPMs than other demographics.
So lyric sites have to supplement traditional banners with, well, those ringtone ads.
In the case of SongMeanings, we're doing ringtone ads because our licensing agreements are very expensive. It's not cheap doing what we're doing. We're proud to be licensed, sure, but again, it's very expensive.
Heads up -- if you become a member at SongMeanings, you'll actually see fewer advertisements. It's our way of saying thanks to loyal users.
I'm certainly open ears to suggestions on how to pay for licensing while not doing ringtone adverts. Or any other suggestions on how to improve SM, too.
IMDB was originally crowsourced. Started on Usenet.
Can anyone assert ownership over and derive commercial benefit from a data source that traces its origins to volunteer contributors? What would be legally required to do that?
Many of us in the '90s were burned by the CDDB/Gracenote debacle, which was my first unpleasant encounter with the problem. My experience contributing lyrics to songmeanings.net, which used to be a community-run/crowdsourced lyrics repository, not full of pop-up ringtone ads, was similarly negative.
Since then, I contribute only to nonprofits that seem to have some long-term credibility with their data licensing and governance, such as Wikipedia, Musicbrainz, and OpenStreetMap. In principle I'd contribute to a for-profit if it were really convincing about its long-term good faith (and provided data export), but the bar is high.