Bulbapedia DuckDuckGo wants you!

[rafaelluik]

I'm using this great search engine and they have a feature called 0-click info box.
It's a red box that displays information about the thing you're searching for.

The main way of displaying that data is getting it from wikis. This is where you enter.
The actual wiki for Pokémon things is the wikia's Pokémon encyclopedia. Example: cacturne (Pokemon) at DuckDuckGo

After I sent feedback about how better and complete Bulbapedia is they accepted it and want to get you inside the box (as the first result).

I got this response:
"Thx for the feedback! If we could get a regular dump of the site we could add it in. Do you know the owners/maintainers and have any interest in trying to track that down? It's just the regular medawiki dump stuff."

So, could you provide this info...? Or perhaps you won't allow this to happen? :/

 

[Archaic]

Zero click info is somewhat self-defeating for us. There could also be potential legal issues with releasing our database dump to an external party like that, given the license we operate under.

 

[rafaelluik]

Look at this example search:
starmie (Pokemon) at DuckDuckGo

Notice the 0-click info isn't nothing more than you would find in the description of the result (the part where a little extract from the page is displayed) in a search (in DDG, Google, etc...). But you have also categories to choose to browser more and a picture.

The good thing if you do this is Bulbapedia would be the very first result, and in the categories, in the place of Pokémon wikia which is much worse. Bulbapedia has much more info and is more well managed being a much better result. So, be the first!

I don't know what you mean by publicizing your "dump". I don't understand how it works but in case you want to cooperate you can get in touch with the DDG owner himself and define the details with him completely private.

 

[Adrian Malacoda]

(Disclaimer: not a lawyer, but someone who spends much time reading about intellectual property law and cases involving such)

When he's talking about the license he means the legal terms under which content may be reused. In Bulbapedia's case, content is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license. The "legal issue" comes from the fact that, well, DuckDuckGo is a commercial venture, and the license explicitly prohibits commercial use.

All Wikias, as well as Wikipedia itself, are made available under a less restrictive license which allows such commercial use. That's why DuckDuckGo is able to use Wikia's information. It's also the reason you can't copy content between Pokemon Wikia and Bulbapedia (although inexperienced editors from the Wikia have tried that in the past).

This isn't something Bulbagarden management can make an exception for, either. Usually on wikis, each contributor keeps the copyright to their work and merely agrees to make it available under the wiki's license. So for DuckDuckGo to be able to get a commercial license to any article, it would have to obtain the consent of each individual author. For the Starmie article I count 143 unique names (not including BulbaBot).

It goes both ways, too. Wikia has actually tried to buy out Bulbapedia several times in the past. Bulbagarden would never agree to anything like that, but even if it wanted, it clearly couldn't; it doesn't actually hold the copyright on individual articles, and Wikia would want to monetize them somehow (being a company started by high-ranking Wikipedians, you'd think they'd know that, oh well).

Not that I'm saying it would be impossible for DDG to use Bulbapedia content in their topic box thing (calling it zero click info is sort of inaccurate, it's just a picture, description, and a link - hardly more than an ordinary search result, really). They'd just have to find a way to do it that doesn't involve Bulbagarden handing over everything. Certain limited uses of copyrighted content fall under what is called "fair use." People on YouTube who upload episodes of TV shows like to define it as "it's okay as long as I don't make money from it" but it's actually a lot more restrictive than that. The US Copyright Office defines fair use in terms of these four factors:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
2. The nature of the copyrighted work
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work

and also lists possible purposes that could be considered fair use as "criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research."

It's arguable, but not certain, that any possible use of Bulbapedia content by DDG in this manner could be considered fair use. Yes, it's commercial, but the portion of the article used (a single sentence) is meager and I don't see how it could affect the value of the article in question. It's certainly possible that they could simply grab this info from the HTML source.

 

[rafaelluik]

Ok then Bulbagarden must sue all search engines because they show snippets of their pages on the search results pages.

I don't know exactly what the "medawiki dump" is, but it must have data organized specifically done for being able to be implemented it in the 0-click and lists box programming.

0-click is more, it has more uses on other kinds of search, it presents some features and categorized lists too.

 

[Archaic]

Long answer short rafaelluik. Even if we could legally do this (which we're not sure we can, and there's a massive difference between the fair use of regular search engines and what DuckDuckGo is doing), we have no interest in doing so. DuckDuckGo is a relatively minor search engine who relatively few have heard of. There's just not really anything in it for us. I'd much rather promote things like our Bulbapedia search plugin for Firefox, or the NIWA plugin for Google Chrome.

EDIT: For the record as well, Adrian, I think there may be a few cases where you don't fully understand the licenses there. I know for a fact that wikis using our license have been bought out by Wikia in the past, so the license in and of itself isn't an impediment to that (though the way Wikia treats its communities is a huge Great Wall of China sized impediment to anything there as far as I'm concerned).