Talk:Big Tech

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Facebook - "It is considered one of the Big Four technology companies along with Amazon, Apple, and Google."

Big Four tech companies - "The Big Four is a name used to describe the four multinational technology companies Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple."

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TODO - plenty of work

It's amazing how little sourced content is present on an article on the handful of totalitarian organisations that dominate the online world, and thus, the real world to a large degree. [Conspiracy theorists: you can create some conspiracy theories about GAFAM blocking Wikipedia editors ... ;) ]

But seriously: this page is worth doing some work on. There should be plenty of sources. Boud (talk) 13:27, 25 May 2019 (UTC)

Correction: GAFAM + Wikipedia + git repositories dominate the online world - where Wikipedia/git repositories are the complete opposite to GAFAM. Anyway, let's see if I or others find time to do some work on this... Boud (talk) 13:29, 25 May 2019 (UTC)

Word salad in lead

The term Gang of Four was coined for this context by Eric Schmidt in 2008 [??] Phil Simon, and Scott Galloway as describing the companies "behind the consumer revolution on the Internet" and "avoid[ing] taxes, invad[ing] privacy, and destroy[ing] jobs".

— MaxEnt 21:19, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

Split proposal: Big Four tech companies vs GAFAM

Proposal: WP:SPLIT this article into separate, partially overlapping, articles GAFA (or Big Four tech companies = present main name; I'm not proposing a name change) and GAFAM.

This informal proposal is motivated by recent edits by @RaphaelQS:. In this edit and this revert, RaphaelQS seemed to suggest that we split the article into two separate articles for the US versus the French views of the world's 4-5 dominant software/internet corporations. I oppose the proposal (see below), but I'm making a proposal so that it can be discussed properly. Boud (talk) 20:08, 14 August 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose - At the moment, the amount of knowledge content in the article, in the sense of academic analysis rather than media interviews, doesn't seem to me sufficient to split. The content could be significantly expanded (for obvious reasons - these companies dominate the World and the World has started to notice) - but that editing hasn't happened yet. Independently, it seems to me that the choice of which companies to include/exclude is less important - in terms of "knowledge" - than what is common between the two visions - a world-dominating oligarchy with barely a hint of separation of executive-legislative-judicial powers. Splitting into GAFA vs GAFAM would also suggest that we should create a third overlapping article for G-MAFIA+BAT, which might be better justified, provided that we have enough RS'd content. Boud (talk) 20:08, 14 August 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose to avoid repetition, especially at the moment when this article is tiny. ─ ReconditeRodent « talk · contribs » 14:53, 24 August 2019 (UTC)

• Since you oppose the proposal, please do not remove notable content. Some of the restructuring is OK, but not removal of significant content. The causes or origins of Wikipedia topic X are a notable aspect of topic X. Academic content is more significant than mainstream media content, since academics take time to study topics in depth and systematically. Thanks. Boud (talk) 13:15, 13 September 2019 (UTC)

Proposed merge of Big Five (technology companies) into Big Four tech companies

The two topics can be more or less discussed in a common article since Microsoft is really the only notable difference. Neither deserves a separate article. ««« SOME GADGET GEEK »»» (talk) 15:08, 10 December 2019 (UTC)

• Merging these two articles would be a good idea. The Big Five article doesn't seem to serve any purpose other than highlight the fact that some people consider Microsoft to be on the level of GAFA. Based on this edit, it seems like this might have been User:Zaheen's motivation for creating the separate Big Five page. Rogerthat94 (talk) 06:21, 13 December 2019 (UTC)
• Agreed. Perhaps renaming the article into something like “Internet Giants” or “Web Giants” would help focus less on exactly which companies to include —which is a bit pointless and subject to change over time— and more on what they mean in the global society, as mentioned by @Boud. This is the solution adopted by the French and Dutch articles (the Dutch article seems to have some relevant additions). Regards, Maëlan 15:08, 13 December 2019 (UTC)
• Support merger. The Big Five article only seems to add a little extra info compared to the main "Big Four" article. But the situation in the fr.Wikipedia is more developed in terms of content. Boud (talk) 17:18, 13 December 2019 (UTC)

Rename proposal: Not yet. At the moment, in fr.Wikipedia, fr:GAFAM is a long in-depth article, fr:BATX is a stub, and it's true that fr:Géants du Web exists, though right now it's just a rather short overview article. This split seems reasonable to me: we have zillions of articles on Europe, North America, United States, China, Asia, Africa, and any proposal to merge them all into a single article wouldn't last more than a few seconds before being laughed off as utterly ridiculous. The new superpowers can surely be documented with depth appropriate to their significance in the world, and on a more practical side, appropriate to the number of WP:RS. But I don't see much point splitting until we have a bit more solid material written and sourced, preferably from academic sources.

This is actually a more tricky bootstrap (COI of the sources) problem than in the case of geographically based governments/powers. GAFAM directly affects what sources we have available, and indirectly affects Onex Corporation and Baring Private Equity Asia which affect the in-depth academic sources via their (Onex + BPEA) ownership of Clarivate Analytics which owns Web of Science which strongly influences academic careers and funding via bibliometry (quantification of "serious knowledge"). Academic bibliometric centralisation of power is a less visible world domination question than GAFAM/BATX. (BATX doesn't affect Wikipedia sources so much, because of the PRC choice to block Wikipedia - this shooting-one's-propaganda-in-the-foot irony is well-known: the PRC would influence "knowledge" as represented in Wikipedia more if Wikipedia were not blocked in the PRC.) I'm not opposing a rename now, but I think that it would make more sense with a bit more material, so that individual GAFAM and BATX articles are not too stubby. Boud (talk) 17:18, 13 December 2019 (UTC)

fr:Géants du Web is cross-linked from here, I hadn’t noticed that there were other French articles (the cross-language link should be fixed, then). I would support their merging in the French Wikipedia as well but this would require energy (fr:GAFAM is actually good and since it is tailored to the Big Five, generalizing it would be non-trivial) and I don’t have enough at the moment.

… On second thought I acknowledge that the Internet Giants and the GAFA(M) are largely the same topic but different things so that it can make sense to have separate articles. However GAFA and GAFAM are the same thing. No matter how well-sourced GAFAM would be, it would either be largely redundant (more than 80% redundant, to be precise) with GAFA, or amount to “The GAFAM are the GAFA plus Microsoft.”

The analogy with geography does not hold : a more correct analogy would be creating articles for every subset of States, e.g. China and Canada, China and Canada and the Netherlands, China and Mauritius and New Zealand… That’s exponentially more than a zillion. Maëlan 18:38, 13 December 2019 (UTC)

Just to clarify: I'm not proposing to think of a long-term power set split of these powers ;) (2^{|UN member states|} ~ googol^{0.58}; so I think your estimate is fair, assuming that 1 zillion < 1 googol^{1/2}) - so obviously GAFA and GAFAM are close enough that (at least in the reasonably forseeable future) there's no justification in splitting them. But having an overall article, and separate GAFAM/GAFA and BATX articles, seems reasonably likely to be justifiable in terms of sources. Which raises the questions of European or Indian/South Asian internet giants - I guess Wipro and Infosys don't have the near-monopoly status of GAFAM or BATX for specialised services, and their financial evaluations are much smaller than GAFAM/BATX, so they gather less attention. Another interesting question (for academics creating source material for Wikipedia) would be how to include WMF wikis/Wikipedia in relation to the others: in terms of web influence and numbers of editors and readers working together, the WMF wikis/Wikipedia are "a tech giant" - one of the top few websites (or website groups), while in financial terms, we have negligible weight; our organisational nature (transparent, horizontal) is also completely opposite to GAFAM/BATX (opaque, vertical). Again: we need to find or wait for academics who study these things (and miraculously are independent of those things) to provide sources for these articles. Boud (talk) 22:39, 13 December 2019 (UTC)

Strongly oppose excempting Microsoft from GAFAM

Microsoft has high market value than Amazon and Facebook It is factually incorrect to call Amazon and Facebook are bigger than Microsoft.

The reason cited is not based on data and facts but merely just because a Google staff called Microsoft is not part of it, what happened to review policies of Wikipedia.