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Google Donates $2 Million To Wikimedia Foundation

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Re: Google Donates $2 Million To Wikimedia Foundation

#11

Post by andreyf »

GFischer wrote: post #2

I'm really happy about that, but I wanted to point out it's not completely disinterested - Wikipedia is the top search result for an absurd amount of queries, so Google benefits from its continued existence (not to mention it's aligned with their stated goal). Edit: Someone posted in the original article about similar grants - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Grants , including a recent $2 million po…

Also, if wikipedia becomes more reliant on Google funding as they continue to scale, Google will have more leverage to ask them to monetize their pages down the road.

Re: Google Donates $2 Million To Wikimedia Foundation

#12

Post by fierarul »

Skriticos wrote: post #8
fierarul wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trick is that Wikimedia provides little valuable content, beyond the web hosting and software updates they do on Mediawiki. I'm not sure how much of the money will go towards full time "wikipedia editors", for example. So, if we believe the wikipedia marketing that most of the editors are "largely anonymous internet users who write without pay", what exactly are they spending the money on ? If it's hosting and su…

Are you friggin' kidding me. Wikipedia hosts so many sites and serves so many requests that they are their partially their own cloud. They would not gain much from switching to some other cloud, not to mention the probability that there is no other 'cloud' that could handle them ad hock. I'm sure Amazon would swallow big if Wikimedia came to them with such a request, then probably laugh out loud. Get real..

Yes, my reply wasn't as smart in retrospect. They seem to have about 350 machines [1] so maybe moving to the cloud isn't as easy as it seems.

My remark was mostly triggered by the fact that here you had Google with a big cluster, a cloud offering and tons of bandwidth paying money to Wikimedia so they could buy their own hardware and bandwidth at a worse price probably. A direct deal would have looked better.

1. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers

Re: Google Donates $2 Million To Wikimedia Foundation

#13

Post by fnid2 »

shrikant wrote: post #3

..and Google continues doing less evil than most. Despite having the deadweight that is Knol in their kitty.

donating $2M is not doing no evil. If donating money to a nonprofit unevils you, then why do people still claim microsoft / bill gates are evil? They've donated billions to charity.

If this is your metric, then Google is way more evil than Microsoft.

Re: Google Donates $2 Million To Wikimedia Foundation

#14

Post by [deleted] »

fnid2 wrote: post #13
shrikant wrote: post #3

..and Google continues doing less evil than most. Despite having the deadweight that is Knol in their kitty.

donating $2M is not doing no evil. If donating money to a nonprofit unevils you, then why do people still claim microsoft / bill gates are evil? They've donated billions to charity. If this is your metric, then Google is way more evil than Microsoft.

[deleted]

Re: Google Donates $2 Million To Wikimedia Foundation

#15

Post by skywalker »

fnid2 wrote: post #13
shrikant wrote: post #3

..and Google continues doing less evil than most. Despite having the deadweight that is Knol in their kitty.

donating $2M is not doing no evil. If donating money to a nonprofit unevils you, then why do people still claim microsoft / bill gates are evil? They've donated billions to charity. If this is your metric, then Google is way more evil than Microsoft.

Wikimedia is not only a non-profit, but also Google's more sucessful competitor in organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful, albeit with some factual errors and unsourced statements.

Google benefits from Wikipedia articles in that they make Google more useful, but if Wikipedia is always the first result, people will begin to go directly to Wikipedia to get information, just like they go directly to Facebook or to Twitter, even though Google also benefits from their public information.

Re: Google Donates $2 Million To Wikimedia Foundation

#17

Post by gojomo »

This is good for Wikipedia, and nice of Google, but I'm also reminded of Nicholas Carr's observation:

The next thing to be said is: what we seem to have here is evidence of a fundamental failure of the Web as an information-delivery service. Three things have happened, in a blink of history's eye: (1) a single medium, the Web, has come to dominate the storage and supply of information, (2) a single search engine, Google, has come to dominate the navigation of that medium, and (3) a single information source, Wikipedia, has come to dominate the results served up by that search engine. Even if you adore the Web, Google, and Wikipedia - and I admit there's much to adore - you have to wonder if the transformation of the Net from a radically heterogeneous information source to a radically homogeneous one is a good thing. Is culture best served by an information triumvirate?

(From ." rel="nofollow">http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/01/all_hail_the_in.ph...)

Re: Google Donates $2 Million To Wikimedia Foundation

#18

Post by lolcraft »

skywalker wrote: post #15
fnid2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

donating $2M is not doing no evil. If donating money to a nonprofit unevils you, then why do people still claim microsoft / bill gates are evil? They've donated billions to charity. If this is your metric, then Google is way more evil than Microsoft.

Wikimedia is not only a non-profit, but also Google's more sucessful competitor in organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful, albeit with some factual errors and unsourced statements. Google benefits from Wikipedia articles in that they make Google more useful, but if Wikipedia is always the first result, people will begin to go directly to Wikipedia to get information, just l…

people will begin to go directly to Wikipedia

I doubt it. All people I know use Google as their URL entry field, as the concept of URL is too machine-oriented to be comfortably used by the average guy, when good search is available. Given that, Google donating to Wikipedia is a pure win-win situation.

Re: Google Donates $2 Million To Wikimedia Foundation

#19

Post by skywalker »

lolcraft wrote: post #18
skywalker wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikimedia is not only a non-profit, but also Google's more sucessful competitor in organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful, albeit with some factual errors and unsourced statements. Google benefits from Wikipedia articles in that they make Google more useful, but if Wikipedia is always the first result, people will begin to go directly to Wikipedia to get information, just l…

people will begin to go directly to Wikipedia I doubt it. All people I know use Google as their URL entry field, as the concept of URL is too machine-oriented to be comfortably used by the average guy, when good search is available. Given that, Google donating to Wikipedia is a pure win-win situation.

People don't need to type the url. Wikipedia is already installed as a search engine on Firefox's search box (and maybe in IE?). Eventually users will learn to use it.

Crome's omnibox search also takes users to wikipedia without visiting google. They could show ads in the omnibox, but the space and user experience is more limited.

And don't forget that most sites don't get all their referrers from Google, so users are getting there via another way. Some of those are indeed direct traffic, without an intermediary.

Re: Google Donates $2 Million To Wikimedia Foundation

#20

Post by robryan »

skywalker wrote: post #19
lolcraft wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people will begin to go directly to Wikipedia I doubt it. All people I know use Google as their URL entry field, as the concept of URL is too machine-oriented to be comfortably used by the average guy, when good search is available. Given that, Google donating to Wikipedia is a pure win-win situation.

People don't need to type the url. Wikipedia is already installed as a search engine on Firefox's search box (and maybe in IE?). Eventually users will learn to use it. Crome's omnibox search also takes users to wikipedia without visiting google. They could show ads in the omnibox, but the space and user experience is more limited. And don't forget that most sites don't get all their referrers from Google, so users ar…

I still usually type what I want into google followed by wiki to get the relevant Wikipedia entry first. Google is also better at finding the page you want that Wikipedia itself, such as if you type in The Simpsons wiki, but you really want the episode list page, it will be the second result indented under the main page.

It may not really save to much time, but if a tech guy like myself does it that way, average internet users would probably be even more inclined to.

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