181–190 of 299 posts
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At this point, I basically have to append "reddit" to every search if I want to get quality answers.
What? Reddit.com is essentially unusable since the update a few years(?) ago.
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Addendum: their revenue was actually following an upward trend as of their last report: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising/2018-19_Report#K... But the number of new registered users and the number of user edits are both decreasing: https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects
Couldn't it be said Wikipedia is basically complete? Which would explain the declining number of edits
No.
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> I personally love it when my search results just give me the answer I'm looking for, so I don't have to click through to Wikipedia (or any site) Except for the very frequent times when Google’s summarization engine conveys the opposite point than the text was making. I’ve had lots of cases where google reassures me that something is possible (like an iOS feature) because it takes a Yes from paragraph 2 and then pro…
Could you give an exact example?
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Those businesses should license their content differently, then. Wikipedia is CC BY-SA licensed.
Does google "share alike" the rest of the results page? Or is embedding considered enough separation to not need to share alike?
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Reducing traffic to Wikipedia reduces donations, contributions, brand awareness. Grabbing Wikipedia's added value is like stealing candies from a child.
Wikipedia does not need any donations. If they Wikimedia Foundation puts its cash reserves into safe low yield investments, it’ll be able to run Wikipedia for decades. Of course, it won’t pay for salaries of the current WMF employees, but Wikipedia does only need a few of them.
Even if they weren't, the ~$154m they have free for investments, would only gross ~$1.2m in 10 year Treasuries, or at most $5-6m in relatively higher-yield investment grade corporate bonds.
Looking at their expenses in 2019, even if you cut donation processing expenses to $0, cut awards and grants to $0, cut travel and conferences to $0, strip out depreciation and amortization, and cut their $46m payroll in half to $23m (which at a fully loaded cost of $200k/employee, is only 115 employees for one of the most widely used websites in the world), you would still be looking at annual operating expenses of ~$45m.
There is absolutely no way that Wikipedia/the Wikimedia Foundation could survive without any donations - they have $154m between cash and investments, and would need to support $45m in annual operating expenses, even with these fantastically high budget cuts. That means they'd need to net, after taxes, almost 30% return on their assets every year, just to tread water, and only after cutting their budget essentially in half.
Wikipedia has 51.1 million articles in 291 languages, is something like the 5th most visited website in the US, 10th in the world, and they manage to do this without running any ads. Can't we be thankful for the incredible human library of knowledge they've built, and chip in a few dollars if we are able, instead of complaining and telling them they should not accept donations?
> ...zero-click results have cost Wikipedia’s English language subdomain tens of millions of organic visits. > ...Google was able to steal over 550 million clicks from Wikipedia in six months... "Cost"? "Steal"?! This would make sense if Wikipedia were ad-supported. But Google saves Wikipedia money by requiring less servers to support traffic. And Wikipedia is open content , you literally can't steal from it -- being…
it would be nice if this was a two-party agreement. Google is forcible changing or dictating any potential business model changes Wikipedia might want to make.
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Any site can control indexing through robots.txt. You either want this information in the search engine or you don't. Don't like one of the indexers? Tell it not to index you.
How about if you want the information in a search engine, but you would prefer that the "search engine" didn't just nick the contents and display it on their site, rather than sending searchers to yours?
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Does google "share alike" the rest of the results page? Or is embedding considered enough separation to not need to share alike?
I don't think Google claims any copyright on the Wikipedia snippets. You can share them just like you can share the original. They also give a link back to the source and clearly mark them as Wikipedia content. What more do you think that they should do to satisfy the license terms?
On the other hand, arguably incorporation of the snippet (as the incorporation of context for other pages) is permitted in some way other than licensing (fair use?), in which case the terms of the license wouldn't apply.
I would have to think harder to have a well-formed personal opinion.
> ...zero-click results have cost Wikipedia’s English language subdomain tens of millions of organic visits. > ...Google was able to steal over 550 million clicks from Wikipedia in six months... "Cost"? "Steal"?! This would make sense if Wikipedia were ad-supported. But Google saves Wikipedia money by requiring less servers to support traffic. And Wikipedia is open content , you literally can't steal from it -- being…
As the article points out, the problem isn't specifically that this harms Wikipedia, it's that this practice harms pretty much every for profit business that Google does this to. Pretty much every company in an established space that Google has entered, is losing traffic and thus revenue due to this practice: Yelp, any flight/hotel/tourism based company, video hosting sites, weather data sites, the list goes on and o…
I’m pretty sympathetic to the plights of Weather.com, Genius.com, Zagats (oops, Google bought them and then resold them), Yelp, and whomever else Google is appropriating non-public domain and non-Creative Commons content from. But that’s a story that’s already been told, so the site decided to find a heart-string tugging yet intellectually-dishonest angle.