31–40 of 299 posts
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I would rather Wikipedia took some advertising, rather than it’s begging pop ups which have become more intrusive and irritating recently.
That literally makes no sense. You'd rather a rectangle telling you to consume sugar than a rectangle asking if you can support an organisation that provides a service you use?
Putting aside the criticisms of Google for its near monopoly on search, I don't think it's necessarily fair to say that Wikipedia "loses" a visit just because Google happens to be able to deliver the desired information on the search results page itself. In many cases, visitors aren't using Google search because they want a webpage. They're using Google search because they want an answer to a question. Google is answ…
I think this is extremely shortsighted. If this were the whole story, then why would Google be going through the effort of integrating Wikipedia data into zero-click results? Out of charity? No. Because big picture, those people who go to Google and leave without clicking anything had reinforced that Google finds everything they need easily. It makes them more likely to come back. So Wikipedia does lose clicks to Goo…
Shouldn't Wikimedia Foundation be grateful for that? Their goal is met — people learn stuff even faster, and also they incur less server costs, because Google eats them. For a site without ad revenue, it looks like a total win-win for them!
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People perceive that they can get the information for free from Google, so they're a lot less likely to donate to Wikipedia even though that's where Google gets the information from. Imagine a future where Wikipedia finally runs out of money after trying bigger and bigger donation banners and has to stop providing the service. As users expect to see the sidebar in Google's search results pages Google would hoover up…
Google, as well as many other companies, has long relied on Wikipedia for its content. Now, Google and Google.org are giving back. Google.org President Jacquelline Fuller today announced a $2 million contribution to the Wikimedia Endowment. An additional $1.1 million donation went to the Wikimedia Foundation, courtesy of a campaign where Google employees decided where to direct Google’s donation dollars. https://tech…
Looks like they're ok with it now though.
I suspect it won't be too long before they get used to this largesse and won't want to do anything that might jeapoardize it.
What's with the top header constantly appearing and disappearing in this website?
There's little or no "inertia" in that behavior though, so depending on your mousewheel/track-pad/touch scroll behavior that can seem kinda flaky. A tiny scroll-up action brings the sticky header back. I have noticed other sites that do that can be really annoying on mobile, but on a MacOS laptop at least this site seems to do it pretty well (IMO).
It might benefit from not re-displaying the header until you've scrolled up a little more than it does now (again, IMO). I.e,. maybe have a threshold of a certain number of pixels (>1) or a certain velocity of scrolling-up before the header re-appears.
It's a shame that a lot of the antitrust criticisms of google don't focus on Youtube. The fact that youtube is one of the main rivals to wikipedia in results is highly suspicious to me, and should be to antitrust regulators. Of course at this point its a bit of a self reinforcing cycle, because youtube ranks, it gets more and more content, becomes more popular, and so google might be ranking it more and more legitima…
The main rivals to YT are sites like Vimeo and Twitch, not Wikipedia. And I don't think either of those is anywhere near YT-scale. It's really hard to run that kind of service in a profitable way, and even harder to let creators monetize their content directly the way YT does.
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I think this is extremely shortsighted. If this were the whole story, then why would Google be going through the effort of integrating Wikipedia data into zero-click results? Out of charity? No. Because big picture, those people who go to Google and leave without clicking anything had reinforced that Google finds everything they need easily. It makes them more likely to come back. So Wikipedia does lose clicks to Goo…
If you're using DuckDuckGo, we can use the !w bang to search directly on Wikipedia. Bangs are really handy, when you know where you'll find the answers, and can fallback to !s (startpage) if you feel google will have better answers for current query. This feature has been very useful for me, especially !mdn, !cpp etc. when coding.
Shouldn't Wikimedia Foundation be grateful for that? Their goal is met — people learn stuff even faster, and also they incur less server costs, because Google eats them. For a site without ad revenue, it looks like a total win-win for them!
I've definitely noticed that I"ve had to add "wiki" to my search results to see Wikpedia articles to certain subjects I'm searching for whereas in previous years, Wikipedia was almost always the number one result. I feel like I'm back in the 90s when Yahoo went from a pretty good search engine to mediocre with ads and stuff, and I marveled at the clean simplicity of Google. Now, I'm finding Google shows a bunch of ar…
!w X
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People perceive that they can get the information for free from Google, so they're a lot less likely to donate to Wikipedia even though that's where Google gets the information from. Imagine a future where Wikipedia finally runs out of money after trying bigger and bigger donation banners and has to stop providing the service. As users expect to see the sidebar in Google's search results pages Google would hoover up…
I imagine a future where a project like wikipedia is replicated endlessly by willing users on an IPFS-like network, where people can donate CPU, storage and bandwidth instead of money to pay for a centralized server, simply by running something like ipfs pin wikipedia (or a subset)