
Google Donates $2 Million To Wikimedia Foundation - epi0Bauqu
http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/16/google-donates-2-million-to-wikimedia-foundation/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
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GFischer
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 potential "grant" funding from the Omidyar Network.

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gwern
How does that work? Wikipedia appears equally in the competitors' results -
it's not like the Bing or Yahoo developers don't know of this obscure
Wikipedia thing - so that's not it; and Google benefits from users spending
more time on search pages, since they will see more adds, so providing results
that instantly solve their problem isn't very helpful either (and targeted ads
are well-targeted independently of the search results); and users going into
Wikipedia don't add anything to the bottom-line since Wikipedias don't run ads
(Google's or otherwise).

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ugh
Wikipedia provides valuable content which increases the usefulness of Google
(and all other search engines).

If Wikipedia were to go under and nothing similar were to replace it
(unlikely, but who knows) people might go back to using encyclopedias on dead
wood or walled garden online encyclopedias both of which would lead to people
spending less time searching.

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fierarul
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 such, I'd rather see them not manage their own
infrastructure and try to move towards the cloud (no matter how corny it
sounds). Putting Wikipedia on EC2 or AppEngine should be transparent for users
and might allow them to focus on their core competency (which would be what,
btw -- crowd sourcing management ?)

Not trying to be snarky but I fail to see how this money is helping that much.

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Skriticos
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..

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fierarul
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>

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

~~~
fnid2
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.

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skywalker
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.

~~~
lolcraft
_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.

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skywalker
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.

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robryan
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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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
<[http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/01/all_hail_the_in.ph...](http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/01/all_hail_the_in.php>.))

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denizzz
Good news as long as the deal has no strings attached...

