Google Donates $2 Million To Wikimedia Foundation | Hacker News Reader

Google Donates $2 Million To Wikimedia Foundation

techcrunch.com

59 pointsepi0Bauqu18 comments

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.

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).

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.

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.

I wonder how much it would cost to move to the cloud and provide the same sort of availability.

I suspect a pretty hefty sum; I've no idea what they spend on hosting right now but I bet it wouldn't be a drastic cost cut.

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

You grossly underestimate how much money goes into hosting Wikipedia. They're most certainly at the scale where physical boxes are cheaper than EC2 and others.

http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Server_roles

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.

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

How is knol a deadweight? At worst, its an idea that didn't work (still too soon for a conclusion).

If you were to take seriously some of the estimated cost of keeping youtube alive, it is more of a deadweight.

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.

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.

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.

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...)

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com