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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

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 all the data and bring control of it in-house, and we would only see whichever facts Google chooses for us. I'm not sure that would be a good thing.

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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://techcrunch.com/2019/01/22/google-org-donates-2-milli...

Wikipedia spends more than that only for "Donation processing expenses". Of course it is a nice contribution but, in my opinion, very small if compared to the huge value that Google is able to get for free. https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/fin...

I was going to be even more cynical and say that 3 million sounds absolutely pathetic relative to the scale of both entities, and given how important it is to the quality of Google’s search results.

I would be even more cynical and say that $3 million is more than enough to cover all of Wikipedia's expenses and that the rest is bureaucratic fluff.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3112115

To add to my own comment, this [1] was the submission that I originally had in mind. It was in the 2007-2008 operating year that Wikipedia's expenses crossed the $3 million threshold. In 2015-2016 the expenses were >$65 million. In 2019, they were $91 million. Remember that the content creators work for free.

The reports are available here [2]. Looking at the most recent report here for FY18-19, the amount spent on hosting is $2.3 million. That's less than half of the "donation processing expenses"!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235

[2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/

I remember when Wikipedia used to warn against donations from Google and the like and running ads because even if it didn't undermine their independence it would at the very least undermine the perception of their independence.

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.

It isn't "largesse" because Google's donation is a small fraction of what they are collecting. It would be a concern if a large fraction of their income came from Google.

The difference is that google's donation is a no-strings-attached donation, whereas if they were running ads, Google could decide to hold their payout or serve hostile and invasive ads. Running ads on that scale equals leverage.

AIUI, Google does give proper credit to Wikipedia whenever it's reasonable to do so. Technically they don't even need to do this for a lot of basic machine-readable information that Wikidata is making available via CC0.

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)

Sounds kind of like a newsgroup, with every client also being a server. I think torrents can be dynamically updated now.[1][2] Maybe we already have the tools we need, we just haven’t put all the pieces together yet.

[1] https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0039.html

[2] https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html

That's right. We need to start thinking decentralized. Instead of using DNS to find a server and HTTP to get the content from it, we should switch to a decentralized lookup of the data itself, sourced from wherever the network can serve it. I don't mind getting one wiki page from Peter and another from Paul.

I think IPFS and Filecoin could solve these problems and keep attribution and data integrity intact. Would be nice to have the privacy of monero or another more private coin to facilitate subscription functionality with built in micropayments.

Update on this front:

Web3Torrent adds etherium micropayments to WebTorrent

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23602008

https://blog.statechannels.org/introducing-web3torrent/

nice. pointing 2 torrents at the same folder alteady works. If they share files at worse it will be overwritten with the same content. Even if there is a lack of clients supporting it you can still force a re-check and avoid downloading everything again.

And Wikipedia gets its information from their editors. When are the editors getting their fair share of the money? :')

Wikipedia is a non-profit and money goes to servers and wages for a few staff members.

Google gets advertisement money out of it and is a for-profit organisation ...

Actually, the organization behind Wikipedia has way more than "a few" staff members. There's been a perceived problem with excessive spending growth for many years now although to be fair, the increased spending has also allowed for compelling new features, projects, and avenues of editor support. (Stuff like the Visual editor, newer successful projects like Wikivoyage and Wikidata, initiatives to support article-editing in educational and scholarly settings, large-scale contests to support the editing community, etc. etc. just wouln't exist absent that revenue growth.)

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?

Ads are easier to block, or just ignore as a fact of life. Donation requests might cause irritating cognitive dissonance.

then you should be asking for a paid membership

The point is, of course, that you don’t really want to pay for it but feel sort of guilty if reminded that keeping it running costs money. Textbook example of cognitive dissonance.

That sounds like the donation request is being effective...

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