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Comment by gcb0 | Hacker News Reader

"we don't make money because we do not advertise on that site" is a huge fallacy.

This sounds like a bluff because if that gets traction in the US then their search business will collapse. Imagine $0.01 for every search that shows a snipet of wikipedia to the wiki foundation?

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It's a bit disengenous because although they don't directly make money on the News portal, it reinforces their market position and keeps users in the Google ecosystem. Those users in turn run searches that DO display ads.

that is exactly what i implied.

Google already makes billions from Wikipedia. The problem with kicking money back is that nothing goes to the contributors, but to the useless Wikimedia Foundation.

You can try to fork Wikipedia. The content is all available, all you need is a bunch of servers; then you can convince the contributors to come over.

I don't think it is possible to make "the next Wikipedia" from a fork. It's easier and cheaper to remake the data so that it works right from the get go. Best to start fresh. If the data is better then the contributors will come over anyway.

I think you missed his point about the servers.

> It's easier and cheaper to remake the data so that it works right from the get go.

Could you please explain? I don't understand how the data (ie all the articles) would weigh one down.

Wikipedia as an organization has some cultural issues that one might want to fix. I don't really see a problem with the data that would warrant starting from scratch. (Starting from scratch might be necessary to fix the culture. But that's another argument to make.)

The problem is that the data has so many errors and inconsistencies it would actually take much longer to fix them than to start fresh. There is also the problem that Wikipedia data is based on pages (each page is an article). Using a smaller data type would allow for features like sorting and filtering the data on the page. I am working on these issue on my own site. As for the culture: that will not change. The culture follows the software design. You can read a deeper analysis here: http://newslines.org/blog/wikipedias-13-deadly-sins/

The Google News website doesn't show any banner ads.

But it does lead to sites that likely show ads from google. So technically news.google.com doesn't generate revenue but it does direct traffic to news.spain.commercial.site that is showing google ads along side news.

...and that website also makes money. Really, this hurts Spanish news websites more than it hurts Google.

So you are saying that Google should be charging the sites money since it brings them ad traffic?

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