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Google gives Wikimedia millions
- lostgame 8y agoFantastic news. Someone has to.
- devereaux 8y agoTimeo Danaos et dona ferentes // Beware of Greeks bearing gifts.
- squarefoot 8y agoYou beat me at posting this same comment. A good move from Google, still it raises some concerns. Should Wikipedia become dependent on Google's money in the future say if they hired more people or invested in beefier hardware after some agreement (put ads?), that would be a disaster. Not unlike the pop or sports star who suddenly gets a huge contract and stupidly begins spending loads of money in luxuries. By doing so he/she is now being forced to keep making tons of money to maintain that lifestyle, de facto becoming property of his/her management.
- paxys 8y agoDon't forget that Google once tried to kill Wikipedia with their own proprietary project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol). Really happy that was a failure.
- lern_too_spel 8y agoAnd shuttered Freebase. Similarly, Apple used Openstreetmap to get their mapping effort off the ground and then didn't contribute back. I understand the profit motive for both of them, but it still rubs me the wrong way.
- btgeekboy 8y agoUnfortunately, that’s the deal with open source - you have to expect that people will use your work in ways you may not like. License your stuff accordingly.
- zozbot123 8y agoAIUI, Freebase was not "shuttered" - it was used to seed Wikidata, a Wikipedia sister project which makes its data available under permissive CC0 licensing.
- lern_too_spel 8y agoIt was shuttered. You can no longer contribute to Freebase. Wikidata used some data from the last Freebase triples dump, but Google is not contributing its updates to either, despite using Freebase's crowdsourced work to seed its internal knowledgebase. Once again, I understand the profit motive. I just don't like it.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoApple doesn't contribute back? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18913408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18913408 > Apple employee spoke at a recent OSM conference. Yes, they use OSM data as well. In some countries more than others. Apple also has a fulltime staff working on OSM. https://github.com/osmlab/appledata/issues https://github.com/osmlab/appledata/issues, https://github.com/osmlab/appledata/ https://github.com/osmlab/appledata/
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- why_only_15 8y agoI asked a friend at Apple and there are apparently like 15 people working on it, which is a $2-3M contribution.
- lern_too_spel 8y agoApple is replacing OSM and all other sources with its own private maps. https://www.justinobeirne.com/new-apple-maps/ https://www.justinobeirne.com/new-apple-maps/
- sonnyblarney 8y agoThat shareholders don't really own Wikipedia doesn't necessarily mean it's entirely 'better' than it would be otherwise. As the top commenter noted, there are problems. Though it would be sad if a commercial entity put Wikipedia 'out of business' per say, I think 'more variety' in this space would be welcome. I'd have no problem looking to different sources for a more authoritative source of information. For example, maybe Unis get together to publish their own wikis on more academic subjects. Maybe companies can have a Wiki to make their own articles about their own articles (I understand they have web sites for that, but the Wiki format is different). More variety would generally be better not worse.
- zozbot123 8y ago> ...For example, maybe Unis get together to publish their own wikis on more academic subjects. ... There's nothing stopping them from doing this. Wikis are actually a nice example of a federated standard, with good support for "InterWiki" cross-linking, well-understood naming conventions (thanks to Wikipedia) for encyclopedia-like articles, and open licensing via CC-BY-SA.
- skj 8y agoIs it impossible to attempt to innovate in a space without being accused of trying to kill the space's current leader? (googler, but had never even heard of knol until now)
- lwansbrough 8y agoWhen Google innovates, it’s usually in a vein attempt to kill competitors in a place where it sees an opportunity for more revenue. Competition from Google is hardly ever fair (despite most of their projects being spectacular failures regardless.) So no it’s not impossible, but it’s always gonna happen when it’s Google/Amazon and the “innovation” is a free alternative to a successful independent business.
- ajross 8y ago> When Google innovates, it’s usually in a vein attempt to kill competitors in a place where it sees an opportunity for more revenue Isn't that how everyone innovates? (FWIW: you meant "vain", I think, but that doesn't seem like the right word either. Maybe "arrogant" was the spin you wanted?)
- lokedhs 8y agoVain seems like an appropriate word to use, when interpretated as "producing no result; useless" That is, after all, the end result of many of Google's attempts at dominating a space. Their love of shutting services down will likely make further future dominations of new fields even harder.
- staticautomatic 8y agoNo, but when a company has a history of trying to completely dominate every space it goes into, it's a fair assumption.
- throwaway314271 8y agoGoogle was considering Wikipedia as main competitor in the late 2000s and the whole "content is a king" mindset. So yeah.
- phillc73 8y agoWikipedia itself is of course just an iteration on Everything2. https://everything2.com/ https://everything2.com/
- dt_rsp 8y agoA similar vintage, but slightly younger than everything1 was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H2g2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H2g2 / https://www.h2g2.com/ https://www.h2g2.com/
- livatlantis 8y agoHa! Glad to see H2G2 come up. Lots of great moments there!
- xref 8y agoI used to contribute heavily to Wikipedia in 2007-08 and intermittently since, however recently it has become an absolute nightmare to contribute. Creating a missing article almost immediately is met with an admin nominating it for deletion for something like “notability”, the catch-all term for “I personally don’t care about this topic, and if it was important someone would have made it already.” If you survive deletion then your article is often removed from the main Wikipedia site into “draft space” where it is hoped you’ll just go away, with a reason like “need more than the X-number of existing <refs> you have.” If you still haven’t given up trying to contribute it is currently a 6 week wait to have your article reviewed to be moved back into Wikipedia-proper. However! You’ll find any fair-use images you uploaded to support your article (say a movie poster), well those have been deleted since “draft space” articles are banned from containing them. Those are just some of the trials I’ve gone through in the last two months trying to fill in some gaps on Wikipedia. It feels like they’ve added so many layers of bureaucracy over the last decade even longtime contributors are being forced away.
- starpilot 8y agoWikipedia has finite resources that cost money. So they have to restrict it to hosting articles that will have some level of audience.
- baroffoos 8y agoThis is wrong. Low view articles cost essentially nothing to host. The whole of wikipedia can be stored for about $1 per month if all you care about is storage. Also rejected articles don't get deleted from the system they just get moved to the draft section which is hidden from search results.
- ardy42 8y ago> This is wrong. Low view articles cost essentially nothing to host. The whole of wikipedia can be stored for about $1 per month if all you care about is storage. Also rejected articles don't get deleted from the system they just get moved to the draft section which is hidden from search results. That's wrong. Low view articles still cost volunteer time to maintain, otherwise many would become home to malicious edits. That's a kind of hosting cost. Also, deleted articles on Wikipedia are removed such that only admins can see them. I don't think it's common to remove them to the drafts area unless they're under construction and have some hope of meeting standards.
- webaholic 8y agoI hope this reduces the "we need donations" banner to an extent. I contribute changes whenever I can, so seeing that banner each and every time is a bit frustrating.
- raz32dust 8y agoYou can create an account and log in. I think logged in accounts don't see the banner. At least I don't see it. I am not sure if logging in is enough or you need to make some contributions as well (I have some contributions).
- kondro 8y agoProbably not. Wikimedia like money[1]. They've been running a revenue surplus of $20m+ per year for the last while and are currently sitting on a $130m cash & equivalents hoard. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/6/60/FY17-18_-_Independent_Auditors%27_Report.pdf https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/6/60/FY17-...
- dingdongding 8y agoConsidering there expenses are $80m in 2018, I think it is okey if they keep some surplus as a cushion.
- Guereric 8y agoPlease change the source to this: https://blog.google/products/search/expanding-knowledge-access-wikimedia-foundation/ https://blog.google/products/search/expanding-knowledge-acce...
- p49k 8y agoPlease don't - we should be linking to objective journalistic sources which provide analysis surrounding the decision, not one-sided puff pieces from the sources themselves which can present their actions in any light they wish and omit whatever relevant info they don't want presented.
- voycey 8y agoProbably just so they can get rid of that 1/3 page notification to "give them money"
- ykevinator 8y agoOn the same day taxpayers gave millions to Google https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autonomous-waymo/waymo-says-it-will-build-self-driving-cars-in-michigan-idUSKCN1PG22R https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autonomous-waymo/waymo-sa...
- mattigames 8y ago8 million is peanuts compared to the cost that self-driving has had for google and that cost will only increase until successful, and if that happens it will save thousands of lives (mostly because it can't get drunk, it's mood-less and respects speed limits)
- ykevinator 8y agoI'm pro self driving car, just saying it's absurd to give taxpayer money to Google (Amazon, etc.)
- mattigames 8y ago8 million is not enough to buy a single tank for the military, and they buy hundreds of those; if wasting taxpayers is your concern you looking at the wrong places.
- xbmcuser 8y agoA lot of Google Assistant and Google search answers are from Wikipedia entries. So Us$3.1 million is very little investment for the returns they are getting.
- techcarving 8y agoWow
- Alexander473 8y agoCommerces "give back to the community", as MongoDB would say.
- olivermarks 8y agoNearly All of Wikipedia Is Written By Just 1 Percent of Its Editors https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-elite-diversity-foundation https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-...
- martin_a 8y agoTried writing for it in Germany, but stopped after two or three articles and some minor corrections. It's full of people who feel enlightened and therefore drive all the sane people off. It's a really ill climate in there. No fun.
- Jyaif 8y agoReminder that Wikimedia receives north of 100 million of USD per year, with the servers themselves costing 2 millions.
- mavhc 8y agoSo you're saying computers are cheap and humans expensive? Breaking news there
- xfitm3 8y agoGoogle has so much money its scary.