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Shouldn't Wikimedia Foundation be grateful for that? Their goal is met — people learn stuff even faster, and also they incur less server costs, because Google e

• 9nGQluzmnq3M 6y ago
  Exactly. Wikipedia's content is CC-licensed precisely to allow reuse of all kinds, including this.
• bootloop 6y ago
  I believe it's a big problem that people don't know anymore where their "information" comes from (and who paid for it).
• onion2k 6y ago
  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.
  • tantalor 6y ago
    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-million-to-wikipedias-parent-org/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/22/google-org-donates-2-milli...
    • matteuan 6y ago
      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/financials-leadership/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/fin...
      • sjwright 6y ago
        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.
        • xigency 6y ago
          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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3112115
          • xigency 6y ago
            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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14287235 [2] https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/financial-reports/
    • pydry 6y ago
      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.
  • zozbot234 6y ago
    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.
  • bzb3 6y ago
    And Wikipedia gets its information from their editors. When are the editors getting their fair share of the money? :')
    • LunaSea 6y ago
      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 ...
      • zozbot234 6y ago
        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.)
  • idoby 6y ago
    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)
    • deleted 6y ago
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    • aspenmayer 6y ago
      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 https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0039.html [2] https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0046.html
      • idoby 6y ago
        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.
        • aspenmayer 6y ago
          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.
        • aspenmayer 6y ago
          Update on this front: Web3Torrent adds etherium micropayments to WebTorrent https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23602008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23602008 https://blog.statechannels.org/introducing-web3torrent/ https://blog.statechannels.org/introducing-web3torrent/
  • garyclarke27 6y ago
    I would rather Wikipedia took some advertising, rather than it’s begging pop ups which have become more intrusive and irritating recently.
    • sjwright 6y ago
      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?
      • Sharlin 6y ago
        Ads are easier to block, or just ignore as a fact of life. Donation requests might cause irritating cognitive dissonance.
        • softwarejosh 6y ago
          then you should be asking for a paid membership
          • Sharlin 6y ago
            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.
            • sujinge9 6y ago
              That sounds like the donation request is being effective...
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• xxs 6y ago
  They are less likely to contribute, explore more, or check the veracity of the info. Google routinely shows disputed info in their short excerpts. Personally I dislike the attempt to scrape and show results of their original sites.
• perfectstorm 6y ago
  > people learn stuff even faster I agree with the faster part but these snippets Google shows often times lacks context and other miscellaneous information along with deep links to many other great articles.