13 ms·

Sergey Brin gives $500,000 to help Wikipedia

545 points by recusancy 15y ago

benatkin 15y ago
I wonder how many times he saw Jimmy Wales' face at the top of an article.
- 0003 15y ago
  It is an effective face... to wit: >It was an excellent year for the Wikimedia Foundation from a financial perspective. The 2010-11 plan called for us to increase revenue 28% from 2009-10, to $20.4 million, and to increase spending 124% from 2009-10, to $20.4 million. In fact, we significantly over-achieved from a revenue perspective, and we also under spent, resulting in a larger reserve than planned. We closed the year with a reserve of $12 million, up from $7 million the prior year. This over-achievement is primarily due to the success of the 2010 WMF fundraiser. In 2010-11, the Wikimedia Foundation refocused from a mixed revenue model to a strong primary focus on the annual campaign: this resulted in our shortest and most successful campaign to date, raising $15 million (up 72% from 2009's $8.7 million) in 50 days (25% fewer than 2009's 67 days). If you include the $6.5 million received by 12 chapters which acted as payment processors in 2010, the total raised by the movement in the 2010 campaign was $21.5 million.[1] [1]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/7/72/Audit_FAQ_2011_Final.pdf http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/7/72/Audit_...
  - benatkin 15y ago
    Indeed. I think he looks kind of like Larry Ellison but I'm not great at recognizing faces and I haven't put them side-by-side yet.
scottkrager 15y ago
The hundreds of millions of visitors from Google isn't enough? : ) Just joking, that's a nice donation. My wife was totally freaked out this week though...she had never seen the donation banner before.
- FooBarWidget 15y ago
  What made her freak out? Just the existence of the banner, or that she didn't realize Wikipedia needs funding from the public? How did she respond afterwards?
  - sjs 15y ago
    She was probably creeped out by Jimmy's mug staring her down, eerily grinning at her. "Hi there. I'm watching you."
    - ErrantX 15y ago
      Because of the positioning it also looks like article titles are captions to the image... which has led to "much amusement" in certain circles.
      - cobrausn 15y ago
        Yes. Yes it has. http://theoatmeal.com/blog/jimmy_wales http://theoatmeal.com/blog/jimmy_wales Note: Though I would normally not post these kinds of links, it's somewhat relevant to the topic at hand.
        iso8859-1 15y ago
        Funny how you can't post a link to The Oatmeal without a note like that. :)
  - scottkrager 15y ago
    I think a little of both. 1. She had no clue who this guy was suddenly staring at her 2. Didn't know Wikipedia needs $
leak 15y ago
I think Wikipedia should get into printing & selling beautiful books from some of their content. Maybe that will be my weekend project!
- marquis 15y ago
  Like an encyclopedia? Unless it's the book from the diamond age I'm not sure I'm comfortable anymore showing my kids printed encyclopedias.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- allbutlost 15y ago
  Have you seen http://pediapress.com/ http://pediapress.com/? It seems to do exactly that, although you need to compile the book yourself.
  - leak 15y ago
    Yeh, something similar except beautiful, not just printing the content. Beautiful cover, font, design, maybe even vintage looking. It might not be "scalable" tho but I think people would dig it and willing to pay $100 for something like that. I would buy a vintage looking book about cars.
    - _delirium 15y ago
      Yeah, I'd be interested in well-edited individual books, by someone knowledgeable in the subject who took care with both the physical presentation, and ideally some editing of the content, at least to make the articles flow coherently and not have too much redundancy between chapters (and make sure total crap sections didn't slip in). In some ways that's the whole point of it being open-content, that you can reuse/repackage it in various ways, but there hasn't been a lot of creative third-party reuse yet.
      - ErrantX 15y ago
ajross 15y ago
[EDIT: could those downvoting this please reply and tell me why? I wouldn't have thought this would be controversial, but I'm looking at this post sitting at -4 just minutes after posting and am genuinely confused as to what the issue is.] Hrm. Obviously this is a good thing, but... Wikipedia tells me that Brin's net worth is $16.7B. Very roughly, my "net worth" (in the sense of assets required to duplicate my income) is $2M. So that's the equivalent of my dropping $59 on them. Obviously all gifts are good (as long as you, like me, value wikipedia). And this is a big one. But it hardly qualifies as earth-shaking philanthropy. It's the gift amount Brin would be expected to give, I'd say. Obviously there's a lot of apples and oranges here; both of the numbers above represent "tied down" assets and not disposable cash, etc... But shouldn't the extremely wealthy be held to higher standards about what they're expected to do with their charity? Why must it be news when someone like Brin does the equivalent of clicking on "Donate via PayPal". I guess one good thing came of this though: lest I feel like a hypocrite, I went to Wikipedia and clicked on "Donate $100". So that makes me a better person than Brin, I guess?
- brador 15y ago
  Sergey's net worth is in large part held as stock (in Google). His liquid is probably <$1B.
  - ajross 15y ago
    Right. And my liquid fraction of that $2M number is far less still. My "assets" are held up in my employment and dolled out every two weeks in a paycheck. So by that analysis he should be donating even more, no?
    - brador 15y ago
      No. As an officer of a public company, he sells his shares on timetable as required by insider trading regulation. You can cash out your entire net worth within a month to year max. Sergey, practically, can never realise his entire net worth, or anything close to it.
zeruch 15y ago
Basically he paid to stop seeing Jimmy's dessicated, mildly derpish face page after page after page...
nostromo 15y ago
I personally would love to see Wikipedia sell ads. Nothing crazy, just one subtle and tasteful text ad per page, sold by auction. (The ads would be much smaller and more relevant than "a personal appeal from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales".) The revenue could allow Wikipedia to take on ambitious projects to further its mission statement, similar to the Mozilla Foundation or NPR. Unlike most publishers, Wikipedia doesn't need to worry about maintaining a firewall between sales and editorial -- so I think it's a natural fit.
- blinkingled 15y ago
  This makes total sense. After all the personal appeal is an ad. Much better to have non-intrusive ads that people might even find useful in some cases.
- simonbrown 15y ago
  Why wouldn't they need to worry about advertisers having control over content? A big client would still have a lot of leverage.
- nupark2 15y ago
  As someone who very much values the clarity of content without the insidious distraction of advertisements, I would not like to see Wikipedia sell ads. I would rather that they either continue to work through donations, or figure out how to sell their content directly. Ultimately, I think the use of advertising as a proxy mechanism for charging customers is an inefficient historical fall-out of the constraints of magazines, television, and the web. Any use of advertisement to fund modern digital distribution is indicative of one of two things: - A failure find a less round-about, more efficient, and more profitable mechanism for directly charging consumers for what they consume OR - A lack of respect for the customer and an attempt to maximize profit at the expense of their enjoyment of your product. I do not subscribe to Hulu for this reason.
  - maximusprime 15y ago
    You're an outlier. Most people don't mind ads.
napierzaza 15y ago
And he wants to make sure everyone knows about it.
- pjscott 15y ago
  The desire for recognition is a major driver of philanthropy. Let's not attack the reason for Wikipedia getting half a million dollars.
benwerd 15y ago
Serious question: is Sergey Brin Google's version of Steve Wozniak? He certainly seems to be chasing the less-commercial, more-interesting ideas.
- mikeklaas 15y ago
  Serious question: what ideas is Woz chasing that is more interesting than what Apple has done in his absence?
  - jbermudes 15y ago
    Education.
- Detrus 15y ago
  In this case Brin might just be a convenient way to subsidize Wikipedia. Google depends on Wikipedia to provide good results for a large percentage of their searches.
- kmt 15y ago
  No. Beyond technical stuff and Apple, Wozniak is a simple man with a good heart but still a rather simple man who apparently doesn't appreciate money all that much. Beyond math, science and Google, Brin is an idealist with grand ideas about the world. Expect much more from him in the future since he does indeed have a lot of money, understands money's potential very well and is careful about investing in anything now knowing that later he'll be even more mature and will make much wiser investments.
  - eavc 15y ago
    Sounds like a description of Gates.
    - mayanksinghal 15y ago
      I am not so sure about that. MS has had significant contributions in research that is not directly relevant to Microsoft's current revenue streams - but I haven't heard if Gates was directly involved in any of them. Brin, on the other hand, appears to be spearheading that stream of research and development.
ckenst 15y ago
Good for Wikipedia. Wikipedia should consider experimenting with different business models to generate money. Mozilla makes most of it's money from Google. By placing Google.com as their start page, they split the revenue generated from ad clicks - it's around 80% of their revenue (I looked at their financial statements long ago but can't remember specifics). $500k to Sergey Brin is pocket change.
grigy 15y ago
I think true donation should be anonymous, otherwise it becomes a promotion.
- ianstormtaylor 15y ago
  As long as you realize that it would severely reduce the amount of money donated to non-profits.
maximusprime 15y ago
wikipedia only needs "help" because it spends so much money.
- stdgy 15y ago
  I'm not sure how that's relevant. Every other organization operates the same way.
  - maximusprime 15y ago
    Look at their budget. They spend shedloads. On things they don't need. If wikipedia wanted to survive, it'd trim back it's massive spending.
    - megablast 15y ago
      For example? I guess they could save a lot by cutting out hosting.
      - maximusprime 15y ago
        Last time I looked, only a tiny % of their expenses were on hosting. The vast majority was on research,salaries, business crap, idk what else. Take a look.
djtriptych 15y ago
As one of the unfortunate who has had to attempt to hack at mediawiki... I hope some of that cash goes towards improving their code base. It's gotta be costing them in maintenance (to say nothing of the ability to add new features).
- ErrantX 15y ago
  A decent portion of the latest budget is going into hiring technical staff; and from what I have observed of that "department" things are improving rapidly :)
- a3_nm 15y ago
  Mediawiki is indeed a very poor substitute for a VCS, and things could probably be improved. For example, there once was a project to store Wikipedia articles using git as a backend: <https://github.com/scy/levitation> https://github.com/scy/levitation>.
dvdhsu 15y ago
Sergey's wife, Anne Wojcicki, is mentioned. This is interesting because Anne's mother, Esther Wojcicki, is on the board of Creative Commons [1], which is what Wikipedia uses. ------------------------------ 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esther_Wojcicki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esther_Wojcicki
- iso8859-1 15y ago
  It is a very popular license. Content on Wikipedia used to be GFDL-only, but the CC is obviously better suited. I doubt this connection has anything to do with the donation.
st3fan 15y ago
Well that is very nice of him.
hello-trolls 15y ago
muscle
oth3r 15y ago
No love for Knol? I guess Sergey would like to forget that that venture ever existed.
- iso8859-1 15y ago
  Why deny the existence of Knol? Google has tons of failed projects. Like many others, I don't see Knol as a competitor; and I don't think it was even supposed to be.
bborud 15y ago
It probably went down like this: Sergey: "hey Jimmy, how much do I have to pay you NOT to see your creepy face on every wikipedia article?" Jimmy: "Well...."
- a3_nm 15y ago
  Jimmy: "Just click on the little cross to close the ad." Seriously, why are so many people complaining about this?
  - aw3c2 15y ago
    I don't allow cookies. That way of removing the ad does not work for me.
    - jeffdavis 15y ago
      You can enable cookies to get the viewing experience that you prefer. Or, you can download the content freely and see it any way you prefer. Those seem like a couple reasonable options, to me.
    - taken11 15y ago
      just use adblock
  - bborud 15y ago
    In all seriousness, I would very much like to see Wikipedia be properly funded in a way that doesn't make bumming money from users necessary. The problem is finding a model that is sustainable in the long run and which doesn't compromise Wikipedia's independence and objectivity. What makes me a bit uncomfortable is that these ads associate Wikipedia very strongly with a single person. (I'm sure there are people who think Wikipedia is neither independent nor objective; I have no informed opinion on that. But for argument's sake, let's assume that it is and that this is what the contributors strive for)
    - jeffdavis 15y ago
rosshere 15y ago
rad
fsniper 15y ago
I believe, a joint venture should be formed between Redhat, Canonical, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla and Facebook to fund wikipedia and this kinds of open source and very much needed projects with some of their yearly revenues. I named those companies because much or they are making money over free and open source projects. And this kind of venture is a way of showing good will. This could make wikipedia to survive, build more kinds of projects that could lead to more innovation and this new created innovation and brain would turn into profits for this companies. A long shot maybe, but this organisations contributors would not be harmed.
capex 15y ago
I wrote about this in my little article a few days ago. Wikipedia needs to raise money for the next 20 years, not for one year at a time. And then amaze their visitors with more interactive and engaging stuff when they take the money matters off their minds. http://www.adnanymous.com/2011/11/why-jimmy-wales-wikipedia-collect-donations-every-year/ http://www.adnanymous.com/2011/11/why-jimmy-wales-wikipedia-...
- neilk 15y ago
  Hi, I work at the WMF. I'll address your points here. > Why can’t we have Stypi recording all changes made to Wikipedia articles? Because Stypi didn't exist until a few months ago? Ok, more seriously: I and my colleagues have talked to everybody else that ever did collaborative editing tools. We know the Wave guys, the Etherpad guys, and others, over the past year. I myself did a little analysis of Stypi a little while ago to try to learn some things from them. We are working on this problem. I think you will be pleasantly surprised with the results shortly. The new editing "surface" is making progress by leaps and bounds lately. See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Future http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Future and others. There are reasons why we can't just grab anything off the shelf like Etherpad, Wave, Etherpad-lite, or Stypi. MediaWiki already has a huge infrastructure of tools behind it and the entire community model is organized around chronologically ordered single-user discrete taggable edits of a very specialized format. Wikipedia wouldn't work well without all the bots and scripts that our community has written, and then we'd have to rewrite all of them too. Etherpad has plain text with bold and italic. Stypi has even less, as far as I know. It is possible to use these editors to create a collaborative way to edit wikitext (I did an experiment this summer to do just that). But that doesn't get us any closer to a GUI editor, which most people think is a sine qua non. Given the resources we have devoted to this -- basically some of the time of four or five engineers since March or so -- progress has actually been pretty good. Anyway, that's a slice of life at the WMF. Just so you know, in my corner of the world at least, we really are trying to make things awesome and it isn't costing the world a whole lot. > Why can’t we create more engaging Wikipedia articles using > something like Popcorn.js for videos? Again it comes down to the wikitext format. We do not have the liberty of banging out a new JS library and content model and then slowly adding features. Because the Foundation is adamant about never deploying any technology that's not 100% open source, we missed the whole wave of Flash-based video. Only in the past few years has it become possible to seriously do open source video in the browser. Michael Dale from Kaltura has written some great HTML5 video libraries for MediaWiki; watch for them on Wikipedia in the near future. In the meantime we're also upgrading our APIs and storage infrastructure to support uploading longer format videos and so on. This brings us into parity with maybe Youtube circa 2007 or so, with some more advanced editing and annotating tools due to the wiki-nature of everything we do. But better late than never.
erichocean 15y ago
Wealthy people giving money to Wikipedia is a great idea; I wish more would do it.
podperson 15y ago
Unlike NPR (et al), Wikipedia could actually ask for donations and then not show the appeals for donations to people who have donated (e.g. by providing simple logins). Similarly, Wikipedia could show ads or not depending on whether someone paid a small fee. I wouldn't mind either.
- wmeredith 15y ago
  I would prefer this. I'd gladly pay for a pro account.
hmottestad 15y ago
That is a very nice thing he did. Thank you Sergey Brin.
DanBC 15y ago
Some small areas of Wikipedia are so toxic that no-one would want to have anything to do with them. Some areas are probably not suitable for advertising. Would an ad on "Holocaust" or "Lynchings" really be acceptable? And so the problem then would be the megabytes of meta "discussion" about why some page should or shouldn't have ads.
dextorious 15y ago
"Sergey Brin gives $500,000 to help Wikipedia" Anything to keep Jimmy Wales off of my screen is good.
ayu 15y ago
One time I applied for a software engineer position at Wikipedia. The first phone interview was with a non technical director of people or whatnot, and after a drawn out conversation of "tell me a time when..." she informed me there would 2 others to speak with. Feels like a nonprofit.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]

545 points by recusancy 15y ago

benatkin 15y ago

I wonder how many times he saw Jimmy Wales' face at the top of an article.

0003 15y ago
It is an effective face... to wit: >It was an excellent year for the Wikimedia Foundation from a financial perspective. The 2010-11 plan called for us to increase revenue 28% from 2009-10, to $20.4 million, and to increase spending 124% from 2009-10, to $20.4 million. In fact, we significantly over-achieved from a revenue perspective, and we also under spent, resulting in a larger reserve than planned. We closed the year with a reserve of $12 million, up from $7 million the prior year. This over-achievement is primarily due to the success of the 2010 WMF fundraiser. In 2010-11, the Wikimedia Foundation refocused from a mixed revenue model to a strong primary focus on the annual campaign: this resulted in our shortest and most successful campaign to date, raising $15 million (up 72% from 2009's $8.7 million) in 50 days (25% fewer than 2009's 67 days). If you include the $6.5 million received by 12 chapters which acted as payment processors in 2010, the total raised by the movement in the 2010 campaign was $21.5 million.[1] [1]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/7/72/Audit_FAQ_2011_Final.pdf http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/7/72/Audit_...
- benatkin 15y ago
  Indeed. I think he looks kind of like Larry Ellison but I'm not great at recognizing faces and I haven't put them side-by-side yet.

scottkrager 15y ago

The hundreds of millions of visitors from Google isn't enough? : ) Just joking, that's a nice donation. My wife was totally freaked out this week though...she had never seen the donation banner before.

FooBarWidget 15y ago
What made her freak out? Just the existence of the banner, or that she didn't realize Wikipedia needs funding from the public? How did she respond afterwards?
- sjs 15y ago
  She was probably creeped out by Jimmy's mug staring her down, eerily grinning at her. "Hi there. I'm watching you."
  - ErrantX 15y ago
    Because of the positioning it also looks like article titles are captions to the image... which has led to "much amusement" in certain circles.
    - cobrausn 15y ago
      Yes. Yes it has. http://theoatmeal.com/blog/jimmy_wales http://theoatmeal.com/blog/jimmy_wales Note: Though I would normally not post these kinds of links, it's somewhat relevant to the topic at hand.
      - iso8859-1 15y ago
        Funny how you can't post a link to The Oatmeal without a note like that. :)
- scottkrager 15y ago
  I think a little of both. 1. She had no clue who this guy was suddenly staring at her 2. Didn't know Wikipedia needs $

leak 15y ago

I think Wikipedia should get into printing & selling beautiful books from some of their content. Maybe that will be my weekend project!

marquis 15y ago
Like an encyclopedia? Unless it's the book from the diamond age I'm not sure I'm comfortable anymore showing my kids printed encyclopedias.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
allbutlost 15y ago
Have you seen http://pediapress.com/ http://pediapress.com/? It seems to do exactly that, although you need to compile the book yourself.
- leak 15y ago
  Yeh, something similar except beautiful, not just printing the content. Beautiful cover, font, design, maybe even vintage looking. It might not be "scalable" tho but I think people would dig it and willing to pay $100 for something like that. I would buy a vintage looking book about cars.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    Yeah, I'd be interested in well-edited individual books, by someone knowledgeable in the subject who took care with both the physical presentation, and ideally some editing of the content, at least to make the articles flow coherently and not have too much redundancy between chapters (and make sure total crap sections didn't slip in). In some ways that's the whole point of it being open-content, that you can reuse/repackage it in various ways, but there hasn't been a lot of creative third-party reuse yet.
    - ErrantX 15y ago

ajross 15y ago

[EDIT: could those downvoting this please reply and tell me why? I wouldn't have thought this would be controversial, but I'm looking at this post sitting at -4 just minutes after posting and am genuinely confused as to what the issue is.] Hrm. Obviously this is a good thing, but... Wikipedia tells me that Brin's net worth is $16.7B. Very roughly, my "net worth" (in the sense of assets required to duplicate my income) is $2M. So that's the equivalent of my dropping $59 on them. Obviously all gifts are good (as long as you, like me, value wikipedia). And this is a big one. But it hardly qualifies as earth-shaking philanthropy. It's the gift amount Brin would be expected to give, I'd say. Obviously there's a lot of apples and oranges here; both of the numbers above represent "tied down" assets and not disposable cash, etc... But shouldn't the extremely wealthy be held to higher standards about what they're expected to do with their charity? Why must it be news when someone like Brin does the equivalent of clicking on "Donate via PayPal". I guess one good thing came of this though: lest I feel like a hypocrite, I went to Wikipedia and clicked on "Donate $100". So that makes me a better person than Brin, I guess?

brador 15y ago
Sergey's net worth is in large part held as stock (in Google). His liquid is probably <$1B.
- ajross 15y ago
  Right. And my liquid fraction of that $2M number is far less still. My "assets" are held up in my employment and dolled out every two weeks in a paycheck. So by that analysis he should be donating even more, no?
  - brador 15y ago
    No. As an officer of a public company, he sells his shares on timetable as required by insider trading regulation. You can cash out your entire net worth within a month to year max. Sergey, practically, can never realise his entire net worth, or anything close to it.

zeruch 15y ago

Basically he paid to stop seeing Jimmy's dessicated, mildly derpish face page after page after page...

nostromo 15y ago

I personally would love to see Wikipedia sell ads. Nothing crazy, just one subtle and tasteful text ad per page, sold by auction. (The ads would be much smaller and more relevant than "a personal appeal from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales".) The revenue could allow Wikipedia to take on ambitious projects to further its mission statement, similar to the Mozilla Foundation or NPR. Unlike most publishers, Wikipedia doesn't need to worry about maintaining a firewall between sales and editorial -- so I think it's a natural fit.

blinkingled 15y ago
This makes total sense. After all the personal appeal is an ad. Much better to have non-intrusive ads that people might even find useful in some cases.
simonbrown 15y ago
Why wouldn't they need to worry about advertisers having control over content? A big client would still have a lot of leverage.
nupark2 15y ago
As someone who very much values the clarity of content without the insidious distraction of advertisements, I would not like to see Wikipedia sell ads. I would rather that they either continue to work through donations, or figure out how to sell their content directly. Ultimately, I think the use of advertising as a proxy mechanism for charging customers is an inefficient historical fall-out of the constraints of magazines, television, and the web. Any use of advertisement to fund modern digital distribution is indicative of one of two things: - A failure find a less round-about, more efficient, and more profitable mechanism for directly charging consumers for what they consume OR - A lack of respect for the customer and an attempt to maximize profit at the expense of their enjoyment of your product. I do not subscribe to Hulu for this reason.
- maximusprime 15y ago
  You're an outlier. Most people don't mind ads.

napierzaza 15y ago

And he wants to make sure everyone knows about it.

pjscott 15y ago
The desire for recognition is a major driver of philanthropy. Let's not attack the reason for Wikipedia getting half a million dollars.

benwerd 15y ago

Serious question: is Sergey Brin Google's version of Steve Wozniak? He certainly seems to be chasing the less-commercial, more-interesting ideas.

mikeklaas 15y ago
Serious question: what ideas is Woz chasing that is more interesting than what Apple has done in his absence?
- jbermudes 15y ago
  Education.
Detrus 15y ago
In this case Brin might just be a convenient way to subsidize Wikipedia. Google depends on Wikipedia to provide good results for a large percentage of their searches.
kmt 15y ago
No. Beyond technical stuff and Apple, Wozniak is a simple man with a good heart but still a rather simple man who apparently doesn't appreciate money all that much. Beyond math, science and Google, Brin is an idealist with grand ideas about the world. Expect much more from him in the future since he does indeed have a lot of money, understands money's potential very well and is careful about investing in anything now knowing that later he'll be even more mature and will make much wiser investments.
- eavc 15y ago
  Sounds like a description of Gates.
  - mayanksinghal 15y ago
    I am not so sure about that. MS has had significant contributions in research that is not directly relevant to Microsoft's current revenue streams - but I haven't heard if Gates was directly involved in any of them. Brin, on the other hand, appears to be spearheading that stream of research and development.

ckenst 15y ago

Good for Wikipedia. Wikipedia should consider experimenting with different business models to generate money. Mozilla makes most of it's money from Google. By placing Google.com as their start page, they split the revenue generated from ad clicks - it's around 80% of their revenue (I looked at their financial statements long ago but can't remember specifics). $500k to Sergey Brin is pocket change.

grigy 15y ago

I think true donation should be anonymous, otherwise it becomes a promotion.

ianstormtaylor 15y ago
As long as you realize that it would severely reduce the amount of money donated to non-profits.

maximusprime 15y ago

wikipedia only needs "help" because it spends so much money.

stdgy 15y ago
I'm not sure how that's relevant. Every other organization operates the same way.
- maximusprime 15y ago
  Look at their budget. They spend shedloads. On things they don't need. If wikipedia wanted to survive, it'd trim back it's massive spending.
  - megablast 15y ago
    For example? I guess they could save a lot by cutting out hosting.
    - maximusprime 15y ago
      Last time I looked, only a tiny % of their expenses were on hosting. The vast majority was on research,salaries, business crap, idk what else. Take a look.

djtriptych 15y ago

As one of the unfortunate who has had to attempt to hack at mediawiki... I hope some of that cash goes towards improving their code base. It's gotta be costing them in maintenance (to say nothing of the ability to add new features).

ErrantX 15y ago
A decent portion of the latest budget is going into hiring technical staff; and from what I have observed of that "department" things are improving rapidly :)
a3_nm 15y ago
Mediawiki is indeed a very poor substitute for a VCS, and things could probably be improved. For example, there once was a project to store Wikipedia articles using git as a backend: <https://github.com/scy/levitation> https://github.com/scy/levitation>.

dvdhsu 15y ago

Sergey's wife, Anne Wojcicki, is mentioned. This is interesting because Anne's mother, Esther Wojcicki, is on the board of Creative Commons [1], which is what Wikipedia uses. ------------------------------ 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esther_Wojcicki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esther_Wojcicki

iso8859-1 15y ago
It is a very popular license. Content on Wikipedia used to be GFDL-only, but the CC is obviously better suited. I doubt this connection has anything to do with the donation.

st3fan 15y ago

Well that is very nice of him.

hello-trolls 15y ago

muscle

oth3r 15y ago

No love for Knol? I guess Sergey would like to forget that that venture ever existed.

iso8859-1 15y ago
Why deny the existence of Knol? Google has tons of failed projects. Like many others, I don't see Knol as a competitor; and I don't think it was even supposed to be.

bborud 15y ago

It probably went down like this: Sergey: "hey Jimmy, how much do I have to pay you NOT to see your creepy face on every wikipedia article?" Jimmy: "Well...."

a3_nm 15y ago
Jimmy: "Just click on the little cross to close the ad." Seriously, why are so many people complaining about this?
- aw3c2 15y ago
  I don't allow cookies. That way of removing the ad does not work for me.
  - jeffdavis 15y ago
    You can enable cookies to get the viewing experience that you prefer. Or, you can download the content freely and see it any way you prefer. Those seem like a couple reasonable options, to me.
  - taken11 15y ago
    just use adblock
- bborud 15y ago
  In all seriousness, I would very much like to see Wikipedia be properly funded in a way that doesn't make bumming money from users necessary. The problem is finding a model that is sustainable in the long run and which doesn't compromise Wikipedia's independence and objectivity. What makes me a bit uncomfortable is that these ads associate Wikipedia very strongly with a single person. (I'm sure there are people who think Wikipedia is neither independent nor objective; I have no informed opinion on that. But for argument's sake, let's assume that it is and that this is what the contributors strive for)
  - jeffdavis 15y ago

rosshere 15y ago

rad

fsniper 15y ago

I believe, a joint venture should be formed between Redhat, Canonical, IBM, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla and Facebook to fund wikipedia and this kinds of open source and very much needed projects with some of their yearly revenues. I named those companies because much or they are making money over free and open source projects. And this kind of venture is a way of showing good will. This could make wikipedia to survive, build more kinds of projects that could lead to more innovation and this new created innovation and brain would turn into profits for this companies. A long shot maybe, but this organisations contributors would not be harmed.

capex 15y ago

I wrote about this in my little article a few days ago. Wikipedia needs to raise money for the next 20 years, not for one year at a time. And then amaze their visitors with more interactive and engaging stuff when they take the money matters off their minds. http://www.adnanymous.com/2011/11/why-jimmy-wales-wikipedia-collect-donations-every-year/ http://www.adnanymous.com/2011/11/why-jimmy-wales-wikipedia-...

neilk 15y ago
Hi, I work at the WMF. I'll address your points here. > Why can’t we have Stypi recording all changes made to Wikipedia articles? Because Stypi didn't exist until a few months ago? Ok, more seriously: I and my colleagues have talked to everybody else that ever did collaborative editing tools. We know the Wave guys, the Etherpad guys, and others, over the past year. I myself did a little analysis of Stypi a little while ago to try to learn some things from them. We are working on this problem. I think you will be pleasantly surprised with the results shortly. The new editing "surface" is making progress by leaps and bounds lately. See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Future http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Future and others. There are reasons why we can't just grab anything off the shelf like Etherpad, Wave, Etherpad-lite, or Stypi. MediaWiki already has a huge infrastructure of tools behind it and the entire community model is organized around chronologically ordered single-user discrete taggable edits of a very specialized format. Wikipedia wouldn't work well without all the bots and scripts that our community has written, and then we'd have to rewrite all of them too. Etherpad has plain text with bold and italic. Stypi has even less, as far as I know. It is possible to use these editors to create a collaborative way to edit wikitext (I did an experiment this summer to do just that). But that doesn't get us any closer to a GUI editor, which most people think is a sine qua non. Given the resources we have devoted to this -- basically some of the time of four or five engineers since March or so -- progress has actually been pretty good. Anyway, that's a slice of life at the WMF. Just so you know, in my corner of the world at least, we really are trying to make things awesome and it isn't costing the world a whole lot. > Why can’t we create more engaging Wikipedia articles using > something like Popcorn.js for videos? Again it comes down to the wikitext format. We do not have the liberty of banging out a new JS library and content model and then slowly adding features. Because the Foundation is adamant about never deploying any technology that's not 100% open source, we missed the whole wave of Flash-based video. Only in the past few years has it become possible to seriously do open source video in the browser. Michael Dale from Kaltura has written some great HTML5 video libraries for MediaWiki; watch for them on Wikipedia in the near future. In the meantime we're also upgrading our APIs and storage infrastructure to support uploading longer format videos and so on. This brings us into parity with maybe Youtube circa 2007 or so, with some more advanced editing and annotating tools due to the wiki-nature of everything we do. But better late than never.

erichocean 15y ago

Wealthy people giving money to Wikipedia is a great idea; I wish more would do it.

podperson 15y ago

Unlike NPR (et al), Wikipedia could actually ask for donations and then not show the appeals for donations to people who have donated (e.g. by providing simple logins). Similarly, Wikipedia could show ads or not depending on whether someone paid a small fee. I wouldn't mind either.

wmeredith 15y ago
I would prefer this. I'd gladly pay for a pro account.

hmottestad 15y ago

That is a very nice thing he did. Thank you Sergey Brin.

DanBC 15y ago

Some small areas of Wikipedia are so toxic that no-one would want to have anything to do with them. Some areas are probably not suitable for advertising. Would an ad on "Holocaust" or "Lynchings" really be acceptable? And so the problem then would be the megabytes of meta "discussion" about why some page should or shouldn't have ads.

dextorious 15y ago

"Sergey Brin gives $500,000 to help Wikipedia" Anything to keep Jimmy Wales off of my screen is good.

ayu 15y ago

One time I applied for a software engineer position at Wikipedia. The first phone interview was with a non technical director of people or whatnot, and after a drawn out conversation of "tell me a time when..." she informed me there would 2 others to speak with. Feels like a nonprofit.

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