Google Donates $2 Million To Wikimedia Foundation

http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/16/google-donates-2-million-to-wikimedia-foundation/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

by epi0Bauqu • 16 years ago

59 18 16 years ago

techcrunch.com

GFischer• 16 years ago

I'm really happy about that, but I wanted to point out it's not completely disinterested - Wikipedia is the top search result for an absurd amount of queries, so Google benefits from its continued existence (not to mention it's aligned with their stated goal).

Edit: Someone posted in the original article about similar grants - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#Grants , including a recent $2 million potential "grant" funding from the Omidyar Network.

gwern• 16 years ago

How does that work? Wikipedia appears equally in the competitors' results - it's not like the Bing or Yahoo developers don't know of this obscure Wikipedia thing - so that's not it; and Google benefits from users spending more time on search pages, since they will see more adds, so providing results that instantly solve their problem isn't very helpful either (and targeted ads are well-targeted independently of the search results); and users going into Wikipedia don't add anything to the bottom-line since Wikipedias don't run ads (Google's or otherwise).

ugh• 16 years ago

Wikipedia provides valuable content which increases the usefulness of Google (and all other search engines).

If Wikipedia were to go under and nothing similar were to replace it (unlikely, but who knows) people might go back to using encyclopedias on dead wood or walled garden online encyclopedias both of which would lead to people spending less time searching.

andreyf• 16 years ago

Also, if wikipedia becomes more reliant on Google funding as they continue to scale, Google will have more leverage to ask them to monetize their pages down the road.

shrikant• 16 years ago

..and Google continues doing less evil than most. Despite having the deadweight that is Knol in their kitty.

pavs• 16 years ago

How is knol a deadweight? At worst, its an idea that didn't work (still too soon for a conclusion).

If you were to take seriously some of the estimated cost of keeping youtube alive, it is more of a deadweight.

fnid2• 16 years ago

donating $2M is not doing no evil. If donating money to a nonprofit unevils you, then why do people still claim microsoft / bill gates are evil? They've donated billions to charity.

If this is your metric, then Google is way more evil than Microsoft.

skywalker2• 16 years ago

Wikimedia is not only a non-profit, but also Google's more sucessful competitor in organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful, albeit with some factual errors and unsourced statements.

Google benefits from Wikipedia articles in that they make Google more useful, but if Wikipedia is always the first result, people will begin to go directly to Wikipedia to get information, just like they go directly to Facebook or to Twitter, even though Google also benefits from their public information.

denizzz• 16 years ago

Good news as long as the deal has no strings attached...

gojomo• 16 years ago

This is good for Wikipedia, and nice of Google, but I'm also reminded of Nicholas Carr's observation:

The next thing to be said is: what we seem to have here is evidence of a fundamental failure of the Web as an information-delivery service. Three things have happened, in a blink of history's eye: (1) a single medium, the Web, has come to dominate the storage and supply of information, (2) a single search engine, Google, has come to dominate the navigation of that medium, and (3) a single information source, Wikipedia, has come to dominate the results served up by that search engine. Even if you adore the Web, Google, and Wikipedia - and I admit there's much to adore - you have to wonder if the transformation of the Net from a radically heterogeneous information source to a radically homogeneous one is a good thing. Is culture best served by an information triumvirate?

(From <http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/01/all_hail_the_in.ph...)

Google Donates $2 Million To Wikimedia Foundation

Related Stories