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Google Donates $2 Million To the Wikimedia Foundation
k33l0r writes "Yesterday, the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia and other projects, announced that it has received a $2 million donation from Google. This is the first time that Google has supported Wikipedia, and it has many wondering why. Anyone remember Knol, Google's answer to Wikipedia?"
As the article already states: there are "long-term motivations" at play here, (probably to soften its image) in preparation for some new project, as already mentioned with Firefox and Chrome.
As usual, since the article summary does not include this info which is easily found by reading the article, people will speculate here in the forums and end up rewriting the article themselves :D
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation isn't Microsoft. It just belongs to Bill Gates.
Nothing lasts forever but the certainty of change.
No, Google donating $2 million to Wikipedia doesn't even come close to upstaging the enormous philanthropy of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Do you mean, giving poor countries some drugs but only if they agree to not produce any more domestically?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
That bare minimum only goes to the people that have health concerns because they work for/live close at the companies that polute, in which the Bill Gates foundation holds stock, so it's buying off the guilt.
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As someone who works with a variety of nonprofits which receive funding from the Gates Foundation, I must say: you are either an idiot, a troll, or a person with remarkably bad skills at satire. Hard to tell. GF funds work all over the world in ways that have nothing to do with corporate proximity or pollution.
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
Nothing like that will happen. The Wikimedia Foundation has received large grants before (such as Omidyar's $2M grant). WMF isn't a company you can just 'buy out'. It's a charitable 501(c)(3) organization that is controlled by the Board of Trustees, which is composed of 3 community-elected seats, 2 community-seats elected by chapters, a "Jimbo-seat" for the Wikipedia founder, and up to four "Specific expertise" seats elected by the board itself (source). Google could attempt to get a "Specific expertise" seat, but they can't do anything to significantly change the course of the foundation. Also, if they tried, there'd be a major outcry by the community (and perhaps a fork).
(To be fair, one should address the Omidyar case. Around the time Omidyar granted $2M, Matt Halprin, an Omidyar employee got a "Specific expertise" seat. There were of course conspiracy theories about Omidyar 'buying' a seat in the board. I've discussed this matter with one of the board members, and the result was something like this: Omidyar didn't 'buy' a seat, but in the grant negotiations, they became aware of Matt Halprin's expertise and realized of which value he'd be on the board.)
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is sitting on billions, but only spends 3% of their endowment in a given year.
The correct number is more like twice that, and is typical of foundations that spend money based on endowments, the point of an endowment is to allow an organization to do work over an extended period of time, something impossible to do if you spend 50% of your money every year.
If you looked at actual dollars handed out in a given year, I wouldn't be shocked if Google (and Google.org) hands out more cash than the Gates Foundation.
2009 Gates Foundation: $3.8B: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN2632188420090126
Google.org's entire charitable endowment is less than a third of that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google.org.
It ain't even close, you're off by at least two orders of magnitude.
The Gates Foundation has been asking others to give to them to hand out. The largest contributer to the Gates Foundation is Warren Buffet.
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Gates' donation to the foundation is of a similar size to Buffet's, the tho had known each other for many years (play bridge together, I'm told). The Gates Foundation survived for many years with no other contributions, and I'm unaware of a single dollar that's come from any other source.
There have been many well-researched in-depth pieces that suggest The Gates Foundation is doing more harm than good right now.
[citation needed]
The LA Times 2007 piece questioning the Foundations never made that particular claim, it did raise a signficant issue in that direction though. Because endowments must invest the money they hope to use for work in the future, conflicts arise when those investments do harm. It's entirely fair to say that it's irreponsible not to look those costs.
Of course, if you read, say, the articles in the Times that discussed this, you almost certainly saw the article in the Times a few days later saying that the Gates Foundation had decided to reassess its investments for social responsiblity.
(I'd admit, by the way, that those questions can still be pretty complex. A few obvious corporations aside, most corporations do quite a number of things, many of them bad, many of them good. "How much?" can be a very challenging thing to quantify.
When The Gates Foundation was pressed about it, they said they can't be bothered to research the firms they invest it.
[citation needed]
But there are people who've linked Gates Foundation investments to Microsoft contracts and strong-armed deals.
[citation needed]
Until it is clear that The Gates Foundation is doing more good than harm, I'm not sure we should be so quick to praise them, let alone donate money to them.
Nobody is asking you to, in fact, can you point me at a place where it is possible to donate to the Gates Foundation? No, you can't, because they don't accept external donations in general. Show me the donate button on this page, and we'll talk:
http://www.gatesfoundation.org/Pages/home.aspx
I'm a nature photographer.
Google has their core cash cow but everything else seems half assed. Not everything, but knol, wave, buzz, base, orkut, etc. I understand, it's more fun to design and build new stuff, but epic failure. MS is similar, of course, but they are seem willing to dump money and resources into some of their half assed shit (zune, xbox)
It's trivial for a website to disallow Google's crawlers if the traffic they bring is a problem. Google owes nothing to Wikipedia. This is a charitable donation and not a matter of obligation.
Also, websites disappear from the web every day. Google doesn't have to change their algorithms to accommodate this. Wikipedia is at the top of search results because they contain valuable textual content relevant to specific queries, and because people link to Wikipedia from their sites. The point of Google's algorithms is to be a hands-off approach to search ranking.
Nobody is asking you to, in fact, can you point me at a place where it is possible to donate to the Gates Foundation? No, you can't, because they don't accept external donations in general.
Were one to advocate for the devil one might point out that every purchase of a PC which has ever come preinstalled with Windows due to Microsoft's per-processor licenses was and is an involuntary donation to the Gates Foundation.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Even more interesting is to compare their 2007-2008 budget with their 2008-2009 budget.