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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?"
Google must get huge revenue from searches like $WHATEVER wikipedia
Set your phasers on "funky"!
The impact of the Gates' money is immediate, but in the long run a well-funded knowledge base is much more effective at raising the standard of living worldwide. Again, Google upstages Microsoft. Is there anything they can't fail at?
No, Google donating $2 million to Wikipedia doesn't even come close to upstaging the enormous philanthropy of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
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
because Bing does http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Benefactors
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation isn't Microsoft. It just belongs to Bill Gates.
Nothing lasts forever but the certainty of change.
Wow. Trolling this took talent. Both are good causes, and I would say vaccinating a population so they can survive will do wonders for raising their standard of living. It is hard to build knowledge when you are dead.
because Google makes $500m a year off typos...
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.
Again, Google upstages Microsoft.
Well, to be fair, that wasn't Microsoft, it was Bill Gates. Yes, he built his money from Microsoft but we need to wait and see what Larry and Sergey do with their cash when they hit Gates' age.
The impact of the Gates' money is immediate, but in the long run a well-funded knowledge base is much more effective at raising the standard of living worldwide.
Now you've gone and done it. Now you've put me in the very awkward position of defending William Gates. Recently the foundation committed $10 billion to Malaria Research and Development . Not distribution and deployment but R&D. Technically this has no immediate effect but instead contributes to our "well-funded knowledge base" of vaccine development. It's entirely probable that the first world will benefit from $10 billion being dumped into any medical R&D. I'm not even going to get into the number of zeros that ten billion has compared to two million but I trust you to be able to discern between the significance.
... like who gets the money, where the money is spent and how American companies keep building their infrastructure off of it when you should probably be dumping it into the countries that you pledged to help.
I got my own problem with the Gates Foundation
Is there anything they [Google] can't fail at?
The summary lists Knol. Recently I watched Wave flounder. You're being disingenuous to claim that all Google touches is gold. Their advertising revenues support a lot of their endeavors similar to how Microsoft operating system stranglehold allowed them to elbow their way into hardware and gaming. Impressive? Yes. King Midas? No. Infallible? No.
My work here is dung.
They probably mostly did it for publicity. And this article on Slashdot was probably $2 million worth of good press to them.
Remember, a lot of people on this site are avid technologists who are becoming suspicious of Google now over privacy and such things. But they are all going to have a geekgasm over this donation to Wikipedia.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Gimmicked page rankings? They're by definition gimmicked. If they tried to do it without human intervention 99.99% of of the top 10 results would be porn and scams.
Well Google still is relatively a new company (at least as a company successful enough to be handing out millions to charity), I am sure they just never got around to it yet.
Big companies give money to charity and Wikimedia makes sense for Internet based companies like Google because they make the web so much more worth using.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
"Gimmicked", how? It's not like there's not a huge amount of people linking to Wikipedia. I'm not sure how boosted search rankings and the corresponding increased traffic helps keep an ad-free site "afloat" either.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
[citation needed]
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
How is Google sending Wikimedia traffic keeping them "afloat"? Every unpaid-for GET is an anchor, not a lifebelt.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Could Google just completely buy out whoever owns the H.264 patents?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.)
...does that mean WikiMedia will also be classified as kiddie porn in Australia now?
How is access to a useful resource "not a thing in return"? I donated to Wikimedia too, because I appreciate what they have created and use it frequently.
Wikileaks would reject it though, they have a policy against that.
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.
[citation needed]
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.
The problem with giving to Wikimedia is that they have been so wasteful of the money they've been given. The move to the Bay Area is chief exhibit #1 - why move an organization whose whole purpose, mission, and asset is a web page to one of the most expensive real estate locations on earth?
I'm not the only one who thinks Wikimedia has more than enough money.
Advice: on VPS providers
How is Google sending Wikimedia traffic keeping them "afloat"? Every unpaid-for GET is an anchor, not a lifebelt.
Not every unpaid-for GET is unpaid-for. Some readers pay for their GET with their time by becoming editors.
"Yeah right, because Gates does it out of their hearts... you're an idiot if you think that."
you are effectively trolling. Common notes to look for - Lack of supporting information for the claims, calling other people names.
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.
This is slashdot. Bill Gates could sacrifice himself saving a toddler from a burning building and most of the comments on the story would likely be to the effect that the reason the building burned down in the firstplace was the firehall down the street had a computer in it running Windows.
I didn't say they had to buy every company who purchased a license. They'd have to buy the patent owner.
Google, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, etc. have a history of purchasing patent owners rather than attempting to license themselves from time to time.
If Google bought the patent owner, then Apple and everyone on that list would have to pay license fees to Google.
MPEG LA is a LLC, not a publicly traded corp. So I can't easily figure out with a quick search what the approximate net worth of the company is. But it might be a company that Google could purchase.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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
This is the result when you have people who have a reputation for saying they are going to stop doing some bad thing only to be caught doing it time and again. It's the same as crying wolf. After a while, people who recall the reputation (embrace, extend, extinguish for just one example) will suspect the future motives for everything they do, even if it really is noble this time (and I'm not saying that it is, but I haven't found anything particularly damning). It really shouldn't be that surprising when people become suspicious of people who have shown such a history of underhanded tactics. Maybe they've really changed, but maybe we just haven't seen the full plan yet? It wouldn't be the first time, and that's the really sad part.
You misunderstand. 3.8 billion is what they spent in 2009, they spent all of that figure. They have significantly more money than that.
I do not agree with your main point, though. Depending on the specific project involved, "blowing every penny you have" the first year can be madness. Vaccine research takes years to get from first investment to results, delivering vaccines or mosquito nets involves not only dropping the money but putting together an organization that can get those to the people who need them.
Spending at the "slow" rate of "only" four billion dollars a year doesn't seem that unreasonable to me. *shrug*
I'm a nature photographer.
To paraphrase Anthony Burgess, "It's not good deeds that makes one good, but good intent."
And so what if he is doing it for the press? If he cures malaria, the people who are cured will not care why he did it. Viewpoints like yours tend to come from people who don't actually spend much time helping other people and haven't really thought things through.
Qxe4
You are insane. Really, get help.
I was going to explain how philanthropy really works, and then explain Gates' tax liability and the position that both he and Warren Buffet have about income taxes (that they both believe that marginal rates are too low) but you are in a bubble of irrational hatred.