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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..
because Bing does http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Benefactors
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.
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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.
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
"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.
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
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