Google Donates $2 Million To Wikimedia Foundation

Re:Google Donates $2 Million To Wikimedia Foundation by shrikant on Wednesday February 17, 2010 @09:02AM (#1131508)

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

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Re:Google Donates $2 Million To Wikimedia Foundation by pavs on Wednesday February 17, 2010 @11:26AM (#1131791)

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.

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Re:Google Donates $2 Million To Wikimedia Foundation by fnid2 on Wednesday February 17, 2010 @02:01PM (#1132176)

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.

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Re:Google Donates $2 Million To Wikimedia Foundation by skywalker on Wednesday February 17, 2010 @02:45PM (#1132340)

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.

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Re:Google Donates $2 Million To Wikimedia Foundation by lolcraft on Wednesday February 17, 2010 @04:50PM (#1132726)

people will begin to go directly to Wikipedia

I doubt it. All people I know use Google as their URL entry field, as the concept of URL is too machine-oriented to be comfortably used by the average guy, when good search is available. Given that, Google donating to Wikipedia is a pure win-win situation.

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Re:Google Donates $2 Million To Wikimedia Foundation by skywalker on Wednesday February 17, 2010 @05:36PM (#1132827)

People don't need to type the url. Wikipedia is already installed as a search engine on Firefox's search box (and maybe in IE?). Eventually users will learn to use it.

Crome's omnibox search also takes users to wikipedia without visiting google. They could show ads in the omnibox, but the space and user experience is more limited.

And don't forget that most sites don't get all their referrers from Google, so users are getting there via another way. Some of those are indeed direct traffic, without an intermediary.

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Re:Google Donates $2 Million To Wikimedia Foundation by robryan on Wednesday February 17, 2010 @06:28PM (#1132946)

I still usually type what I want into google followed by wiki to get the relevant Wikipedia entry first. Google is also better at finding the page you want that Wikipedia itself, such as if you type in The Simpsons wiki, but you really want the episode list page, it will be the second result indented under the main page.

It may not really save to much time, but if a tech guy like myself does it that way, average internet users would probably be even more inclined to.

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