TheWikimedia Foundationofficially announced a $2 million grant fromGoogle. The grant will be used to help pay for core operating costs and to support the initiative to make Wikipedia more accessible to the general public. According to Sue Gardneron Foundation-l, the grant is completely unrestricted.
The donation comes via theTides Foundation, adonor advised fund that managed the donation for the Google Charitable Giving Fund. The Wikimedia press release for the donation noted past collaborations between Google and Wikimedia, such as the feature in the Google Translation Toolkit to help translate Wikipedia articles, and the Google-led Swahili Wikipedia editing contest(see previous articles:Swahili contest,translate toolkit). However, this is the first financial gift from the search engine giant to Wikimedia.
Several news outlets commented on the grant.BusinessWeekcommented on the mutually beneficial relationship between Wikimedia and Google that this grant would help to foster. Among many sources,CNET was one tocomment on the fact that the announcement was made publicly byJimmy Wales in atweet (firstre-tweeting advisory board member Mitch Kapor who posted the news after an internal announcement was made). And theWall Street Journal, along with other sources,quoted a statement in the press release fromSergey Brin who said Wikipedia was "one of the greatest triumphs of the Internet."
International commentary on the donation includedcommentary in Chinese from163.com.
After filing a complaint under theUniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) in December, the Wikimedia Foundation was granted thedomain name "softwarewikipedia.com", which had been registered by a Chinese company. TheFebruary 9 decision by theWorld Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Arbitration and Mediation Center found that the domain name was "confusingly similar" to the Foundation's "Wikipedia" trademark and that it had been used to run a website which "incorporated many of the look-and-feel elements of [Wikipedia] (including colour scheme, layout, typeface, section names and sizes, menu items, and spherical logo)". The Foundation was represented byThe Gigalaw Firm, as in last year's UDRP cases, where it had secured "visualwikipedia.com" and twotyposquatting domains(seeprevious story).
Stu West, a member of the Wikimedia Board of Trustees, has posted the latestcomScore dataon Meta. The data is donated by comScore, which measures traffic to websites and analyzes the demographics of site visitors.
ComScore estimates that in January 2010, 365 million unique visitors visited Wikimedia projects (all projects combined). This makes the Wikimedia Foundation the 5th most-visited Web content provider worldwide, behindGoogle (includingYouTube),Microsoft,Yahoo!, andFacebook. Of those visitors, an estimated 189.9 million visited the English Wikipedia.
Other estimates provided by comScore include the age and geographical demographics of visitors, along with the projects visited: Wikipedia gets 362.2 million estimated visitors, with Wiktionary receiving 10.5 million and the other projects trailing behind. Finally, 60.1% of the visitors to Wikimedia projects are estimated to come via Google searches.
West put the comScore data together with Erik Zachte'seditor statistics for December, to estimate what percentage of visitors are active editors. If both data sources are correct, only 0.025% of visitors to Wikimedia projects made more than 5 edits in that month. For the English Wikipedia, only 0.021% of visitors have more than 5 edits. The number is higher if you count visitors with any edits; according to West, "If you include all users who made at least one edit, it's about fifteen times higher at one-third of one percent." Of the languages compared by West, the proportion of active editors is lower for the Japanese, Spanish, and French Wikipedias, but slightly higher for the German and Russian Wikipedias.
West alsocreated a map visualizing where traffic to the Wikimedia projects comes from, using data from Erik Zachte(seeprevious story).
And in 2007,the Signpost covered a story about where traffic to the projects originates from, quoting data that seems similar to this week's story on the comScore analysis of traffic to the projects; if anything, the proportion of hits to Wikimedia that originate in Google searches has increased in the past three years. The relationship of the search engine to the health of Wikimedia's projects and their continued stunning growth has indeed been a topic of discussion and analysis for many years now, and with this week's announcement will no doubt continue to be. --phoebe /(talk to me)07:10, 22 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The author is assuming that everyone knows what RFC and BLP mean. Many people reading this article may notRacklever (talk)13:18, 24 February 2010 (UTC)[reply]
