[mrkramer]

Why would Google pay for this when they already crawled and are crawling whole Wikipedia and have complete index of it?

Better way for Wikipedia to earn extra revenue are affiliate links. A lot of people when they read and learn about some topic go to Amazon and buy a book about that topic. Wikipedia could embed book affiliate links and earn commission from book sales.

[xwx]

Affiliate links seems like a type of advert or they at least share some of the arguments against implementing them on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Funding_Wikipedia_th...

[superluserdo]

That sounds like a horribly perverse incentive for the world's main free and open source of information.

[mrkramer]

I mean Wikipedia offers basic information about some topic it's not like you are about to get deep insight unless you buy a book. And I bet Wikipedia generated millions of book sales like I said people who read an article from Wikipedia and went to Amazon or Google to search for a book.

[robjan]

If Wikipedia starts to receive commission for selling books the incentive changes from recommending the best book to the one who pays then the most

[mrkramer]

It's not about "who pays the most" it's about the best book. Book authors compete against each other to write the best book and therefore generate more sales.

Imagine reading an article from Wikipedia and at the end of the article it says "If you want to learn more about this topic take a look at our recommended books" and link leads you to dedicated page which lists let's say top 20 most popular books about that topic.

It can even replace Goodreads in a sense that Wikipedia community can rate, review and recommend books to each other.

[MattGaiser]

Perverse incentives for book authors too. You could create a industry generating books to cite on Wikipedia.

[PopePompus]

I do a lot of Wikipedia editing, and I'm fine with them monetizing an Enterprise API. But affiliate links are too close to advertising. IMHO one of the best features of Wikipedia is the lack of Ads, and if they start going down that route I'm gotta there.

[vosper]

> Why would Google pay for this when they already crawled and are crawling whole Wikipedia and have complete index of it?

Google's not the only enterprise out there :) I believe Wikipedia's taxonomy is used by lots of people for ML purposes, for example.

[easton]

But for ML you’d probably want to download the whole thing anyway, considering it’s only like 47GB. I doubt many people want to make a model on only soccer pages or something.

[ckoerner]

There’s an SLA involved in this service. Business people like SLAs. :)

[busyant]

> affiliate links

Sounds well-intentioned, but it would be immediately gamed by every unscrupulous entity and ruin Wikipedia.

[judge2020]

Well, they are already a big donor:

https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/annualreport/2019-annu...

> Google Matching Gifts Program

[Clewza313]

If you work at Google, they will 1:1 match donations to virtually any non-profit, plus there's various charity drives where employees get to donate company money. So the match program can become a huge donor just off random Googlers donating.

[throwaway53453]

The distinction doesn't really matter though, does it? Makes no different if it's Googlers as opposed to Google itself.

[markdown]

Google has already set a precedent by agreeing to pay massive corporations for news. If they're willing to do that, why shouldn't they pay WikiMedia for all the content they use?

[m463]

That will lead to many unexpected, possibly perverse, incentives.