Wikimedia Endowment Gets New $1 Million Backing From Amazon

Amazon has donated $1 million to the Wikimedia Endowment, a fund supporting Wikipedia, the e-commerce giant said this week. From a report: The gift was intended to support Wikipedia and its nonprofit parent Wikimedia, which Amazon relies on for answers on its Alexa voice assistant. It was Amazon's first ever to the free online information and education organization. "We are grateful for Amazon's support, and hope this marks the beginning of a long-term partnership to supporting Wikipedia's future," Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said in a statement.

1 million dollars

[Danathar]

Wow Amazon! Big of you to pull a quarter out of your pocket and plink it into the donation jar...

Re:1 million dollars

[Halueth]

They could also have done nothing. Sometimes it's just a time to be grateful; not every action by $bigcorp deserves a sour face... At least them Wiki folks can keep their servers humming along a bit longer, which is a good thing(tm).

Re:

[DerekLyons]

At least them Wiki folks can keep their servers humming along a bit longer

Yeah, instead of having fifteen years of operating capital in the bank, now they have fifteen and a couple of months. Seriously, despite they hype they generate with their annual begging campaigns the Wikimedia Foundation/Wikipedia are swimming in buckets of cash.

Re:1 million dollars

[alvinrod]

This isn't exactly a huge deal for the Wikimedia foundation anyways. If you look at their financial reports [wikimedia.org], they've got plenty of money.

Expenses

[balsy2001]

Why does wikipedia need so much money? Isn’t most of the work done by unpaid people? I get there are servers and power etc, but they could have donated use of AWS. If they had free servers they would have to constantly be running a fund raising campaign.

Re:

[balsy2001]

*wouldn’t

Re:Expenses

[GuB-42]

Servers represent only 6% of Wikimedia foundation operating expenses. Staff is about 50%. For the details, see for yourself.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wik... [wikimedia.org]

It's not the money

[xack]

Wikip(m)edia has tons of money due to the regular begging campaigns it puts on it's website. Wikipedia instead could do with professional administrators with social skills (Unlike the abusive ones they have now) plus get rid of the notability policy and allow the true sum of human knowledge. I reckon Amazon with it's large AWS/S3 infrastructure and it's large amount of books could source a more reliable free encyclopedia.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Like this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Components_of_medieval_armour
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Components_of_medieval_armour#/media/File:Gothic_armour_with_list_of_elements.jpg

Walk Away from CoCs

[Anonymous Coward]

Free Software developers of the world, open your eyes! Our communities are bring raped, our work pillaged.

Detestable villains - mean spirited, bigoted, belligerent, vicious - are using underhanded tricks to force hypocritical "Codes of Conduct" on the projects we built.

The only purpose of these CoCs is to allow so-called "Progressives" to conduct witch hunts against anyone who opposes them. Thereby they plan to steal our work for their shadowy corporate paymasters.

You can readily tell these CoCs are not ab

Wikipedia editors are unpaid

[AnthonywC]

Amazon can just paid for all their hosting cost and Wikipedia should have zero expense. The $ going to Wikipedia ain't going to the editors, it is going to some board of directors and other big shot who probably doesn't even normally edit any article.

Wikimedia Endowment

[annysmithh]

The main problem was that voice assistants were now serving as intermediaries between people and the encyclopedia, reducing the chances that people would contribute as publishers or respond to donation campaigns.