LawPundit Pages

Thursday, January 24, 2019

Google Gives Wikimedia Millions of Dollars, Free Machine Learning Tools and Free Access to Google's Custom Search and Cloud Vision APIs

Wikimedia viz. the Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit behind the behemoth Wikipedia (free encyclopedia), as also the Wiktionary (free-content multilingual dictionary), Wikibooks (open-content textbooks), Wikiquote (quotations with exact sources), Wikivoyage (free web-based travel guide), Wikisource (free library), Wikispecies (free species directory), Wikiversity (free educational resources), Wikimedia Commons (free media files), and other projects.

At Wired.com, Louise Matsakis reports on the "really big news" that Google Gives Wikimedia Millions—Plus Machine Learning Tools.

Wikipedia, as a non-commercial enterprise, has been strapped for cash since its inception, and there have been many Wikipedia online requests for funds in past months and years, asking Wikipedia users to donate money.

Matsakis writes that Google has now given Wikimedia ca. $3 million dollars, and is also providing free Google machine learning tools as well as free access to Google's custom search and cloud vision APIs.

Google Translate is also going to be integrated.

That these donations also help Google Search is obvious, as the article explains. But at least Google is donating "something", whereas many other "tech giants" donate nothing. See Elisabeth Hu, Business Insider France, Sept. 26, 2018, and her article Amazon just donated $1 million to Wikipedia after being called out.