Wikipedia Receives Grant from Google

It has been announced that the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, has been given a $2 million grant from Google.

A fundraising campaign run by Wikipedia has brought in $8 million in donations and this grant comes as a huge boost in paying the costs of running the website. It costs roughly $10 million per year to run Wikipedia and about 340 million users access the website per month.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin said:

“Wikipedia is one of the greatest triumphs of the internet. This vast repository of community-generated content is an invaluable resource to anyone who is online.”

This is not the first time that Google has pumped money into other projects, Mozilla’s Firefox being one example. Though the grant has been met with positivity from Wikimedia, it has been viewed with suspicion by others, no doubt remembering Knol, the rival service that Google launched in 2008. However, it can be argued that the arrangement is mutually beneficial. A Wikipedia entry is often one of the first things a searcher sees in response to a query put into Google and a significant amount of Wikipedia’s traffic arrives from Google.

Co-founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales commented:

“We are very pleased and grateful. This is a wonderful gift, and we celebrate it as recognition of the long-term alignment and friendship between Google and Wikimedia. Both organisations are committed to bringing high quality information to hundreds of millions of individuals every day, and to making the Internet better for everyone.”

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