It’s not every day somebody gives you a call and hands over millions.
That is unless you’re Nigel Page and Justine Laycock, the Gloucestershire couple who won £56m on the lottery last weekend… or Jimmy Wales.
The Wikimedia Foundation – the organisation that runs Wikipedia- scored its own unexpected windfall yesterday, when it officially announced that Google was giving it a $2m grant.
This is the Wikimedia Foundation’s first grant from Google. The funds will support core operational costs of the Wikimedia Foundation, including investments in technical infrastructure to support rapidly-increasing global traffic and capacity demands. The funds will also be used to support the organization’s efforts to make Wikipedia easier to use and more accessible.
“Wikipedia is one of the greatest triumphs of the internet,” offered Google co-founder Sergey Brin. “This vast repository of community-generated content is an invaluable resource to anyone who is online.”
For the website, the donation comes as the icing on the cake. Over the last few months, Wikipedia’s been on a rather relentless fundraising drive that ended up bringing in $8m of cash to keep it going.
And it shouldn’t be a complete surprise that Google is dipping into its pocket – after all, the internet goliath is not above supporting projects that help its users in some way. In the past it has pumped money into projects like Mozilla’s Firefox and various university research projects.
But why Wikipedia?
Well, in general Google focuses on giving money to causes that will help make life better or easier for its users. That might be opening up a database that improves search results, offering a browser that is faster or more flexible than others, or finding new ways to collect and disseminate information.
Seen in that light, the Wikipedia grant is simple: the site’s vast database of articles and search-engine friendly approach means it gets featured heavily in Google’s results pages. Studies have shown how much traffic is sent from Google to Wikipedia, and on any number of queries, a Wikipedia result will be one of the first thing that a Google user sees.
What is good for Wikipedia – making the site faster, more reliable and more accessible – helps Google’s users get what they want, and is therefore good for the company itself. It’s not a grant, it’s an investment in making sure it can keep dominating search.
Still, though, it doesn’t hurt to be wary of Google’s long-term motivations. After all, it was the company’s support of a popular open source browser like Firefox that begat (in part) its development of Chrome.
However, there may be one reason that Wikipedia isn’t worried: it’s already seen off one attempt by Google to encroach on its territory that came a couple of years ago in the shape of Knol – remember that?
The system – touted at launch as Googlepedia, and called “an attack on the media industry in general” here on this very blog by Jack – Knol has become yet another one of Google’s projects that fell by the wayside.
In the official announcement, Jimmy Wales skipped past all that kerfuffle.
“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,” he said. “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.”
Let’s see where this leads.
