Google and Wikipedia


The relationship between Google and Wikipedia was firstly one of collaboration in Wikipedia's early days, when Google helped reduce the pagerank of widespread uneditable Wikipedia clones that were simply ad farms. Then in 2007 it introduced Knol, a direct competitor for community-driven encyclopedia creation. Later it supported Wikimedia with grants and came to rely on Wikipedia to address the spread of misinformation on YouTube, providing verifiable and well-sourced information to those seeking it.

History

In 2007, Google introduced Knol, which was an encyclopedia with user generated content. Various media sources noted that this product was like Wikipedia and called it a competitor to Wikipedia.
In 2008, various news sources reported that most of Wikipedia's traffic came from referrals from Google search.
In February 2010. Google gave as its first grant to the Wikimedia Foundation. Google founder Sergey Brin commented that "Wikipedia is one of the greatest triumphs of the internet".
In March 2018, YouTube announced that they would be using information from Wikipedia to address the circulation of misinformation in the videos in their platform.
In January 2019, Google donated $3 million to the Wikimedia Foundation.

Google's reliance on Wikipedia

In May 2012, Google added a project called the Google Knowledge Graph, which produced knowledge panels alongside traditional search engine results. Later, results from querying the knowledge graph complemented string-based search in producing the ranked list of search results as well. A large amount of the information presented in the knowledge panel infoboxes is retrieved from Wikipedia, Wikidata, and the CIA World Factbook.

Links