Google Announces to Pay for Wikipedia Content

Since 2001, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia has been providing free information on almost every subject. Now. the search engine giant Google has announced that it has agreed to pay the online encyclopedia for the information that is shown on its search engine. It is pertinent to mention here that Google has made similar agreements with European news organizations recently.

Google Announces to Pay for Wikipedia Content

The nonprofit organization that runs Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, announced that Google was the first paying client of Wikimedia Enterprise (the commercial venture launched last year).

The commercial services will be provided without charge to The Internet Archive, which manages a website called the Wayback Machine that archives screenshots of webpages and is used to correct Wikipedia links.

In a statement, Wikimedia’s Lane Becker said,

We’re thrilled to be working with them both as our longtime partners.

Without any doubt, Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites currently and is edited & updated by volunteers and runs by donations. According to the foundation, the new commercial arm won’t change this arrangement for individual consumers.

Google incorporates content from the website into its “knowledge panel,” a sidebar that appears alongside the primary search results. This practice has sparked criticism from Wikimedia because the source of the information is not always displayed.

However, it is also pertinent to mention here that Google has previously made grants and donations to Wikipedia. According to Google’s Tim Palmer,

We have long supported the Wikimedia Foundation in pursuit of our shared goals of expanding knowledge and information access for people everywhere.

The value of the Google deal was not disclosed in the foundation’s announcement. By agreeing on a structure for Google to pay news outlets for material, French regulators and Google on Tuesday put an end to their animosity that had lasted years.

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