Yahoo Lends Support to Wikipedia
Yahoo Search and WikiMedia announced today that Yahoo will dedicate hardware and resources to support Wikipedia, a community based encyclopedia written and edited by people from around the world. The contribution is the most significant dedication made to date to the Wikimedia Foundation by a corporate sponsor and is essential to furthering their global growth.
In addition, Wikipedia content will become available to hundreds of millions of users worldwide through Yahoo! Search via shortcuts that are automatically displayed above the relevant search results. Besides Yahoo, Slashdot reports that WikiMedia is also working with Google for support : Discussions, started at the same time as the aforementioned Google announcement, have been ongoing with both Yahoo! and Google but only the Google news leaked. It’s now more clear why Wikipedia said there was no need to worry about undue influence from any single sponsor.”
“Yahoo! Search’s support and vast user base will provide critical material aid and global reach for Wikipedia,” said Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikimedia Foundation. “Yahoo! has been Wikipedia’s longest-standing corporate supporter and with this dedication of resources we will be able to offer Wikipedia content to a growing worldwide audience, while maintaining full flexibility in our ability to expand relationships and freely distribute our works.”
“Wikipedia is one of the most recognized community-generated resources of its kind and it demonstrates the ability to create and manage a high quality content experience,” said David Mandelbrot, vice president of search content at Yahoo!. “Supporting the expansion of this free service aligns with our objective to help people search for and use online content, while also encouraging the growth of communities where people can share and expand upon the growing collection of information on the Web.”
