Google Donates $2 Million To the Wikimedia Foundation

k33l0r writes "Yesterday, the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia and other projects, announced that it has received a $2 million donation from Google. This is the first time that Google has supported Wikipedia, and it has many wondering why. Anyone remember Knol, Google's answer to Wikipedia?"

May be

[CSHARP123]

because Bing does http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Benefactors [wikimediafoundation.org]

Re:Giving back

[buruonbrails]

Google ranks Wikipedia very high in its search results, which bring enormous amount of traffic. Scaling and maintaining the infrastructure to deal with this traffic is the major part of Wikimedia Foundation's expenses. So, Google is in fact responsible for a huge chunk of Wikipedia's expenses, and it probably feels obligated to give Wikipedia some compensation for this.

Re:H.264 License

[Enderandrew]

Could Google just completely buy out whoever owns the H.264 patents?

Re:Wikileaks

[jgtg32a]

Wikileaks would reject it though, they have a policy against that.