Yahoo's search engine division will supply hardware and
other resources to the Wikimedia Foundation to support
that nonprofit organization's free Wikipedia online
encyclopedia.
Yahoo Search's contribution is the most significant Wikimedia
has received from a corporate sponsor to date, the two
organizations said Thursday in a joint statement.
Yahoo Search also will feature abstracts of
Wikipedia content at the top of relevant search
results in the form of "shortcuts," which are either
pieces of factual information or links to factual
information. Yahoo's shortcuts are intended to give users
the answer they're looking for right on the search results
page, so users don't have to browse to other Web sites and
scour them for the desired information.
It's Free
Yahoo's support comes completely free of charge to
Wikimedia, David Mandelbrot, Yahoo's vice president of
search content, said in an interview. Featuring
Wikipedia's content abstracts and links in the form of
shortcuts is in line with Yahoo Search's mission to
provide high-quality, relevant information to its users,
he said.
"To operate a site that reaches as many people as
Wikipedia can be costly for a nonprofit, and we're
contributing with resources to help with that effort,"
Mandelbrot said. "Their popularity is growing very fast
and, accordingly, their bandwidth and hardware needs have
increased substantially."
The hardware support will bolster Wikimedia's technical
infrastructure, while the shortcuts inclusion will
increase Wikipedia's exposure worldwide, the organizations
said.
"Our growth in Web traffic continues to be staggering,
doubling every few months. Yahoo's generous donation to
our cause in the form of servers, hosting, and bandwidth
will have a huge impact on our ability to get our message
of sharing knowledge out to the world," wrote Jimmy Wales,
Wikimedia's president, in the official Yahoo Search Weblog.
Yahoo's gesture comes with no strings attached, Wales
wrote.
In a separate statement from Wikimedia, the group said
Yahoo will provide it with hosting capacity by dedicating
"a significant number of servers" in a Yahoo facility in
Asia.
Yahoo Search plans to begin serving up shortcuts with
Wikipedia content in the coming weeks on its U.S. site and
on other select country sites.
The content of the increasingly popular Wikipedia is
available for free. Anyone can add and edit Wikipedia
content via a Web browser. It receives about 50 million
hits every day and its English-language version now has
over half a million articles, according to Wikipedia.
Since its launch in 2001, about 40,000 people have
contributed content to Wikipedia, which has versions in
more than 100 languages.
Wikipedia's main site ranks number 63 among the most
visited English-language sites, according to Alexa
Internet
