Google Gives $2 Million to Wikipedia

Google Inc., the Internet's most profitable company, is giving $2 million to support Wikipedia, a volunteer-driven reference tool that has emerged as one of the Web's most-read sites.

Wikimedia Foundation, owner of Wikipedia, said Wednesday that Google has donated $2 million to further develop the popular encyclopedia and other projects.

Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder, broke the news on Twitter on Tuesday, followed by a formal announcement from the nonprofit organization.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, in a statement, called Wikipedia "one of the greatest triumphs of the Internet…this vast repository of community-generated content is an invaluable resource to anyone who is online."

The search giant's funds will be used on technology projects to help Wikipedia handle its increasing bandwidth and multimedia needs.


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Google To Build Ultra-Fast, Consumer Broadband Networks in U.S.

Search and advertising giant Google plans to build and test super fast fiber-optic broadband networks in a few communities around the U.S., promising up to a one gigabit per second service — a hundred-fold increase over what most Americans currently can subscribe to.

A 1 Gbps could let a user download a HD movie in minutes and is more than 1000 times faster than AT&T’s basic DSL offering.

The company, whose experience running a ISP is limited to a small, free wireless service in its hometown of MountainView, California, called the intiative an “experiment” in keeping with what it urged the FCC to do with its upcoming national broadband plan. The company is asking municipalities to apply to be candidates and said it will offer a competitively priced service to 50,000 to a half a million people.

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