Wikimedia, the parent company of Wikipedia, is going to get a big customer soon. The customer is none but Google. Since most of the Google users’ first choice of source of information is Wikipedia, Google is intended to work with Wikimedia to make Wikipedia a more reliable source of information. Wikipedia is the most easy to access online source for anyone who wants to know about something, especially for the first time. But as it is an open-source platform, the information is not 100 percent reliable. Google with this tie-up is expecting to make the information available on Wikipedia more accurate.
How does Google use Wikimedia’s information for Wikipedia?
Google uses the information provided by Wikipedia in so many ways. Google uses Wikipedia’s information in knowledge panels” that appear on the right side of a results page. Added to that Google users don’t have to rely on huge dumps of data and publicly available APIs (application programming interfaces) to get information. They can open Wikipedia pages about the thing they want to know about and read.
Google Wikipedia relationship
Earlier Google has made so many donations to Wikimedia. But this is the first time that Google is becoming a customer of Wikipedia. For now, it is hard to say whether the changes will be seen in the experience of the end-users or it will remain same for them. But one thing is clear this collaboration of two companies will benefit the people who come to Wikipedia for getting accurate, to the point and reliable data.
Emma Roth in her article published in The Verge said, “I would imagine that Google users probably won’t notice a change at all — maybe we’ll see Wikipedia cited more often in knowledge panels or perhaps Google will come up with a new way to integrate Wikipedia’s information into its services.”
For now we can wait to see what happens to the user experience of Wikipedia in future.
