The Wikimedia Foundation, the charity that
oversees the online encyclopedia, said Google was the first paying customer for
its commercial venture Wikimedia Enterprise, which it launched last year.
The Internet Archive, a non-profit that
runs a site called the Wayback Machine that saves snapshots of websites and is
used to fix Wikipedia links, will be offered the commercial services for free.
"We're thrilled to be working with
them both as our longtime partners," said Wikimedia's Lane Becker in a
statement on Tuesday.
Wikipedia, one of the world's most visited
websites, is free to use, updated by volunteers and relies on donations to keep
afloat.
The new commercial arm will not change that
arrangement for individual users, the foundation said.
Google uses material from the site for its
"knowledge panel" — a sidebar that accompanies the main search
results.
The source of the information is not always
shown, a practice that had sparked complaints from Wikimedia.
Google has previously given money to
Wikipedia through donations and grants.
"We have long supported the Wikimedia
Foundation in pursuit of our shared goals of expanding knowledge and
information access for people everywhere," said Google's Tim Palmer.
The foundation's statement did not reveal
the value of the Google contract.
French regulators and Google on Tuesday
ended a years-long dispute by agreeing a framework for the US firm to pay news
outlets for content.
Google said it had already made deals with
hundreds of news outlets across Europe, Agence France-Presse among them.