Why cant Google acquire Wikipedia? | Hacker News Reader

Why cant Google acquire Wikipedia?

9 pointsaitoehigie6 comments

Googles' mission statement is "to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful". So I kind of wonder why it hasnt deemed it fit to acquire wikipedia? I kind of find Jimmy Page annual appeal for donations kind of demeaning for such a useful website. It would make more sense for Google and would be in line with their mission statement for them to acquire Wikipedia, rather than developing sites like boutiques.com (which to me is somewhat lame) and trying to play catch up with Facebook.

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Wikipedia wouldn't be open to an acquisition for the same reason they're against putting advertising on their site -- it'd ruin their neutrality.

And also, IIRC, rumor has it Google attempted to acquire Wikipedia a long time ago but was rebuffed for this very reason.

How can you acquire a non-profit foundation? http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home

Google could certainly just give them a lot of money, and possibly get a board seat.

You buy the assets of a non-profit (I think). Only rule is that the non-profit stakeholders can't profit from the sale.

The directors are legally required to act in the interests of the foundation's charitable mission, though, so they could only sell the assets if they deemed it to advance those interests. I could see selling non-mission-critical assets passing that bar, but I don't see any way the Wikimedia Foundation could justify jettisoning Wikipedia, its flagship project, as being in line with its mission.

It'd be even more problematic in this case, because the Foundation's mission statement explicitly promises to maintain these resources "in perpetuity", which would seem to conflict with selling them to a third party:

In collaboration with a network of chapters, the Foundation provides the essential infrastructure and an organizational framework for the support and development of multilingual wiki projects and other endeavors which serve this mission. The Foundation will make and keep useful information from its projects available on the Internet free of charge, in perpetuity.

It's possible there's some legal wiggle room around that, but it would certainly seem hard to justify.

Because Wikipedia -- to its credit -- has no intention of being acquired by anyone.

I work at the Wikimedia Foundation, and I don't find the fundraiser demeaning at all. I think it's fantastic that Internet users across the globe are coming together to support such a useful resource.

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