Google Inc. may offer hosting services to Wikipedia, a free community-built encyclopedia, and other projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. Preliminary talks are scheduled to continue in March. 
The steps of Google towards Wikipedia are not surprising. Google's competitors, such as Clusty.com, MSN Search, and Yahoo, already offer searching of encyclopedias as a dedicated  search category. Clusty.com offers the English Wikipedia, MSN Search links to Encarta, and Yahoo has access to the Columbia Encyclopedia.
Wikipedia is often one of the top results of many searches. Anyone can distribute and even modify Wikipedia content in compliance with its license, called the GNU Free Documentation License. Besides attribution, the license requires that modifications are made available under the same conditions, a principle known as "copyleft" and most frequently applied to computer software such as the free operating system Linux.
How would a tight Wikipedia integration into Google look? 
The technical side of Google hosting also leaves various possibilities:
Here is an excerpt of a page about hosting posted on Wikimedia's "Meta-Wiki", which is used by the community to coordinate project organization: 
"Google Inc. have made a proposal to host some of the content of the Wikimedia projects. The terms of the offer are currently being discussed by the board. The developer committee have been informed of some of the details via email. A private IRC meeting with Google is planned for March, 2005. Please note that this agreement does not mean there is any requirement for us to include advertising on the site." [1]
The original summary [2] was written by Angela Beesley, one of the two elected board members of the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia and its sister projects. According to a message posted to a public Wikimedia discussion list by the second elected trustee, Florence Nibart-Devouard, Wikipedia founder and Wikimedia president Jimmy Wales met with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin on February 10, "who were extremely enthusiastic about the whole project." [3]
This article was originally based on the blog entry "Google wants to Host Wikipedia or its Content" by "Sweet Silhouette". Portions of it are therefore licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0.
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Google offers to help Wikipedia