Few websites have made a bigger impact on the world than Wikipedia has and today the organization is celebrating its 8th birthday. Not content to rest on its laurels, Wikipedia is gearing up for the future with new a new structured data search integration with Yahoo!, 24 times as much media storage space as it had this time last year and goals to integrate with media sites like Flickr.
This year Wikipedia survived the launch of Google’s Knol, a product many feared Google would give favorable treatment, served up its pages to nearly 700 million unique viewers and launched its first official mobile version of the site. What’s next? Big, tech-centered plans.
Structured Search
Yahoo! announced today that Wikipedia has now been added to its semantic and structured data “Search Monkey” program. Yahoo! searchers will now be served up some nicely organized links, summary information and images from Wikipedia when they are available about a search query. We’d sure love to see Google do this same thing.
A Whole Lot More Media Servers and Flickr Integration?
According to an interview this week by Network World with Wikimedia Foundation CTO Brion Vibber, the organization started 2008 with 2 Terabytes of storage for media like images, music and movies. Today that’s been increased to 48 Terabytes with the donation and discounted sale of a pile of Sun servers.
Wikipedia expects to see huge increases in media uploads in the coming months and years. Vibber’s goals include support for full length, high quality feature film upload to Wikipedia and integration with 3rd party media sites, possibly including Flickr.
That all sounds really exciting to us. We’re excited to see what the next year will bring. Happy birthday, Wikipedia!
