Wikipedia’s growth depended on its unpaid symbiosis with Google’s search business.

Evidence

But the success of Wikipedia is nonetheless traceable to how the site fits into the larger business plan of commodification of the Internet. In particular, the symbiosis of Google and Wikipedia goes quite the distance in explaining how it is that Wikipedia has been blessed with exponential growth. Google started out with a good search algorithm coupled to an essentially impossible goal: fast convenient access to everything on the Web. What Google needed for effective search was some other entity to preprocess the vast masses of dreck clogging the Web and cross-reference the refined results in such a way that it would show up early (usually on the first search page) on Google search results. (It was estimated in 2007 that Wikipedia entries show up in 95 to 97 percent of the top ten sites delivered in a Google search.) Conveniently, Wikipedia’s policy of citing everything from other sources exactly meshed with Google’s ranking algorithm. As in so many other instances, Google wanted access to such services for free. Thus Wikipedia materialized as a Godsend for Google’s business plan. Moreover, the supposed Chinese Wall between Google and Wikipedia makes it possible for Wiki-workers to think they are squirreling away for the betterment of humankind, while Google positions itself to be the premier portal for information on the Web and the biggest corporate success story of the “New Information Economy.” — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2105

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly parallels the grafting/exchange logic of ‘Grafting & Growth’ — one party’s unpaid labor sustains another’s infrastructure.
• XREF: Connects to the ‘platform capitalism’ literature (e.g., Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism) and Kaushik Basu’s work on unpaid digital labor in the earlier chapters.