[Volpe]

Well, a little bit of self-glorification is okay...

But seriously, is it wikipedia that's giving people access to knowledge or is it google (and other search engines)?

Without google, I'd guess wikipedia would get a fraction of the traffic it gets now. There is no use building a massive repository of knowledge if no one can navigate it easily.

[tikhonj]

I think you have it backwards--Wikipedia actually faces (in a sense) competition from Google. With Google, I can get my information from millions of disparate sites, each specializing in some niche--if I'm looking to buy a car, I might visit ten or twenty car club websites, for example.

Without Google, there would be no good way to find all of the little, disparate sites. Wikipedia, on the other hand, is an organized, uniform collection of information; finding the right article there is much easier than finding an appropriate fan site or the like.

Google's mission is to "organize the world's information". Wikipedia's mission could just as easily be phrased as "organize the world's notable information"--there is a gigantic overlap between the two.

[kalleboo]

There's no use building a content indexer if there's no content to index.