Hello everybody,

In the past weeks we have heard from more several unrelated sources (official, private sector & academia) that: *Google is funding Wikimedia *Google is actively promoting Wikipedia in search results *Therefore, Wikimedia and Wikimedia cannot be considered user-generated, crowd-funded and non-commercial projects

As the wording and structure of these claims were extremely similar and they came within a short time period I am convinced that there someone is running a quiet smear campaign against us. These things are not uncommon and we do have a large network already, so there's not need to panic. I just wanted you to be warned.

In responding to it I use the following key facts: *Cite the WMF Fundraising Report [1], which says that the average donation is 15USD and that 74% of revenue is from donation under 100USD. A dependency can thus not be asserted. *We provide content as freely is possible and there are almost no barriers to its re-use, including for commercial purposes. Anyone, be it Google, DuckDuckGo, Ask.com, apps or private blogs can freely integrate it. And they do! *We never pay for content on Wikimedia projects. It is edited by hundreds of thousands of users each year. [2]

If you have other thoughts, feel free to share them.

Cheers, Dimi

[1]https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2014-2015_Fundraising_Report [2]https://reportcard.wmflabs.org/graphs/active_editors#