Peter Mackay wrote: <snip>
Getting back to the original point, charging Google enough to keep WP running isn't going to do much beyond providing an incentive for Google to put up their own online encyclopaedia. I would imagine that if they were pressed, Google could get the MediaWiki software and Wikipedia content loaded and tested in a matter of days, if not hours, and alter their search results to give their "Googlopedia" a higher precedence than Wikipedia. We don't have any sort of "big stick" to threaten Google with.
Actually, we do. We withold editors. What will they do when they are vandalised? They won't have WP's 650+ admins (and 2000+ others) to help deal with it.
Googlopedia on Wheels, here we come...