Currently, the Wikipedia website is posting a solicitation for donations. Reading the solicitation letter, one gets a good idea of the philosophy of the company. And get some stats too: 679 servers, 95 staff, #5 on the web, 450-million people served per month, billions of page views.

An idea struck me that Wikipedia and WCG share somethings in common that is embedded in each company's mission/philosophy. Non-profit is one of them, and not far is knowledge. Where WCG is about facilitating basic research, Wikipedia is, as part of the solicitation letter puts it, "Like a library or a public park. It is like a temple". Broadly, it is clear that Wikipedia and WCG are organizations that deal with knowledge in a non-profit context.

Wikipedia and WCG also each have an open-source gene as the means to obtain content. Wikipedia as an open-sourced encyclopedia, and for WCG, the raw data output from volunteer's computers crunching WUs.

With a shared 'knowledge gene' in them, I figured that one could complement the other; and when two parties do complement each other, there must be some area where they can work together. What area would that be? I ask myself...

How about WCG making use of those 679 Wikipedia servers to support a crunching operation with WCG providing infrastructure support in return? Also, a '#5 on the web' has great potential to spread the word about WCG: a non-profit sponsor like WCG of a non-profit Wikipedia seems like a hand-in-glove.
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