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.
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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.