Wikipedians (or Wikimedians) are volunteer content editors. Universities and other cultural/heritage organizations hire people -- such as grad students -- on special projects to "enable the host organisation and its members to continue a productive relations with the encyclopedia and its community." An example is UofT's wikipedia entry that a wikipedian developed to highlight UTL's digital collections.
Ask yourself: Why is the algorithm -- the way the search results are ordered -- a corporate secret?
"Spiders" or "crawlers" are used to discover content by detecting what webpages exist. This is the discovery component. As the next component, a massive index is maintained based on page content, This aides in findability. Finally, there is a retrievability component that is referred to as "PageRank." PageRank is a top-secret algorithm that takes into account factors like how long a page has been in place, how many times a page has been visited, geographic location, and the number of webpages that link to the page.
Here is just a few of the 200 components Google looks for:
Ask yourself:
Additional considerations:
To put Wikipedia's achievements in numerical context, at the same time it was celebrating the publishing of its one millionth entry (a Hebrew article on the Kazakhstan flag) in less than four years, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography launched its latest edition. It had taken 12 years to complete, yet contained a comparatively tiddly 55,000 biographies. It also cost some £25m to create. Wikipedia has so far been bankrolled by Wales, but the total cost so far is still around £300,000.
(Simon Waldman, The Guardian 26 Oct, 2004.)
Created by Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia, Citizendium is intended to be an academic alternative to Wikipedia.
There are so many Wikipedia alternatives sprouting up that it is difficult to know which of them have added value. Scholarpedia might be worth considering.