[kassemi]

I'm not sure how much competition Wikipedia has as a free online encyclopedia.

Any other encyclopedia and any wiki-formatted knowledge store could be considered close competition. Wikipedia's in the business of providing high-level (and often low) level information, and there are tons of players in that space - just perhaps not as generalized and overreaching.

Wikipedia is a non-profit. They don't really make more money by having more people use the site

Which doesn't mean that it can't compete with other entities, just that it does so under a special set of rules. It's still in the best interest of Wikipedia to keep up traffic.

[anindyabd]

> It's still in the best interest of Wikipedia to keep up traffic.

That interest is clearly not "making more money". Can you explicitly explain what those interests are? I may be naive in believing that Wikipedia's goal is "making all the world's information freely available to everyone". But if they have some other ulterior motive for expansion, I would like to know what that is.

[crazypyro]

At the very least, each of their employees' has a selfish reason to keep Wikipedia the de-facto encyclopedia. For instance, they have over $20 million in salary they need to pay every year and without traffic, they lose donations (over $45 million a year) and therefore could lose their jobs. Seems a monopoly would be in their interest.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/b/bf/Audit_...