It is said, the bigger they are the harder they fall. And this is just what happens in the world of social media. The bigger one site gets to be, it’s also a bigger target, and there are more threats than if it’s just one piddling site or blog that doesn’t really matter.

Here’s a threat faced by Wikipedia. They’re probably relying too much on traffic from the search engines. Google, after all, is probably considered to be the research tool of today. And Wikipedia, meanwhile, is the resource and reference of today. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t trust everything that Google and Wikipedia tell me. But fact is, Wikipedia is already the top external domain that Google directs users to from its search page.

And this could be over with a flick of a switch, so to speak. Google may as well be holding Wikipedia hostage.

With the flick of a switch over at the Googleplex Wikipedia’s traffic could be impacted with an absolute killer-blow. Given Google’s absolute dominance in the search space, such referrals cannot easily be replaced from another source, and Wikipedia may well be a sitting duck.

Compounding this is the belief that Google is applying additional weight to Wikipedia’s domain over and above what would normally be expected.

This all beggars the question ‘why?’.

What does Google plan for Wikipedia?

Then again, Google probably has everyone hostage. In my personal experience, about 70% to 80% of traffic on my personal blogs come from Google. I can probably say the same for most other blogs and sites out there. But my blogs aren’t as big as Wikipedia, and I don’t run the risk of losing a relatively large amount of traffic (and maybe money) if I suddenly disappear from Google.

Or perhaps Google has plans for eventually gobbling up Wikipedia, too, sometime soon. It’s always a possibility, especially given that Wikipedia seems to be looking for a more sustainable business model.

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