The Wikimedia Foundation and Yahoo! announced today that they have reached an agreement by which Yahoo will provide hosting capacity to Wikimedia. Yahoo will dedicate a significant number of servers in one of its Asian facilities for hosting Wikimedia's free content websites. Jimmy Wales, CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, says that this generous donation will be of particular benefit to the vibrant and growing community of Wikipedia users in that part of the world.

Yahoo!'s donation is a gesture of support for the charitable goals of the Wikimedia Foundation, and does not imply any ownership of the content. Yahoo! does not expect Wikimedia to host advertisements in return for this support.

As of April 7, Yahoo! will also test the integration of Wikipedia content in its French-language Yahoo! Search shortcuts, to be followed by other languages to accommodate users in Asia, Latin America, Europe, and the U.S. The shortcuts will show contextually relevant abstracts of Wikipedia articles in response to user queries.

Yahoo! is one of the Wikimedia Foundation's earliest corporate supporters. The relationship began last year with Yahoo!'s integration of Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, into their Content Acquisition Program.