Google is most certainly crossing the line here.<p>1. They are not only doing this with wikipedia, but with many, many sites: "what is the smallest cell in the human body", "what is the biggest planet in the solar system".<p>2. The sites they chose to link are not always the highest quality sites, such as the two examples above- why are these websites being featured?<p>3. Many times, the user will get their answer right then and there, and be done with the search process. The site misses a visitor. In spite of these type of questions being "facts", someone took the time to organize and give context to these "facts". Turning facts into useful, consumable, content costs money. Google should not be taking visitors away from these sites.<p>4. There should be public information on the CTR of these snippets. See if it helps or hurts the user.<p>5. Google is abusing its power as a major search engine to reinforce structuring rules, such as microformats. With these rules, webmasters are giving more and more semantic meaning to their content, which means Google has an easier time completing their knowledge graph. They might link to the source site for a while, but there is no good argument for linking back to wikipedia to attribute the fact that Jupiter is the largest planet, since it's a fact, just like 2+2 is 4 (no attribution).<p>6. Google is all about ML/NLP/AI driven knowledge. But in reality they are turning all of the internet content creators into a giant sweat shop for their knowledge graph. This is not fair, and sooner or later it will come back to bite them.