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Wikipedia to charge big tech platforms for content

Shortly after celebrating its 20th anniversary, Wikipedia’s mother foundation is launching Wikimedia Enterprise – a new business that will offer paid services for big companies that benefit from using Wikipedia data. Among such big companies could be Google, Apple, Amazon etc as for instance their virtual assistant services – Siri, Alexa and Cortana – are Wikipedia users.

The operations that will start later this year will not change the way Wikipedia works but will offer new options for companies that use content, Wikimedia Foundation said.

“This is the first time the foundation has recognized that commercial users are users of our service,” Lane Becker, director of business development at the foundation told Wired. “We’ve known they are there, but we never really treated them as a user base.”

The magazine reports that the Wikimedia Enterprise already has conversations ongoing with Big Tech companies.

“This project represents a new kind of activity at the Foundation. The project is at a very early stage that should be considered a learning period”, Wikimedia Foundation says in a blog post.

“We will have successes, we will make mistakes, and we will need to adapt our strategies. The team is committed to listening, engaging, and where possible, integrating the feedback we get on our work. This document is organic and is reflective of the team’s current thinking; we are attempting to document as much work as possible in the open. Up until now, our work has been shaped by a series of initial interviews with community members, Wikimedia Foundation Board and staff, researchers, and reusers.”

“The Enterprise project team is developing a new resource aimed at commercial content reusers, who have product, service, and system requirements that go beyond what we freely provide. Use of this offering will not be required for commercial content reuse; companies can continue to use the current tools available at no cost.”

Wikimedia stresses that all revenue from Wikimedia Enterprise “will unequivocally be used to support the Wikimedia mission—for example, to fund Wikimedia programs or help grow the Wikimedia Endowment.”

Lisa Seitz-Gruwell, the foundation’s chief revenue officer, told Wired that having a reliable additional revenue stream from companies would offer stability for the foundation, particularly as it embarks on an ambitious agenda for the year 2030 to reach more parts of the world and more communities with “free knowledge.”

“We have a big job ahead of us, no doubt about it,” she says, adding that it “requires revenue growth.”

Wikipedia was launched by entrepreneurs Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on December 15, 2001. Searching facts about Wikipedia at Wikipedia, you learn that it comprises more than 55 million articles that have been edited 3 billion times, has 1.7 billion unique visitors every month and covers 316 languages. It has 6.2 million articles in English with 127 117 active contributors in the month prior to the anniversary.

Wikipedia and its mother foundation are unusual among success stories on the Internet: no billions made, no shareholders and no advertising. It is run by not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation financed by donations and user contributions.

The name “Wikipedia” is a mix of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning “quick”) and encyclopedia.

 

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