Internet Archive gets free access to commercial Wikimedia Enterprise API

The Internet Archive gets free access to an api from Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia. Google becomes the first paying customer of the commercial Wikimedia Enterprise service, which makes wiki products available for a fee.

Wikimedia has the first official steps taken from the Wikimedia Enterprise project. The foundation announced this a few weeks ago. Wikimedia Enterprise is a paid service for companies that acquire content from wiki services, such as Wikipedia articles and snippets or images from Wiktionary or Wikivoyage.

Wikimedia now writes that Google will be the first customer of the service, but does not provide details about what the internet company will do with the data. The foundation also writes that The Internet Archive will have free access to the functions of Enterprise. This is done so that the agency can ‘continue to work on its mission to archive the web’. Wikimedia also does not disclose how The Internet Archive will use the service.

The foundation has also released new features that should help companies gain membership more quickly. Free trials are now available for companies that want to try the service. They have a maximum of 10,000 requests for the api. The organization has also made a tool that allows users to calculate what Enterprise will cost them. Enterprise consists of an api where users can pay for snapshots, but also per request.

Wikimedia says it also made better documentation for using the api. The free Wikimedia request API will continue to exist, but the foundation says it is quite rudimentary and does not work optimally for large customers.