Wikimedia foundation starts company that provides content to tech companies for money

The Wikimedia Foundation starts a commercial service where it will ask for money from large tech companies for reposting Wikipedia articles. Wikimedia Enterprise will launch later this year. It also makes tools such as APIs available for a fee.

Wikimedia Enterprise will sell Wikipedia’s content to tech companies, the founders said in an interview with Wired. This concerns information that search engines such as Google or smart assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa use when users look up a term. There is a free api available for this, but it is rudimentary and according to Wikimedia, tech companies have to deploy a lot of people and resources to use the data, for example by formatting data differently.

Wikimedia Enterprise must provide that service for a fee. The supplied data can then be adjusted per company and customers can apply their own requirements to this. They also get access to customer service and speed guarantees. The existing free APIs for passing data will remain, the founders say. Payment is therefore not mandatory.

Wikimedia Enterprise will be a separate service under the Wikimedia Foundation. The latter is the foundation that manages Wikipedia. A website has already been set up, but the service will not start until later in 2021. First, the company wants to talk to Wikipedia volunteers. However, the company is already in talks with tech companies. According to Wired, the first agreements could be reached around June.

The content that Wikimedia Enterprise must provide is hosted on AWS. The Wikimedia foundation tells Wired that it does not expect Enterprise to become the largest revenue model in the near future. Most of the foundation’s income will continue to come from donations and grants, and should continue to do so in the future.