Wikipedia Wants To Make Google, Apple, Others Pay For Its Information

Wikipedia has announced a new commercial service called Wikimedia Enterprise, with which it will begin to deliver content directly to large companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple.

Discussions between Wikimedia Enterprise and major tech companies have already begun, a project spokesman said. For now, the foundation will discuss this idea with users who send Wikipedia donations. 

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The organization says that agreements with IT companies can be reached as early as June. Wikipedia is paying attention to commercial users of the service for the first time, said Lane Becker, senior director of the foundation. “We knew they were there, but we never treated them like a user base,” he said.

Wikimedia is still finalizing how Wikimedia Enterprise will operate. But broadly, it’s like a premium version of Wikipedia’s API — the tool that lets anybody scrape and re-host Wikipedia articles. Enterprise customers could get data delivered faster or formatted to meet their needs, for instance, or get new options for sorting and posting it.

For years, Wikipedia has made a snapshot of everything that appears on the site freely available every two weeks, which is called a "data dump" for users, as well as a "fire hose" for everyone, including changes as they happen, delivered in a different format. This is how large companies usually import content from Wikipedia to their platforms, without special help from the foundation, and without paying anything.

It remains possible for companies to use Wikipedia for free. They have to do it without further support and special software that makes the use of the encyclopedia easier. For example, it is possible to display the most up-to-date information via Enterprise. Companies are currently importing biweekly snapshots that Wikimedia places on the site.

Wikimedia’s frequently asked questions page insists that Enterprise isn’t “forcing Big Tech to pay” for Wikipedia. But it could solve specific, well-known problems for those companies. One potential service would let companies display the most reliably community-vetted edits instead of the newest ones, preventing false or insulting vandalized articles from ending up on their own platforms.