The Wikimedia Foundation is creating a new paid service for companies using Wikipedia data. The foundation made the news today via an article in Wired, and plans to launch later in 2021. Wikimedia Enterprise, as it is called, will not change how current Wikipedia services work. Instead, it will offer new options for companies that use its content, a category that includes giants like Google and Facebook.
Wikimedia is still finalizing how Wikimedia Enterprise will work. But by and large, it’s like a premium version of Wikipedia’s API – the tool by which anyone can scrape Wikipedia articles and resubmit them. Enterprise customers can deliver or format data faster to meet their needs, for example, or get new options to sort and place it. As Wikimedia Foundation Director Lane Becker explains Wired, companies can already pay employees to clean up Wikipedia data, and Enterprise will do the kind of cleanup at the source. Or if they wish, companies can continue to use the existing API for free.
Many large internet services are powered in part by Wikipedia. Google’s “knowledge blocks” contain information from the free encyclopedia, as well as voice assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri. As web platforms try to fight misinformation, Wikipedia has also become a source of fact checking. But while some companies have offered donations in exchange for using Wikimedia’s free services, others have launched major Wikipedia initiatives without first telling the foundation.
Wikimedia’s FAQ page maintains that Enterprise should not “force Big Tech to pay” for Wikipedia. But this could solve specific, known problems for those businesses. With a potential service, companies can display the most reliable edits by the community instead of the latest, thus preventing fake or abusive vandalized articles from ending up on their own platforms.
In an essay, the Wikimedia Enterprise team acknowledges that it balances commercial realities with a mission to provide free access to knowledge. “It’s about setting up the movement to thrive in the coming decades, to withstand any storm and to really stand a chance of achieving the mission that was first conceived 20 years ago,” says the set. “We will need more resources, more partners and more allies if we are to achieve the goals in our vision statement.” And from later this year, it could include paid partnerships with the largest internet businesses.