The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, announced on June 21 the names of the first two customers of its new paid service, Wikimedia Enterprise. Google and Internet Archives, an organization dedicated to web archiving, will be the first users of the program.
Google and Internet Archives, first customers of Wikimedia Enterprise
Launched in October 2021, Wikimedia Enterprise is primarily aimed at professionals. This service gives its customers quick and optimized access to the foundation’s databases, namely Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikibooks. The most complete offer starts at $100,000 per year. Lane Becker, revenue manager at the Wikimedia Foundation, said that “ Wikimedia Enterprise is designed to meet a variety of content reuse and traceability needs and our first two customers are a good example of this. “.
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Google and Internet Archives are two notable foundation partners. The search engine giant uses data from Wikimedia projects to power some of its features. The Alphabet subsidiary provides additional information to its users’ searches by using its Knowledge Graph tool. Often taken from Wikipedia, these were not always credited. This should change with Wikimedia Enterprise. For Tim Palmer, Managing Director, Search Partnerships at Google, “ Wikipedia is a unique and valuable resource, created free for the world by a community of dedicated volunteers. We have long supported the Wikimedia Foundation in pursuing our common goals of expanding knowledge and access to information for everyone, everywhere “.
Regarding Internet Archives, the non-profit organization at “ helped fix over 9 million broken links on Wikipedia thanks to the Wayback Machine, a website that has made it its mission to archive the Internet. The foundation makes the services of Wikimedia Enterprise available free of charge to the structure in order to ” support its mission of digitizing sources and knowledge “. Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine for the Internet Archives, explains that ” The Wikimedia Foundation and Internet Archives are long-term partners whose common mission is to provide universal and free access to knowledge. By tapping into a real-time feed of newly added links and references to Wikipedia sites in all languages, we can now archive more of the web faster and more reliably. “.
If Wikimedia Enterprise is a paying service, the foundation reassures and precise that ” All Wikimedia projects, including publicly available datasets, tools and APIs offered by the Wikimedia Foundation, will continue to be freely available to all users. “.
The Wikimedia Foundation wants to diversify its income
The arrival of the first Wikimedia Enterprise customers will enable the foundation to diversify its revenue streams. As a reminder, the Wikimedia Foundation is entirely funded by donations from users. Moreover, Jimmy Wales, the founder, makes it a point of honor to recall the donation page that ” When I founded Wikipedia, I could have started a business and sold advertising space there, but I decided to do something different with it. “. Over the past five years, the foundation has collected nearly 500 million euros in donations.