From the beginning, Google and Wikipedia have had a kind of unspoken partnership: Wikipedia produces the information Google provides in response to user inquiries, and Google is building Wikipedia’s reputation as a source of reliable information. Of course, there have been bumps, including Google’s daring attempt to replace Wikipedia with its own version of user-generated articles, under the clumsy name “Knol,” short for knowledge. Knol failed, despite Google’s offer to pay the lead author of an article part of the advertising money. But after that failure, Google embraced Wikipedia even more strictly – not only by linking to the articles, but also by reprinting important excerpts on the search results pages to quickly convey knowledge of Wikipedia to those looking for answers.
The two have grown together over the past 20 years and have each become their own household names. But while one mushroomed into a trillion-dollar company, the other has remained a midsize nonprofit, relying on the generosity of individual users, grant-giving foundations, and the Silicon Valley giants themselves to survive. Now Wikipedia is trying to rebalance its relationships with Google and other major tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook and Apple, whose platforms and virtual assistants rely on Wikipedia as a free virtual cheat sheet.
Today, the Wikimedia Foundation, which manages the Wikipedia project in more than 300 languages and other wiki projects, announces the launch of a commercial product, Wikimedia Enterprise. The new service is designed for the sale and efficient delivery of Wikipedia content directly to these online giants (and ultimately to smaller companies, too).
Talks between the foundation’s newly formed subsidiary, Wikimedia LLC, and Big Tech companies are already underway, people said about the project in an interview, but the next few months will be about seeking the response from thousands of volunteers from Wikipedia. Agreements with the firms could be reached as early as June.
“This is the first time the foundation has recognized that commercial users are users of our service,” said Lane Becker, a senior director at the foundation who has stepped up the Enterprise project with a small team. “We knew they were there, but never really treated them as a user base.”
For years, Wikipedia has provided free of charge a snapshot of everything that appears on the site every two weeks – a so-called ‘data dump’ for users – as well as a ‘fire hose’ of all changes taking place, delivered in a different format. This is how large companies typically import Wikipedia content into their platforms, without any special help from the foundation.
“They all have teams dealing with Wikipedia administration – big ones,” Becker said, adding that getting the different content to talk to each other requires a lot of low-level work – cleaning up and managing – which is very expensive. “
The free, albeit inconvenient, option will still be available to all users, including commercial ones. This means that Wikimedia Enterprise’s main competition, in the words of Lisa Seitz-Gruwell, the foundation’s Chief Revenue Officer, is Wikipedia itself.
But the formatting issues with the free version provide an obvious opportunity to create a product worth paying for, one that is tailored to the requirements of any business. For example, Enterprise delivers the real-time changes and extensive data dumps in a compatible format. There will also be a level of customer service typical of corporate arrangements, but unprecedented for the volunteer-led project: a number that customers can call, a guarantee of certain speeds for delivering the data, a team of experts assigned to resolve specific technical deficiencies.
In another break for a project like Wikipedia, which was conceived as part of the world of free software, Enterprise will not host its version of Wikipedia content on the project’s own servers, but on Amazon Web Services, making it its own. say can meet the needs of its customers better. In explanatory material, the foundation is doing its utmost to justify the decision, emphasizing that “there is no contractual, technical or financial obligation to use the AWS infrastructure.”
As these comments suggest, the Wikipedia movement, which has proudly stood behind its early Internet idealism, is struggling with how much to meet the needs of the commercial giants with very different standards, not just over free software but also transparency and ‘money’. to earn’. its users. However, the foundation officials running the Enterprise project argue that Wikipedia would be foolish to separate itself from the big corporations as they are the main ways people can read the articles.