From the beginning, Google and Wikipedia have been in a kind of unspoken partnership: Wikipedia produces the information that Google serves in response to user queries, and Google builds on Wikipedia’s reputation as a reliable source of information. Of course, there have been blows, including Google’s bold attempt to replace Wikipedia with its own version of user-generated articles, with the clumsy name “Knol,” short for knowledge. Knol was never implemented, despite Google’s offer to pay the lead author of an article a portion of advertising money. But after this failure, Google further adopted Wikipedia, not only by linking to its articles, but by printing key snippets on its search results pages to quickly offer Wikipedia knowledge to those searching for answers.
The two have grown in tandem over the past twenty years, becoming their family word. But while one became a trillion-dollar company, the other has remained a medium-sized nonprofit organization, depending on the generosity of individual users, grant-making foundations, and the Silicon Valley giants themselves to stay afloat. Now Wikipedia wants to rebalance its relationships with Google and other big tech companies like Amazon, Facebook and Apple, platforms and virtual assistants rely on Wikipedia as a free virtual crib.
Today, the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates 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 efficient sale and submission of Wikipedia content directly to these large online monsters (and ultimately also to smaller businesses).
Talks between the foundation’s newly formed subsidiary, Wikimedia LLC, and Big Tech companies are already underway, people in the project said in an interview, but the next two months will be about seeking the reaction of thousands of Wikipedia volunteers. Agreements could be reached with companies as early as June.
“This is the first time the foundation recognizes that business users are users of our service,” says Lane Becker, the foundation’s senior director, who has expanded the Enterprise project with a small team. “We knew they were there, but we never treated them as a user base.”
For years, Wikipedia has been offering a free snapshot of everything that appears on the site every two weeks (the so-called “data dump” for users), as well as a “fire hose” of all changes to as they are occurring. in a different format. This is how large companies usually import Wikipedia content into their platforms, without any special help from the foundation.
“They all have teams dedicated to managing Wikipedia: great,” Becker said, adding that making the different content talk required “a lot of low-level work (cleaning and management), which is very expensive.”
The free, albeit unreasonable, option will remain available to all users, including commercial ones. This means that Wikimedia Enterprise’s main competency, in the words of Lisa Seitz-Gruwell, the foundation’s chief revenue officer, is Wikipedia itself.
But the formatting issues of the free version offer an obvious opportunity to create a product that is worth paying for, tailored to each company’s requirements. For example, Enterprise will deliver real-time changes and full data dumps in a supported format. There will also be a level of customer service typical of business agreements but unprecedented for the volunteer-led project: a number to call their customers, a guarantee of certain speeds to deliver the data, a team of experts assigned to resolve specific technical defects. .
In another break for a project like Wikipedia, which was conceived as part of the world of free software, Enterprise will host its version of Wikipedia content not on project servers but on Amazon Web Services, which he says will allow it to meet with the needs of its customers better. In explanatory materials, the foundation strives to justify the decision and stresses that “it is not contractually, technically or financially obliged to use the AWS infrastructure.”
As these comments suggest, the Wikipedia movement, which has proudly defended its first idealism on the Internet, is struggling to meet the needs of commercial giants with very different rules, not only on free software, but also on transparency and “monetization. “. its users. However, foundation officials who sponsor the Enterprise project argue that Wikipedia would be foolish to disassociate itself from large companies, as they provide the main ways for people to read their articles.