From the beginning, Google and Wikipedia have been in a kind of unspoken partnership: Wikipedia produces the information that Google provides in response to user questions, and Google develops Wikipedia’s reputation as a reliable source of information. Of course, there were bumps, including Google’s bold attempt to replace Wikipedia with its own version of user-generated articles, under the clumsy name “Knol”, short for knowledge. Knol never caught, despite Google’s offer to pay the lead author of an article some advertising money. But after that failure, Google embraced Wikipedia even more strongly – not only does it link to its articles, but it also reprints key snippets on search results pages to quickly provide Wikipedia knowledge to searchers for answers.
The two have grown in tandem over the past 20 years, each becoming his own word. But while one has become a multi-billion dollar company, the other has remained a medium-sized nonprofit, depending on the generosity of individual users, grant foundations, and the Silicon Valley giants themselves to stay. on the waterline. Wikipedia is now trying to rebalance its relationship with Google and other large technology companies, such as Amazon, Facebook and Apple, whose platforms and virtual assistants rely on Wikipedia as a free virtual crib.
Today, the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the Wikipedia project in over 300 languages, as well as other wiki projects, announces the launch of a commercial product, Wikimedia Enterprise. The new service is designed to efficiently sell and deliver Wikipedia content directly to these online behemoths (and possibly to smaller companies as well).
Conversations between the foundation’s new subsidiary, Wikimedia LLC, and Big Tech companies are already underway, project officials said in an interview, but the next few months will be about seeking feedback from thousands of Wikipedia volunteers. Agreements with companies could be concluded immediately in June.
“This is the first time the foundation has recognized that commercial users are users of our service,” said Lane Becker, the foundation’s senior director, who stepped up the Enterprise project with a small team. “We know they’re there, but we’ve never really treated them as a user base.”
For years, Wikipedia has provided a free snapshot of everything that appears on the site every two weeks – the so-called “data storage” for users – as well as a “firehose” of all changes as you go. it happens, delivered in a different format. This is how large companies usually import Wikipedia content onto their platforms without special help from the foundation.
“They all have teams dedicated to managing Wikipedia – the big ones,” Becker said, adding that making the different content talk to each other requires “a lot of low-level work – cleaning and management – which is very expensive.”
The free option, although strange, 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 offer an obvious opportunity to create a product that is worth paying for, one tailored to the requirements of each company. For example, Enterprise will provide real-time changes and complete data storage in a compatible format. There will also be a level of customer service, typical of business arrangements, but unprecedented for the volunteer-oriented project: a number that customers can call, a guarantee of certain speeds for data delivery, a team of experts appointed to resolve specific technical defects.
In another break for a project like Wikipedia, which was designed as part of the free software world, Enterprise will host its version of Wikipedia content not on the project’s own servers, but on Amazon Web Services, which it says it will enable it to better meet the needs of its customers. In the explanatory materials, the Foundation strives to justify the decision and emphasizes that “it is not contractually, technically or financially mandatory to use the AWS infrastructure”.
As these comments suggest, the Wikipedia movement, which proudly supported its early idealism on the Internet, is struggling to meet the needs of commercial giants with very different rules not only about free software, but also about transparency and “monetization” of users. his. However, officials of the foundation that maintains the Enterprise project say that Wikipedia would be stupid to break away from big companies, because they provide the main ways for people to read its articles.