Google, Internet Archive First Customers to Pay For Access to Wikipedia Content

The Internet Archive also gets free access to the product, as part of a partnership between the two organisations.

Wikimedia Foundation is the non profit organisation that operates Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects like Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikisource, etc.

Photo: Wikipedia 

Google and the Internet Archive are the first customers of Wikimedia Enterprise, the commercial product designed by the Wikimedia Foundation that offers content from Wikimedia’s projects in a way that would be helpful for companies that use them at a high volume.

Wikimedia Foundation is the non profit organisation that operates Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects like Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikisource, etc.

With Wikimedia Enterprise's APIs, commercial organisations that use high volumes of content from Wikimedia’s projects will find it easier to access them. API is the acronym for Application Programming Interface – a software that allows two applications to talk to each other.

Big Tech Frequently Relies on Wikipedia

Google's Knowledge Panels, for example, that pop up on the right side of the page next to search results, usually have information about the search subject, sourced from Wikipedia.

Facebook had also tested out similar features in 2020, and Apple’s Spotlight Search uses Wikipedia for its online search results, making these companies high volume users of Wikipedia content and prospective customers.

“Wikimedia Enterprise is designed to meet a variety of content reuse and sourcing needs, and our first two customers are a key example of this,”

Lane Becker, Senior Director of Earned Revenue at the Wikimedia Foundation

“Google and Internet Archive leverage Wikimedia content in very distinct ways, whether it’s to help power a portion of knowledge panel results or preserve citations on Wikipedia,” she explained.

Wikimedia Enterprise was launched last year, and they are currently offering a free trial period to interested users on their website.

'Long-Term Partners'

This is not the first time Google has paid the Wikimedia Foundation. Google has had a long standing partnership with the company, having donated millions of dollars over the years.

The relationship between the organisations has been good, even though Google attempted to create a rival to Wikipedia with its ‘Knol’ in 2007, which failed to attract viewership and was shut down in 2012.

This comes as Google finally settles a longtime dispute with French regulators over news copyright, as reported by AFP. The company will now pay French news platforms for being able to use their content.

Mark Graham, Director of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine shared, “The Wikimedia Foundation and the Internet Archive are long-term partners in the mission to provide universal and free access to knowledge. By drawing from a real time feed of newly-added links and references in Wikipedia sites – in all its languages, we can now archive more of the Web more quickly and reliably.”

Wikimedia Enterprise is offering their services to the Internet Archive free of cost to support their "mission to digitize knowledge sources," they said in their statement announcing the partnership.

The actual information on Wikimedia projects will still be free to access for anyone and everyone. The coming of Wikimedia Enterprise doesn’t change current access to Wikipedia content and other Wiki content.

Wikimedia Enterprise was conceptualised as part of Wikimedia's Movement Strategy, a volunteer driven process to direct the organisation’s future by 2030.

(With inputs from AFP)