Wikimedia Enterprise announces Google and Internet Archive as first customers

At this point, Wikimedia the organization is parasitic on Wikipedia the open-source information project. The latter generates all the goodwill and the former fucks around doing vanity projects with the ensuing resources.<p>What&#x27;s that pithy &quot;law&quot; about eventually any organization existing simply to perpetuate itself and serve the insiders who work there, rather than further its mission? Ironically what came to mind is Cunningham&#x27;s Law which is the wrong one... <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cunningham%27s_Law" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cunningham%27s_Law</a>

I really don&#x27;t like this. The foundation already has many multiples more money than it needs to cover its core goal: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailydot.com&#x2F;debug&#x2F;wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraising&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailydot.com&#x2F;debug&#x2F;wikipedia-endownemnt-fundrais...</a> This can, at best, be useless, at worst, corrupt its mission to serve corporations.<p>There used to be an expression &quot;don&#x27;t fix what ain&#x27;t broke.&quot; I feel like this old maxim is now completely ignored.

For the critics, this is basically a way for Wikimedia to charge for high throughput access from commercial users, as well as normalizing the API. These corporations already crawl the entirety of this space, both the HTML and the wikitext. Why wouldn&#x27;t they if the license allows it?<p>As long as dumps remain available for free (which as I understand they have to) the community loses nothing, and corporate actors get to contribute a bit more. I don&#x27;t see things like Kiwix going away any time soon.

Google already scrapes and utilizes all of Wikipedia&#x27;s contents to use in its &quot;knowledge graph&quot;, and donates a substantial amount to the WMF in return. This simply formalizes the financial agreement and moves the data exchange to an api that is presumably more convenient and less resource intensive for both parties, while offering the same access for any other enterprise customer (and the internet archive gets it for free).<p>This seems like a good idea for both the WMF and the open internet.<p>(Contrary to what seem to be a lot of early knee-jerk negative responses in this thread - I suspect I&#x27;m seeing a bit of &quot;early-thread contrarian dynamic&quot;)

So now, if a Google related Wikipedia article has something added to it that Google doesn’t like, they can suggest to Wikimedia they might not renew their contract unless things are “made right”<p>Google is just one example of this. Any company now has a pathway to do so.<p>I think this is terrible incentives, and destroys the goal of having an Encyclopedia free from interference where only truth can come through

This is not good at all. Wikipedia has lot of money from donations. Google or its founders already were donors.<p>Rather than fixing the issue with moderation and editing biases creeping into Wikipedia, they seem to be focussing on being more profligate with their money.

I think the big benefit for Google and Co here is SLA and support, Wikimedia gives contributors and partners access for free...<p>A win for Wikimedia beyond diversified funding is also that Google and other corporations gets an contractual obligation to follow Wikimedia licensing.

OK, can anyone explain succinctly what &quot;Wikimedia Enteprise&quot; actually is, as a product? It is described as a product. What does it do?<p>The press release isn&#x27;t helping me much.

It appears this was launched in March 2021<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;wikipedia-finally-asking-big-tech-to-pay-up&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;wikipedia-finally-asking-big-tec...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Talk:Wikimedia_Enterprise#Revenue_goal" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;meta.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Talk:Wikimedia_Enterprise#Re...</a>

Google is their first customer, and they&#x27;re giving IA free access. And what they&#x27;re buying let&#x27;s them<p>&gt;detect vandalism or important updates at the article level.<p>So it gives them a better ability to control a Wikipedia page&#x27;s content?<p>Ostensibly both want the unlimited retreivals, but this entire program seems suspicious.

See a lot of criticism for how Wikipedia is run, but never any well reasoned solutions that offer an actionable path forward; as in click to donate to do ABC so that XYZ will happen.<p>As is, to me, what this is missing is an explicit explanation of why this requires being paid for and metered API with public pricing that does not require “enterprise” effort to use. I could easily see numerous people and organizations wanting real-time notifications to pages of interest to them, but few wanting this for the whole of Wikipedia.

The site mentions &quot;credibility&quot; as available information, but the online documentation does not refer to that topic.<p>Does anyone know more about this?<p>(I&#x27;m doing research in modeling text credibility for fake news detection.)

Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft better cough up as well. They all use the data for voice assistance, etc.

Now that Wikimedia will start getting serious cash, I hope it doesn&#x27;t lose focus the way Mozilla did.

I really don&#x27;t like that Wikimedia has harsh rate limits for traffic in some regions when downloading that data dumps...