Wikipedia has signed multi-million dollar deals with tech giants

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia announced last week, on the occasion of its 25th anniversary, the conclusion of commercial agreements worth millions of dollars with several major companies in the technology sector. The information was transmitted by the platform's representatives, quoted by the DPA agency. Although Wikipedia content remains freely accessible to users around the world, the foundation that manages the encyclopedia has developed in recent years a strategy through which it monetizes the technical infrastructure and the organized distribution of information. At the heart of this model is Wikimedia Enterprise, a paid service launched for companies that use Wikipedia data on a large scale. The platform allows structured access to content, as well as the use of the encyclopedia's technical infrastructure, facilitating the reuse and distribution of information on an industrial scale. "Over the past year, several companies - including Ecosia, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Pleias, and ProRata - have become new partners of Wikimedia Enterprise,” Wikimedia said in a statement. They join existing partners such as Amazon, Google, and Meta. According to the statement, the agreements allow companies to access Wikipedia content "at a volume and speed designed specifically for their needs,” while the revenue generated helps support the non-profit activities of the Wikimedia Foundation. One notable aspect of the announcement is the absence of OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, from the list of paying customers of Wikimedia Enterprise. OpenAI has extensively used freely available content on Wikipedia to train large-scale language models, but it is not among the commercial partners of the paid service. The topic of reusing Wikipedia content by artificial intelligence developers has become increasingly sensitive in recent years, amid debates about copyright, the sustainability of open platforms, and the remuneration of the information infrastructure that underpins the digital economy. By developing Wikimedia Enterprise, the foundation seeks to maintain open access for the general public, while soliciting financial contributions from commercial actors who exploit the content on a large scale.