Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia has been used and praised for various groups, researchers, students and even tech behemoths. It has been used for free, even thought it powers many of The Big Four commercial technologies. Now, it can finally change.
Everyone knows tight partnership between Wikipedia and Google. One fuels another one with date and in exchange is winded up in search results. Other tech giants used its services as well. Many chatbots and virtual assistants such as Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa learn and use data from Wikipedia.
According to The Wired, some companies are generous enough to contribute in many donations once a while, on the other hand, there are also companies that create enormous projects based on Wikipedia data without even mentioning it to the Wikimedia board. The new project called Wikimedia Enterprise decided to finally recognize commercial users as a separate database.
Nowadays, companies hire a lot of people in order to build teams responsible for importing Wikipedia data, usually through “data dumps” happening every other week. They do it without any help from Wikipedia. This is going to change.
“They all have teams dedicated to Wikipedia management—big ones,” Becker said, adding that making the different content speak to each other required “a lot of low-level work—cleaning and managing—which is very expensive.”
That is why Wikimedia Enterprise was born. It offers kind of a premium version of the Wikipedia API, which can be used to extract data faster and in format of a choice. Wikimedia thinks that companies are going to love this function and they will eagerly pay for it, since they are already paying whole teams to clean and format data. Now, it can be done even faster and at the source.
What do you think about Enterprise? Should Wikipedia introduce more premium paid services for companies? Let me know in the comments.