Wikimedia has partnered with Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon: what does the agreement entail?
The Wikimedia Foundation has announced a partnership with major tech companies, including Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, Perplexity, and others. The agreement provides these companies access to the Wikimedia Enterprise commercial platform, allowing them to efficiently and quickly obtain data from Wikipedia via API.
What is known
These arrangements are aimed at compensating for the costs associated with the use of Wikipedia content by large language models and AI chatbots. The online encyclopedia's articles served as a source of training data, but massive "scraping" led to increased server load and reduced traffic, which could pose a threat to the existence of the nonprofit project.
Although some companies, including Google, Meta, and Amazon, have already used the services of Enterprise, they have only now been officially named as partners. A Wikimedia representative explained that it took time to find the optimal format and features for commercial interaction with tech giants, but now there is an understanding of the need to support Wikipedia's mission.
The partnership became part of the celebration of Wikipedia's 25th anniversary, which includes over 65 million free articles with open access.
Source: Reuters
