Google and Internet Archives are Wikimedia Enterprise’s first customers

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization behind the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, announced on June 21 the names of the first two customers of its new paid service, Wikimedia Enterprise. Google and Internet Archives, an organization dedicated to web archiving, will be the first adopters of the program.

Google and Internet Archives, first customers of Wikimedia Enterprise

Launched in October 2021, Wikimedia Enterprise is primarily aimed at professionals. This service allows its customers fast and streamlined access to the Foundation’s databases, namely Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikibooks. The most comprehensive offer starts at $100,000 per year. Lane Becker, Revenue Manager at the Wikimedia Foundation, said: ” Wikimedia Enterprise was designed to meet a variety of content reuse and traceability needs, and our first two customers are a good example of this. “.

Google and Internet Archives are two notable founding partners. The search engine giant uses data from Wikimedia projects to power some of its features. The Alphabet subsidiary provides additional information about its users’ searches using its Knowledge Graph tool. Often taken from Wikipedia, these have not always been credited. That should change with Wikimedia Enterprise. For Tim Palmer, Managing Director, Search Partnerships at Google, “ Wikipedia is a unique and valuable resource, created for free to the world by a community of dedicated volunteers. We have long supported the Wikimedia Foundation in pursuit of our common goals of expanding knowledge and access to information for everyone, everywhere “.

Regarding Internet Archives, the non-profit organization at “ has helped fix over 9 million broken links on Wikipedia Thanks to the Wayback Machine, a site dedicated to archiving the internet. The Foundation makes the services of Wikimedia Enterprise available to the Structure free of charge in order to “ support its mission of digitizing sources and knowledge “. Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine for the Internet Archives, explains: ” The Wikimedia Foundation and Internet Archives are long-standing partners whose common mission is to enable universal and free access to knowledge. By having a real-time feed of newly added links and references to Wikipedia pages in all languages, we can now archive more web content faster and more reliably. “.

If Wikimedia Enterprise is a paid service, the Foundation assures and precise the ” All Wikimedia projects, including publicly available datasets, tools and APIs offered by the Wikimedia Foundation will continue to be freely available to all users. “.

The Wikimedia Foundation wants to diversify its revenues

The arrival of the first Wikimedia Enterprise customers will allow the Foundation to diversify its revenue streams. As a reminder, the Wikimedia Foundation is funded entirely by donations from users. Additionally, Jimmy Wales, the founder, makes it a point of honor to be remembered the donation page the ” When I started Wikipedia, I could have started a business and sold advertising space there, but I decided to do something else with it. “. Over the past five years, the foundation has raised almost 500 million euros in donations.