Wikipedia information is used in a variety of places on the iPhone, iPad and Mac, and feeds a lot of data that is fed through the Siri virtual assistant. Currently, there is no financial relationship between Wikipedia and Apple for this information, but that could change soon.
A new report from Wired today he explains that the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia and related projects, presented a new commercial project, Wikimedia Enterprise. This new initiative will be launched at the end of 2021:
Wikimedia Enterprise is a new product from the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Wikimedia Enterprise provides paid tools and services for developers that make it easier for companies and organizations to consume and reuse Wikimedia data.
According to the report, talks between the new subsidiary and large technology companies “are already underway” and the agreements could be made as early as June. The report does not specify whether or not Apple is one of the companies under discussion with Wikipedia about a partnership.
“This is the first time that the foundation recognizes that business users are users of our service,” says Lane Becker, senior director of the foundation, who is developing the Enterprise project with a small team. “We knew they were there, but we never treated them as a user base.”
The report also points out that the free option that the big tech companies currently use will remain in some way, but this has proven to be inefficient for many. It may even make more financial sense to change the paid company design.
“They all have teams dedicated to managing Wikipedia – big teams,” said Becker, adding that getting the different content to talk to each other required “a lot of low-level work – cleanliness and management – which is very expensive.”
The Wikimedia Enterprise launch comes after Wikipedia’s chief revenue officer, Lisa Seitz-Gruwell, criticized Apple in a 2018 interview for using Wikipedia without reciprocating. Whether Apple and Wikipedia finally reached an agreement or not, however, remains to be seen.
The full report was published in Wired worth reading and can be found here.
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