October 25, 2021, San Francisco, CA, USA ― The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, today formally launched a new commercial product, Wikimedia Enterprise, for large-scale reusers and distributors of Wikimedia content. The opt-in product, operated by Wikimedia, LLC, is designed for companies and organizations who want to more easily reuse content from Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects at a high volume.
“In its 20 years, Wikipedia has grown to become one of the most trusted resources for knowledge in the world,” said Lisa Seitz-Gruwell, Wikimedia’s Chief Advancement Officer. “As people and companies increasingly seek to leverage its value, we created Wikimedia Enterprise to address the growing number of ways people encounter Wikipedia content outside of our sites and further support our free knowledge mission. The product meets the growing needs of commercial content reusers, making it easier for people to discover, find, and share content from our sites, while also providing commercial companies an avenue to support and invest in the future of Wikimedia’s knowledge ecosystem.”
First announced in March earlier this year, Wikimedia Enterprise makes the process of leveraging, packaging, and sharing content from Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects more efficient for large scale content reusers. In most cases, commercial entities that reuse Wikimedia content at a high volume have product, service, and system requirements that go beyond what Wikimedia freely provides through publicly available APIs and data dumps. The information panels shown in search engine results and the information served by virtual home assistants are examples of how Wikimedia content is frequently used by other websites.
Wikimedia Enterprise aims to address this challenge through a product that offers service level agreements with companies, including guaranteed uptime, customer service support, and more efficient access to Wikimedia content through a series of new APIs, designed specifically for high volume content reuse.
Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects will continue to be funded primarily by reader donations from individuals around the world. Wikimedia Enterprise helps to diversify the Foundation’s financial support, but is expected to be a small portion of the organization’s revenue. This will not impact smaller content reusers who can continue to leverage Wikimedia’s data dumps and APIs freely for their own use.
“Wikimedia Enterprise is designed to meet a variety of different content reuse needs,” said Lane Becker, Senior Director of Earned Revenue at the Wikimedia Foundation. “From big to small, nonprofit to for profit, we want to work with organizations that find value in Wikipedia content and want to support our mission of making free knowledge more accessible to everyone.”
The creation of Wikimedia Enterprise arose, in part, from the recent Movement Strategy – the global, collaborative strategy process to direct Wikipedia’s future by the year 2030 devised side-by-side with movement volunteers. By making Wikimedia content easier to discover, find, and share, the product speaks to the two key pillars of the 2030 strategy recommendations: advancing knowledge equity and knowledge as a service.
Interested customers are encouraged to visit the Wikimedia Enterprise website for more information on the product offering, pricing, and other important details.
About the Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia free knowledge projects. Wikimedia Enterprise is operated by Wikimedia, LLC, a wholly owned limited liability company (LLC) of the Wikimedia Foundation. The Foundation’s vision is a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. We believe that everyone has the potential to contribute something to our shared knowledge, and that everyone should be able to access that knowledge freely. We host Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects, build software experiences for reading, contributing, and sharing Wikimedia content, support the volunteer communities and partners who make Wikimedia possible, and advocate for policies that enable Wikimedia and free knowledge to thrive.
The Wikimedia Foundation is a charitable, not-for-profit organization that relies on donations. We receive donations from millions of individuals around the world, with an average donation of about $15. We also receive donations through institutional grants and gifts. The Wikimedia Foundation is a United States 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization with offices in San Francisco, California, USA.
For more information on Wikimedia Enterprise:
Website: https://enterprise.wikimedia.com
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