Microsoft and Meta will pay for Wikipedia content. It is the main source of training AI models
The online encyclopedia operator is shifting access to its AI training content from a free model to a commercial model in an attempt to offset rising infrastructure costs
Wikimedia Foundation announced a number of partnerships with major technology companies / Photo: Shutterstock / reative Salim
The Wikimedia Foundation, operator of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, has announced a number of partnerships with major technology companies, including Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity and Mistral AI. This was a major step for the non-profit organization to start capitalizing on bigtechs' dependence on its content, Reuters reported.
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Wikipedia content plays a key role in training AI models. More than 65 million articles in over 300 languages make up a significant part of the training data for generative chatbots and digital assistants developed by major technology companies, Reuters notes.
The mass use of freely available Wikipedia materials for AI training has led to an increase in the load on servers and, consequently, to an increase in the non-profit organization's expenses, the agency points out, noting that the main source of Wikipedia's income is still donations from users. Against this background, Wikipedia is actively promoting its Enterprise product, which allows technology companies to pay for access to content for AI training and receive data in a format convenient for large-scale tasks.
"It took us some time to figure out what set of features and functionality we should offer if we were going to move these [big tech] companies from our free platform to a commercial platform," Wikimedia Enterprise president Lane Becker told Reuters in an interview. "But all of our bigtech partners do see the need to commit to supporting Wikipedia's work," he added, emphasizing that Wikipedia is now a critical element of big tech companies' operations. "And they [bigtechs] need to figure out how to financially support Wikipedia," Becker noted.
He did not disclose financial details of Wikipedia's agreements with Microsoft, Meta and Amazon, or other details of these partnerships.
This is not Wikipedia's first such arrangement, Reuters notes. In 2022, the Wikimedia Foundation announced an agreement with Google. According to it, Google pays for access to a structured and highly available API that provides Wikipedia data in an easy-to-use format for large-scale use, including for services and functions in which the system uses this knowledge (for example, in search and knowledge panels).
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