Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon pay for “institutions” access to Wikipedia

It owns Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral AI She joined Google In paying the Wikimedia Foundation for access to its projects, including Wikipedia’s massive collection of articles. The Wikimedia Foundation announced the news as part of Wikipedia’s 25th anniversary on Thursday.

Partnerships are part of the Wikimedia Enterprise, An initiative launched in 2021 It gives large companies access to a premium version of the Wikipedia API for a fee. says Len Baker, senior director of earned revenue at the Wikimedia Foundation Edge The program provides a “tuned” version of Wikipedia for commercial use and artificial intelligence companies. “We take feature requests, we build features and functionality, and we try to kind of structure the data in ways that support the needs of these companies,” Baker says.

Microsoft, Perplexity, and Mistral AI joined the Enterprise program “within the past year,” the Wikimedia Foundation says. Although the company lists Meta and Amazon as “current” partners, this is the first time they have been publicly announced. Funds raised as part of the Wikimedia Foundation Orientation towards supporting non-profit projectswhich Baker says could help them create a more sustainable business.

“It is in every AI company’s interest to support the long-term sustainability of Wikipedia, because Wikipedia and all the other projects we support are so fundamental to their business,” Becker says. “Reaching a new sustainable equilibrium with these new companies is critical to our continued existence, but also to their continued existence.”