Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft invest in 'Enterprise' Wikipedia access

Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Perplexity, and Mistral AI have collaborated with Google by offering financial support to the Wikimedia Foundation for access to its platforms, particularly Wikipedia’s extensive database of content. 

The Wikimedia Foundation shared this news during Wikipedia's 25th celebration.

The collaborations are part of Wikimedia Enterprise, an effort that started in 2021, designed to provide major corporations with a paid, enhanced version of Wikipedia’s API. 

Lane Becker, Wikimedia Foundation’s senior director of earned revenue, explained that the program provides a tailored version of Wikipedia for business use and AI enterprises. 

"We take feature requests, we build features and functionality, and sort of try to structure the data in ways that support what these companies’ needs are,” Becker explains.

The Wikimedia Foundation notes that Microsoft, Perplexity, and Mistral AI became part of the Enterprise programme “within the last year.” 

Meanwhile, Meta and Amazon are recognised as “longstanding” collaborators, although this is their first formal acknowledgment. 

The finances garnered via Wikimedia Enterprise contribute to funding the nonprofit’s ventures, which Becker indicates assists in establishing a more reliable operation model.

“It is in every AI company’s best interest to support the long-term sustainability of Wikipedia, because Wikipedia and all the other projects that we support are so core to their business,” Becker states. “Getting to a new sustainable equilibrium with these new companies is critical for our continued existence, but for their continued existence as well."