The Wikimedia Foundation, the org behind Wikipedia and other open knowledge platforms, has revealed it’s signed six more AI companies as ‘enterprise partners’, status that gives them preferential access to the content it tends.
The org revealed the new partnerships in a post celebrating its 25th birthday, and which points out it is among the world’s ten most-visited websites, and the only one to be run by a nonprofit. The post notes that 250,000 editors work on at least one Wikipedia article each month, and that editors make 324 changes each minute as they contribute to the 65 million-plus articles the site contains. 1.5 billion unique devices reach Wikipedia each month.
That’s a lot of traffic to handle, which doesn’t come cheap. One way the Foundation pays for it is with an Enterprise program that offers a suite of APIs designed to provide “more comprehensive, reliable, secure and fast” access to info from the org’s projects.
The Foundation developed the Enterprise offering to serve the needs of “a very small handful of heavy for-profit users” and promised their fees would “feed back into the Wikimedia movement.”
According to the 25th birthday post, in the last year the Foundation signed six more Enterprise Partners: Ecosia, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Pleias, and ProRata. All offer AI services, as do the existing AI partners Amazon, Google, and Meta.
The work of those 250,000 volunteers is therefore helping Wikimedia and its partners to make money.
Microsoft corporate veep Tim Frank welcomed the software behemoth’s new relationship with Wikimedia.
“Access to high quality, trustworthy information is at the heart of how we think about the future of AI at Microsoft,” he said in a canned statement. “Together, we’re helping create a sustainable content ecosystem for the AI internet, where contributors are valued, communities are respected, and responsible AI expands opportunity for everyone.”
Frank appears to have ignored long-standing Wikipedia problems, such as activist and/or paid editors re-writing articles to suit their particular points of view – or those of their clients. Such editors turn Wikipedia’s great strength – open access – against it by creating skewed content. Wikimedia hopes the wisdom of the crowd and volunteers addresses any egregious content. Careful Wikipedia users can understand such edits. Others may not.
All of the glorious mess that is Wikipedia will soon be ingested by more AIs, whose users may be too lazy or impressionable to think critically about the results delivered by chatbots.
Truly, a birthday gift to us all. ®
Source: The register