- Big Tech, AI companies and search engines all help fund Wikipedia
- The Wikimedia Foundation has seven data centers around the world
- Perplexity offered Wikipedia editors 2,500 free Enterprise seats
Tech giants including Ecosia, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Pleias and ProRata are among the latest companies to pledge to pay the Wikimedia Foundation an undisclosed amount for premium access to Wikipedia content, the organization announced in a post to commemorate its 25th anniversary.
Amazon, Google and Meta, some of the Foundation’s earliest members, have already used the commercial API to “access content from Wikimedia projects at high volume and speed.”
This revenue is intended to support Wikimedia’s nonprofit mission and long-term sustainability, but a larger AI story is also at stake.
The Foundation emphasized that AI companies rely heavily on Wikipedia and therefore have a vested interest in maintaining their funding. Considered a core dataset for LLM education, Wikipedia is partly responsible for the operation of chatbots, search engines and voice assistants on a global scale.
Selena Deckelmann, CPO/CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation, highlighted the importance of Wikipedia’s “human knowledge” in the AI era. “Wikipedia shows that knowledge is human and that knowledge needs humans.”
In an article marking Wikimedia’s 25th anniversary, Perplexity noted that it would offer 2,500 Enterprise seats to Wikipedia editors to show appreciation for their output.
An estimated 250,000 volunteer editors contribute to the platform, launched in 2001.
Wikimedia now has seven operational data centers (according to its own data), although none date back to its founding in 2001 – this one closed in 2004. The most recent, located in São Paulo, Brazil, has been credited with improving load times for the country’s citizens by a third of a second.
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