- Big Tech Companies, AI Companies, and Search Engines Help Fund Wikipedia
- The Wikimedia Foundation has seven data centers around the world
- Perplexity has given Wikipedia editors 2,500 free business positions
Tech giants such as Ecosia, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Pleias and ProRata are some of the latest companies to sign up to pay the Wikimedia Foundation an undisclosed amount for premium access to Wikipedia content, the organization announced in a publication to mark its 25th anniversary.
Amazon, Google and Meta, some of the Foundation’s previous members, have already been using the commercial API to “access content from Wikimedia projects at volume and speed.”
This revenue is designed to support Wikimedia’s nonprofit mission and long-term sustainability, but there’s also a broader AI story at play.
The Foundation highlighted that AI companies are highly dependent on Wikipedia, so they have a strong interest in keeping it funded. Wikipedia, considered a core data set for LLM training, is partly responsible for driving chatbots, search engines and voice assistants globally.
Wikimedia Foundation CPO/CTO Selena Deckelmann highlighted the importance of Wikipedia’s “human-powered knowledge” in the age of AI. “Wikipedia shows that knowledge is human and knowledge needs humans.”
In a post about Wikimedia’s 25th anniversary, Perplexity noted that it would be giving away 2,500 Enterprise seats to Wikipedia editors to show its appreciation for their output.
There are an estimated 250,000 volunteer editors contributing to the platform, which launched in 2001.
Wikimedia now has seven operational data centers (according to its own data), although none trace their roots back to its creation in 2001; that one closed in 2004. The most recent one, located in São Paulo, Brazil, is credited with improving loading times for the country’s citizens by a third of a second.
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