Wikipedia to start charging Big Tech firms to pay for content
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Lane Becker, a senior director at the foundation, has been working on the enterprise project along with a small team. He says, “This is the first time the foundation has recognized that commercial users are users of our service. We’ve known they are there, but we never really treated them as a user base.” Wikipedia plans on continuing to make the free option available to the enterprise; this means that according to the foundation’s chief revenue officer, Lisa Seitz-Gruwell, Wikimedia Enterprises’ chief rival will be Wikipedia itself.
For the money that they might pay for the enterprise version of Wikipedia, the tech sites will get real-time changes and a guarantee of certain data speeds as well as the level of customer service commensurate with a paid venture. A contractual agreement means that those tech firms that sign a deal with Wikipedia will receive the latest information while Wikipedia gets credited for the data it supplies. And instead of using its own servers, the enterprise version of Wikipedia will be hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Content will be updated rapidly. The foundation says that it doesn’t expect enterprise to become the primary source of the money it needs for funding the $100 million budget. That will still come from donations and grants. But Seitz-Gruwell says that obtaining revenue from companies will give the foundation more stability. “We have a big job ahead of us, no doubt about it,” the chief revenue officer says.
