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We all use Wikipedia. There is not a time that the free information providing encyclopedia has not helped you with your homework or solving a query you were having or simply answering sudden thoughts that pop into your mind about a certain topic.

This online Encyclopedia is free of cost and runs by a non-profit organization called the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikimedia Foundation's $100 million budget is funded by donations from users and grant money provided to the Wikimedia Foundation but the company wants things to change now.

Though the information providing website has been free of use for the longest time now, the company has been exploited by a lot of big names that use information directly from it for their users and now Wikipedia Foundation is hoping that the Big Tech Giants can pay for it.

The Foundation is hoping that companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon will pay for the content that they use from the free online Wikipedia.

A brand new division has been introduced under the Wikimedia umbrella called Wikimedia Enterprise which will offer a paid service targeting Wikipedias biggest users: Big Tech companies.

The company believes that such huge tech giants use their content and make a whole lot of revenue out of it. For example, if you search a query on Google, it will lead you to a piece of information right off from Wikipedia on the top of your search engine home page without you having to roam on different links for the searched query. Siri from Apple and Alexa from Amazon both are virtual assistants that dig into Wikipedia to answer the questions they have been asked. YouTube also depends on Wikipedia to fight misinformation on its video platform and while all these companies make billions of dollars in revenue, Wikipedia gets nothing in return because it is free of charge and thinks that through these the big tech giants are exploiting them.

Therefore, they have decided to acquire some amount of revenue in exchange of the information they provide. According to the Wikimedia Foundation, these companies currently have employees and, in some cases, entire teams, working on delivering Wikipedias content through their own systems. The paid service provided by Wikimedia Enterprise will help do that work for them and, in turn, bring in a new revenue stream for the nonprofit. The question stands will the companies agree to Wikipedias new demand? Well, according to the Wikipedia Foundation they already have sent the proposals to the company, the talks are in process and hopefully everything will be sorted out before June 2021.

If you are worried about that now you, the general public user will also have to pay for Wikipedia that is not the case. The Foundation will still remain free of cost providing authentic information to all the users worldwide.

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Wikipedia to Now Charge Big Tech Giants for Using Its Content - Digital Information World

Information repository Wikipedia, that has been offering tons of knowledge on a plethora of topics for free, is set to launch a paid option soon, as per a report by Wired. Wikimedia Foundation, that runs Wikipedia has launched Wikimedia Enterprise, a commercial platform that will serve the content of Wikipedia directly to the Big Tech companies. That means Apple and Google will have to pay to the Wikimedia Foundation for its articles and other informative pieces. Till now, the Wikimedia Foundation has remained an organisation that has seen the rapid leaps of the tech giants while remaining a nonprofit itself, subsisting on grants and donations. Like the Big Tech companies, Wikipedia is a well-known name and on Google Search, is usually amongst the top search results. As per the report, The Wikimedia Enterprise aims for the sale and efficient delivery of Wikipedia's content directly to these online behemoths (and eventually, to smaller companies too). The program will reportedly launch later this year.Wikimedia LLC, a new subsidiary of the Wikimedia Foundation, and the Big Tech companies have already entered into discussions, and agreements could be inked by June, claims the report. The report doesnt shed light on the names of the particular firms that are into talks with the Wikimedia Foundation but most likely, they are going to be Apple and Google.The Foundation, the report adds, doesnt have plans to scrap the original, no-pay search option of its free encyclopedia. Not for now, atleast. The Enterprise thing looks to be more of in the testing-the-waters phase for now.

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Apple, Google may have to pay to Wikipedia in the future, heres why - Gadgets Now

West Coast WikiCon kicks off this weekend. Photo / 123RF

Ever wondered who's working behind the scenes to keep New Zealand information on Wikipedia accurate and up to date?

You'll find 20 of them in Hokitika this weekend for New Zealand's first ever Wikipedia conference.

West Coast WikiCon will explore the skills and tools of a hobby that works to build knowledge for the world's leading online encyclopedia.

Longtime Wikipedia volunteer Dr Mike Dickison has trained people for years to edit the site.

He has also travelled the length of the country, working with museums, libraries and art galleries, as they learn to engage with the collaborative source.

Dickison said Wikipedia is written by around a quarter of a million active volunteers worldwide.

"This is a spare time activity for them. Instead of watching Netflix, they go and try and improve Wikipedia articles."

"Wikipedians" tend to focus on their interests - for Dickison this includes New Zealand Natural History, Moa and the West Coast.

The Hokitika resident said in 2021 the site is no longer the unreliable and untrustworthy source it once was.

"With 20 years of development and hundreds of thousands of volunteers working on it, you actually do get a reliable document even if anyone can edit it ... there's a big volunteer force that do proof reading and check for vandalism."

19 Mar, 2021 04:26 AMQuick Read

The site is even regularly updated to fall inline with current events.

"Wikipedia can actually be amazingly timely and respond really well to rapid news outbreaks," Dickison said.

"Its coverage of Covid has been really good, they've had lots of medical professionals contributing to those articles."

But if people think they deserve their own Wikipedia page, chances are it will disappear pretty quick.

Dickison said for a person to become a permanent page, they'll need to have their information backed by a range of credible sources.

"For the hundreds of articles that are created everyday, a good percentage are almost immediately flagged for deletion."

Read more here:
West Coast WikiCon: Volunteers to gather for Wikipedia conference - New Zealand Herald

on March 17, 2021 at 10:30 am

Voice assistants may soon need to pay Wikipedia to find answers to some of the questions users pose. The Wikimedia Foundation, the umbrella organization that encompasses Wikipedia and its sibling wiki-projects, is launching Wikimedia Enterprise to start packaging and selling Wikipedias content to Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google, including their respective voice assistants, as first reported by Wired.

Answering questions is consistently among the most popular ways people use voice assistants. A Voicebot study of smart speaker use last year put asking questions at number two for use case frequency, just below listening to music. And Wikipedia is a crucial source of plenty of that information. Thats especially true when it comes to common questions about brands. Voicebots Voice Assistant SEO for Brands report in 2019 determined that Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri relied on Wikipedia for 99% of correct answers to questions about a brand.

Wikipedia supplies all of its information to the voice assistants with a combination of regular data drops and real-time updates to the information sought and cited by Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and other voice assistants. Each company has a group dedicated to sorting and organizing that information, reformatting it for use by their AI platforms. Voice assistants are only one of the platforms that use Wikipedia directly or indirectly. Wikimedia Enterprises API could be used to enhance navigation systems, search engines, mobile apps, and other programs that already turn to Wikipedia for information.

Wikimedia Enterprise is already talking to the big four of tech about changing how they access Wikipedias database. The new model could be implemented as soon as this summer. The savings in time and resources usually spent basically duplicating Wikipedias work and the chance to have a more accessible customer service team, as opposed to the volunteer force in place at the moment, could be enormous. The existing model will still be available if they so choose, but Wikimedia Enterprise is angling to demonstrate how the companies will save much more than they spend by signing up for the pre-processed data flow.

What many of the largest commercial technology organizations require in order to effectively utilize Wikimedia content goes beyond what we currently provide. Consequently, each of these large companies independently re-builds Wikimedia projects internally to address their very similar use-cases, the Wikimedia Foundation wrote in an essay about the new plan. The Wikimedia Enterprise API is a new service focused on use cases of high-volume commercial reusers of Wikimedia projects, that those entities can use at scale, and for which they will be charged.

The voice assistants have other sources they can use to answer questions, but its hard to match Wikipedias breadth of subjects. For instance, Alexa uses Reuters to answer questions about the news, and Wolfram Alpha collaborated with Amazon to include its database of science and academic subjects in Alexas source list, while Google has its vast army of guides and reviewers updating information on Google Maps and other localized databases, but theres nothing like the encyclopedia of information available on Wikipedia. Amazon has a Wikipedia-esque program called Alexa Answers, which crowdsources responses to questions from users the voice assistant couldnt answer previously. People can submit their answers to any of the unanswered questions, and those answers may then be used as Alexas response to that question. But that is still in its infancy relatively, although Amazon did bring Alexa Answers to the United Kingdom last year to build a British-specific database as well.

While Wikimedia Enterprises focus, for now, is on the four colossi of the tech world, there are tentative plans to extend its sales to more companies that would like to upgrade their access to Wikipedias information. Theres no official decision on the pricing structure either, but its not as though four of the most successful tech companies ever couldnt afford the cost of improving access to an incredibly useful database.

This project represents a new kind of activity at the Foundation, Wikimedia wrote. The project is at a very early stage that should be considered a learning period. We will have successes, we will make mistakes, and we will need to adapt our strategies. The team is committed to listening, engaging, and where possible, integrating the feedback we get on our work.

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Wikipedia Will Start Charging Tech Giants and Their Voice Assistants for Data Access - Voicebot.ai

Wikipedia, one of the most popular search sites in the world, will soon release its paid option for tech giants such as Apple, Amazon, and Google.

The so-called free encyclopedia will now generate revenue for the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that organizes and runs the Wiki site.

(Photo : Screenshot from YouTube/Motion Grafs)Wikipedia

While this option appears to be a premium subscription for its users, Wikipedia assures that people can still access the site for free. As the United States' 8th most visited website, publishing the contents will now change for the tech giants.

According to Wired, the Wikimedia Enterprise will be assigned for Wikipedia's branding. In that manner, the paid service will only impact the huge tech companies, which usually benefit from publishing on the site.

Moreover, the content provided by Wikipedia will now be commercialized to suit the needs of the tech giants, which cater to the needs of millions of people daily.

For example, if you ask Google about a single question, the search engine will show you a brief passage from Wikipedia on the search page. This way, all you have to do is to stay within Google Search webpage for your query.

In another instance, try to speak with Amazon Alexa or Apple's Siri. These digital assistants will tell you the answer straight from the archives of Wikipedia.

This is not only limited to search engines as YouTube also relies on Wikipedia specifically when it needs to combat widespread misinformation.

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For Lisa Seitz-Gruwell, the Chief Revenue Officer of Wikimedia Foundation, using the content on the page is available to all users, but what's not good is when some companies take the opportunity to earn profit by not giving anything in return.

At the moment, several donations and grants keep the Wikimedia Foundation alive. The budget already reached $100 million and it will continue to grow as people want more information for free, Sea Mashable reported.

Despite Google's million-dollar donation, Wikipedia will still pursue the said company.

Meanwhile, it was reported that Amazon, on the other hand, did not donate even a single penny to the organization, according to aTech Crunchinterview with Gruwell in 2018. .Wikimedia Foundation said that the content coming from Wikipedia is being published in their systems, which is apparently done by the employees from the mentioned companies.

Since nonprofit organizations do not generate revenue, the paid option will pave the way for Wikimedia Enterprise to earn money from entities that also use its content.

Would this move benefit those workers who voluntarily work with Wikipedia? It could be possible, and it could work like an agency that gives incentives to its workers.

After all, researching topics and editing articles is not easy, so this is a good way to compensate them for their efforts.

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This article is owned by Tech Times.

Written by Joen Coronel

2018 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

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Amazon, Google, and Apple to Pay Wikipedia For Their Published Contents in the Future - Tech Times