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Everybody uses Wikipedia.

Its currently the 8th most visited website in the U.S. and the 13th most trafficked site in the world. The website bills itself as the free encyclopedia, providing knowledge free of charge to a global user base. However, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, hopes that some companies will pay for it.

Dont worry, itll still likely be free for you, dear Mashable reader. But for companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon, Wikipedia is hoping to charge them for publishing its content.

A new report by Wired looks into a brand new division under the Wikimedia umbrella called Wikimedia Enterprise. In a first for the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, Wikimedia Enterprise will offer a paid service targeting Wikipedias biggest users: Big Tech companies.

Wikimedia Enterprise, according to the organization, will provide a commercial product that tailors Wikipedias content for publication on services provided by Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon services that millions upon millions of people use every day.

Input a query into Google and the search engine will often provide a snippet from Wikipedia right there on the page. Users dont even have to leave Googles search engine for their answer. Ask Apples Siri or Amazons Alexa a question and both the virtual assistants will dig into Wikipedias archives to spit out an answer for you. YouTube even depends on Wikipedia to fight misinformation on its video platform.

Wikipedias current cost to the multi-billion dollar tech conglomerates? Nothing. Its completely free of charge.

In a 2018 interview with TechCrunch, Wikimedia Foundation Chief Revenue Officer Lisa Seitz-Gruwell shared that while Wikipedias content is free to use by all, some companies were exploiting the organization by not reciprocating.

For now, Wikimedia Foundation's $100 million budget is funded by donations from users and grant money provided to the Wikimedia Foundation. Some of the companies they're looking to charge, like Google, have donated millions of dollars to the organization. The year Gruwell spoke to TechCrunch, however, the tech outlet pointed out that Amazon had donated nothing.

According to the Wikimedia Foundation, these companies currently have employees and, in some cases, entire teams, working on delivering Wikipedias content through its 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.

Obviously, Wikipedia will continue to be free for its regular global user base. In fact, Wikimedias Seitz-Gruwell tells Wired that the free service currently being used by Google and the other Big Tech companies will continue to be available to even those for-profit corporations.

So will Big Tech kick back some of its profits to Wikipedia, a service that has provided them so much free content for years? According to Wikimedia Foundation, the organization is already in talks with these companies and deals may be reached as early as June.

A more pressing question, however, is how will Wikipedias army of volunteers react? The organization has depended on its volunteers to actually create, research, update, moderate, and fact-check its content since the websites founding. Will they view this as Wikipedia selling out? Will some want compensation for their work in return? Big Tech has been profiting off of services utilizing Wikipedia at no-charge for years. Now that Wikipedia looks to get paid, will its volunteers look to be compensated too?

Update: March, 16, 2021, 7:55 p.m. ET: The original story contained a sentence that read, "However, the nonprofit which runs Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, hopes that it soon wont be free for everybody." For the sake of clarity, we changed it to, "However, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, hopes that some companies will pay for it."

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Wikipedia wants to charge Google, Amazon, and Apple for using its content - Mashable

Wikipedia's parent company has revealed it is set to launch a new paid-for service for companies that take information from the online encyclopedia.

The new Wikimedia Enterprise platform will only apply to companies that use content from Wikipedia, with the likes of Google, Amazon and Facebook set to be affected.

However normal everyday users of Wikipedia will still be able to access the service for free.

Wikimedia Enterprise will look to provide "paid developer tools that make it easier for companies and organizations to consume and re-use Wikimedia data," the company noted.

The new endeavour is thought to be set to launch later in 2021, with the Wikimedia Foundation already revealing some parts of the modalities of the new programme.

While the regular Wikipedia offering will be free, the new option is an experiment toward sustainability and maintaining independence for the platform.

Top tech companies use Wikipedia in myriad ways, such as Googles knowledge boxes, as well as voice assistants like Amazons Alexa and Apples Siri using data from the same platform.

Some fund Wikipedia through donations, but many others that use Wikipedia resources in a major way, get away without even so much as a thank you note.

"This is the first time the foundation has recognised that commercial users are users of our service. We've known they are there, but never really treated them as a user base," Lane Becker, a senior director at the Wikimedia Foundation, told Wired.

Premium customers could see themselves getting access to Wikipedia data delivered quicker, or formatted in a way that suits them best - ultimately solving some of the most in-depth issues for these tech giants.

This is about setting up the movement to thrive for decades to come, to weather any storm, and to genuinely stand a chance at achieving the mission first conceived 20 years ago, the Wikimedia Foundation wrote in an online essay.

Were going to need more resources, more partners, and more allies if we are going to achieve the goals implicit in our vision statement.

Via Wired

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Wikipedia is getting a 'premium' paid version - but you can't get it - TechRadar

Why did you become an academic?

This question is often answered with idealistic references to making the world a better place by contributing to sciences grand endeavour. Yet as the digital era gathers pace, there is a growing dissonance between what we are doing and what we could be doing when it comes to educating the public.

That dissonance is particularly audible in academias peculiar attitude towards Wikipedia. In the early 2000s, it was understandable that many of us were sceptical of what we saw as an amateurish website whose primary purpose appeared to be to provide lazy students with poorly written content to plagiarise. However,several studies from the past decade have shown that the quality of this vast, free resource is comparable to that of traditional encyclopedias.

Moreover, academics themselves have gradually warmed to Wikipedia. Many use it themselves, and some require their students to contribute to it as part of their coursework. Yet the frequent calls for academics themselves to contribute entries including by several professional associations rarely translate into action. A quick survey of Wikipedias academic-focused discussion and coordination forums, known as WikiProjects (such as WikiProject Sociology or WikiProject Physics), reveals the sad truth: even the most active ones have an active membership of, at most, a dozen professional scholars. That is a fraction of what can be found on any mediocre listserv.

When I ask my colleagues why they dont get involved with Wikipedia, I no longer hear the excuse that it could hurt their reputations. The typical answer, instead, is: Wonderful idea, but I have no time. I need to write another paper/book. But this sense of what ought to be prioritised is misguided. Wikipedia entries appear in the top results returned by virtually any respectable search engine. It has millions of readers. There is no greater direct contribution to disseminating human knowledge that an academic could make than to lend it their expertise. And yet even academics who recognise that fact do not alter their behaviour.

The reason, of course, is that they are given no credit for Wikipedia work by university management. In the deluge of emails about various university initiatives that I scan through every day, for instance, the word Wikipedia is curiously absent and anecdotal evidence makes me reasonably certain that my experience is not exceptional. It just isnt on managers horizon.

Nor are academics rewarded for reaching out to the general public in comparable ways, such as writing newspaper articles. Apart from teaching, professional credit and the pay rises and promotions that come with it still derives almost exclusively from publishing academic articles despite their vastly lower impact on the public.

What is particularly strange is that contributing to an academic reference work generally receives as much credit as publishing a book chapter unless the reference work is Wikipedia. It boggles my mind that if I write an article for the Traditional Publishers Encyclopedia of Specialised Knowledge, with its hard paywall, poor search engine optimisation and double-digit annual readership, I will receive career points and financial benefits from my university. Yet if I were to write the same article for Wikipedia, my official recognition would be zero.

And let us put aside the common misconception that contributors to Wikipedia entries are not identifiable. While their names are not displayed in the articles themselves, their identity is just one or two clicks away, via each articles history tab. Two clicks prove, for example, that I am the main author of Wikipedias article on the sociology of leisure, which receives an average of 24 views each day and has been accessed about 50,000 times since its creation in 2015.

Contrariwise, dozens of clicks are needed to locate several paywalled articles I wrote for traditional encyclopedias. Yet it is the latter that have been considered for my performance review.

It is high time we moved the relationship between academia and the worlds premier reference work to the next level. For that to happen, university administrators need to do their part and actively encourage faculty to contribute to it, via positive promotion reviews and financial bonuses. But academics, too, need to embrace the opportunity and recall why it was that they chose their career in the first place.

Piotr Konieczny is an associate professor in the department of media and social informatics at Hanyang University, South Korea.

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If you want impact, why aren't you writing for Wikipedia? - Times Higher Education (THE)

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