Wikipedia's 25th Birthday Surprise: Big Tech Starts Paying for the Free Encyclopedia You Know and Love

Big Tech's love affair with Wikipedia just got a little more literal — and monetized.

Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral AI have joined Google as Wikimedia Enterprise members, paying for a "premium version of Wikipedia’s API for a fee" launched in 2021. The program offers access to "tuned" data for commercial and AI use, with Meta and Amazon now publicly acknowledged as participants after prior partnerships.

Lane Becker, Wikimedia Foundation's senior director of earned revenue, explained the model: "We take feature requests, we build features and functionality, and sort of try to structure the data in ways that support what these companies’ needs are." Funds from the program support Wikimedia's sustainability, with Becker stating: "It is in every AI company’s best interest to support the long-term sustainability of Wikipedia."

The arrangement creates tension between Wikipedia's mission of neutral knowledge and its new revenue strategy. While Becker emphasizes a "sustainable equilibrium," critics question whether corporate influence could reshape access to freely available information.