Wikipedia announced on Thursday that it has reached cooperation with Microsoft, Metaverse Platform Company, Amazon and other technology giants. The move marks a key step for the nonprofit in turning tech companies' reliance on its content into revenue.
The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, said that in the past year, in addition to the Metaverse Platform Company and Amazon, which have previously established cooperation, the foundation has also signed cooperation agreements with many companies such as artificial intelligence start-up Perplexity and France's Mistral AI.
As early as 2022, the foundation had reached a relevant cooperation arrangement with Alphabet Inc.'s Google.
Wikipedia's content is crucial for training artificial intelligence models - it covers more than 300 languages and has a total of 65 million articles. It is the core training data source for technology giants to develop generative artificial intelligence chatbots and intelligent assistants.
However, as companies scrape large amounts of Wikipedia's free content for artificial intelligence training, the non-profit organization, which mainly relies on small donations from the public to maintain operations, is facing pressure from a surge in server demand and rising costs.
The Wikimedia Foundation has been promoting the popularity of its enterprise version of the service. The enterprise version service allows technology companies to pay for content training permissions. At the same time, the foundation will also provide customized data services according to the needs of large-scale training of enterprises.
Ryan Becker, president of Wikimedia Enterprise, said in an interview with Reuters: "Wikipedia is a key part of the business layout of these technology companies, and they must find ways to financially support Wikipedia."
"It took us a lot of time to figure out what adaptive functions and services we need to provide to these companies in order to promote them from a free platform to a commercial cooperation platform... However, all of our technology giant partners have truly realized the necessity of funding to support the operation of Wikipedia."
Wikipedia's content is created and maintained by approximately 250,000 volunteer editors around the world who write, edit, and fact-check article content.
Tim Frank, vice president of Microsoft Corporation, said: "Access to high-quality, reliable information is the core starting point for us to envision the future development of artificial intelligence... By working with the Wikimedia Foundation, we are helping to create a sustainable content ecosystem for the artificial intelligence Internet, so that the value of every content contributor can be valued."
Reuters first reported last month that the Wikimedia Foundation had appointed former U.S. Ambassador to Chile Bernadette Meehan as its new chief executive, effective January 20.
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