Wikipedia’s parent company, Wikimedia, announced last week a spate of new deals to bolster AI model training capabilities.
In a release, Wikimedia said it will be working alongside major tech companies including Amazon, Meta and Perplexity. Under the deal, these companies are now part of Wikimedia Enterprise, and will pay to access Wikipedia’s data to train and develop their AI foundation models. Financial details of the deals were not disclosed.
Wikimedia Enterprise was set up to allow large-scale reuse and distribution of content from the company’s projects, including Wikipedia.
The offering is pitched as an alternative to the typical web scraping that large language models perform to answer user queries and as a means of securing human-centric knowledge at a time where data authenticity is coming under increased scrutiny.
“All these organizations utilize Wikimedia Enterprise to integrate human-governed knowledge into their platforms at scale,” the blog post reads. “By doing so, they help ensure that the work of our global volunteer community reaches billions of people with the accuracy and transparency that Wikipedia represents.”
The companies join Wikimedia’s existing list of partners, which includes Ecosia, Nomic, Pleias, ProRata, and most notably Google, with the tech major’s partnership announced in 2022.
The news comes as part of Wikimedia’s 25th anniversary, and as the company looks to carve out a space for itself in the age of AI.
“Wikipedia shows that knowledge is human, and knowledge needs humans. Especially now, in the age of AI, we need the human-powered knowledge of Wikipedia more than ever,” Wikimedia Foundation’s chief product and technology officer Selena Deckelmann noted in a separate statement on the company’s anniversary.
“With continued help from readers, volunteer editors, donors, partners, and fans across the globe, Wikipedia will remain the crucial hub for human-powered knowledge and collaboration online for the next 25 years and beyond,” she added.
