Wikipedia owner signs AI content training deals with Microsoft, Meta

Wikipedia owner, Wikimedia Foundation, has unveiled AI partnerships with big tech giants, including Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon.

The recently-revealed collaborations marks a major step in non profit organization’s effort to monetize Big Tech’s heavy reliance on its content.

Moreover, according to the operator of online encyclopaedia, it has been in partnerships with AI startup Perplexity and France’s Mistral AI since last year.

Since 2022, Wikimedia Enterprise has also been in an arrangement with Google.

Wikipedia content is important to train tech companies’ AI generative models and chatbots as the platform contains 65 million articles across over 300 languages.

The online encyclopaedia's goal is to move tech firms from scraping Wikipedia for free to using Wikimedia Enterprise, a commercial product tailored for large-scale data needs.

After adopting its enterprise product, tech companies would be required to pay for its content used in AI training, helping offset the high server costs.

"Wikipedia is a critical component of these tech companies' work that they need to figure out how to support financially," Lane Becker, president of Wikimedia Enterprise, told Reuters.

"It took us a little while to understand the right set of features and functionality to offer if we're going to move these companies from our free platform to a commercial platform ... but all our Big Tech partners really see the need for them to commit to sustaining Wikipedia's work,” Becker added.

According to Microsoft's Corporate Vice President Tim Frank, “Access to high‑quality, trustworthy information is at the heart of how we think about the future of AI at Microsoft ... (With Wikimedia), we're helping create a sustainable content ecosystem for the AI internet.”

Wikipedia-based content is developed and managed by about 250,000 volunteer editors across the world who are responsible for writing, editing, and fact-checking the content.