We launched Wikimedia Enterprise last year with a goal of making it easy to programmatically access data from across the Wikimedia Foundation projects. Since then, we have been busy building a product that can serve the needs of commercial users of any size. Today, we are thrilled to share some of the first customers using this product, in addition to new features that make it easy for anyone to start using Wikimedia Enterprise.
Today, we are excited to announce that:
- Google has become the very first customer of Wikimedia Enterprise.
- The Internet Archive will receive full access to Enterprise’s feature set, at no cost, for use in furthering their mission of archiving the Web.
- Self-service trial accounts are available to anyone to try out Wikimedia Enterprise for their own use. Trial accounts include unlimited free access to a monthly snapshot of the entire Wikimedia Enterprise project archive and 10,000 free requests from our On-Demand API.
- New product and pricing details are now available, including a pricing calculator to estimate usage cost after a trial, as well as comprehensive product documentation, and a customer service portal with detailed FAQs. We have also added a news page (you are reading it!) to better communicate updates and announcements to current and potential customers.
Wikimedia Enterprise was specially designed for Wikimedia content reusers. You are the folks who need to be able to work with Wikimedia content — Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikivoyage, and their companion projects — in order to power projects that range from search engines and voice assistants, to knowledge graphs and machine learning systems.
While people and organizations have been reusing Wikimedia content through various means for well over a decade, we have spent the last two years optimizing the Wikimedia Enterprise product and team to support exactly this kind of content reuse. And we are only just getting started!
The Wikimedia movement, led by a global volunteer community that generously and diligently curates the vast store of knowledge on the project websites, has always ensured that all the content created is legally reusable for any purpose, including commercial use. In the coming months and years, we plan to further this goal, with an eye towards making Wikimedia content as flexible, accessible, and re-usable as possible.
New areas we will be building out include:
- Improved documentation on how to best use Wikimedia Enterprise and its APIs, as well as how to understand and navigate the Wikimedia content ecosystem. Working with the wealth of content that is available to reuse from all our various projects can be confusing for folks who are new to it. Our professional services team already offers personalized support to our customers in this area and will be building out our documentation on this topic in the coming months.
- Tools for dealing with mis- and dis-information. Because our content is sourced from people across the world, occasionally a few of the updates that get made are initially inaccurate (though they get corrected by the community and machine learning tools, often within minutes!) We call this “mis”-information when it’s done unintentionally and “dis”-information when it is done on purpose. Another term that we use for disinformation at Wikimedia is “vandalism.”
One of the biggest challenges for many organizations who reuse Wikimedia content is determining whether or not a particular change – an edit to an individual article on any of our sites or services – is credible, or whether it is disinformation or misinformation. With Wikimedia Enterprise, we are actively working on providing tools to enable you to make more informed decisions about whether or not to update your copy of the Wikimedia dataset based on whether or not you consider a particular edit credible. We will be opening up beta access to this feature in the coming months to existing customers (if you are interested in trying them out as a customer, let us know!)
Curious to know more? Try out Wikimedia Enterprise for yourself! And when you are interested in becoming a customer, get in touch. We look forward to working with you and your team to get the most benefit out of Wikimedia Enterprise.
— Lane Becker, Senior Director of Earned Revenue at the Wikimedia Foundation
Photo Credits
Photo by PtrQs, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons