Launched in October 2021, Wikimedia Enterprise offers companies and organizations that use and distribute Wikimedia Foundation content on a large scale, including Wikipedia, Wikitionary or Wikibooks, fast and sophisticated access to its database.
This service does not concern the general public for whom access to the encyclopedia and the other projects of the Wikimedia Foundation remains free and free.
"Wikimedia Enterprise is designed to meet a variety of content reuse and traceability needs and our first two customers are good examples of this," Lane Becker, chief revenue officer at the Wikimedia Foundation, said in a statement Tuesday.
"Google and the Internet Archive leverage Wikimedia content in very different ways, whether to power a portion of display results or to preserve citations on Wikipedia," Becker added.
Thanks to its Knowledge Graph tool, launched in 2012, Google provides its users with key information on their queries, which appears directly in the search engine so that the Internet user does not necessarily have to navigate to another web page.
The information is often taken from Wikipedia, but its origin is not always mentioned, which has earned Google criticism from the Wikimedia Foundation and other players.
Until the announcement of the partnership with the host of Wikipedia, Google contributed to the financing of the encyclopedia mainly in the form of donations.
For Pierre-Yves Baudouin, member of the board of directors of Wikimedia France, Google's objective is to "sustain financial flows", the company realizing that it was "more logical and economical" to entrust Wikimedia with the implementation updates and improvements to the Wikipedia API.
The amount of the contract between Google and Wikimedia Foundation has not been disclosed.
Internet Archive, which has the status of a non-profit association, will for its part benefit from free access to the services.
The agreement of the American Internet giant with Wikimedia echoes the partnerships signed with several media on neighboring rights to copyright.
Google has agreed to pay newspapers and press organizations, including AFP, for the use of their content.
On Tuesday, the Competition Authority in France put an end to the litigation procedure between the French media and the Californian group in this case, by accepting the commitments made by Google.
© 2022 AFP