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Introducing the Wikimedia Enterprise API

175 points| dfjorque | 5 years ago |diff.wikimedia.org

85 comments

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[+] ROARosen|5 years ago|reply
With all due respect to Wikipedia for what it is, I believe their success is partly because of the 'altruistic' nature of their model. Sure, they should seek donations from huge companies like Google - which make tons of money off of their data - for the services they provide, but I feel like locking down the 'better' api to the public is not the way to go about it. It's just too often that a commercial offering just disincentives bettering the 'free' product.

Wikipedia as the product of a public good foundation should be just that; by the public, for the public, and accessible to the public (including all access methods and API's).

[+] dannyw|5 years ago|reply
Wikipedian here. We edit because we're contributing to free information. Free information means anyone can use it for any purpose, including commercially.

I think this move is great. I'd rather have this money go to the foundation, than ParseAPIco.

[+] patmorgan23|5 years ago|reply
I haven't loom at the details, but a free usage tier with relatively low limits so hobbiest can use it would be acceptable. If you're pulling a lot of data out of a project like wikipedia you would at least be paying to keep the servers running.
[+] anaganisk|5 years ago|reply
> The new API is an opt-in product, meaning that everyone (including those companies) can continue to use the current publicly-available tools at no cost and no restriction. The ability to freely access the knowledge across all Wikimedia projects remains unaffected–it is core to our mission.

Not sure what you have to worry about.

[+] hienyimba|5 years ago|reply
Over time, I believe more public non-profit sites will introduce this. Then for-profit sites. Until Google eventually pays for most of the valuable content it gets today for free.

I own multiple sites where I and my users work to produce valuable data (e.g “so so company reviews”, “Is tenet on Disney” and other data of that kind). And what does Google do? Scrap it all and display it on their page. As a result, the page links gets millions of impressions but tens of clicks. Thus, the sites cannot be monetized. Any reasonable person knows this can’t go on for long before the free and open web comes crashing down or Google (and others like it) pays its due.

[+] theamk|5 years ago|reply
If Google scraping your sites is a bad thing, you want to set "nosnippet" tags on your page [0].

If Google scraping your sites is a good thing, then why are you complaining?

I hope Google never starts paying for the links. Once there is a precedent, this becomes an effective blocker for the new search engines, visualizers, and other exciting web search startups. A new search engine startup is not going to be able to establish a commercial relationship with every site on the web like Google could.

[0] https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/appearanc...

[+] Alupis|5 years ago|reply
> I own multiple sites where I and my users work to produce valuable data

How much do you pay your users for the content they generate?

[+] riku_iki|5 years ago|reply
I suspect this project was pushed by Google, to make importing wiki data to their knowledge graph more convenient for them.
[+] karmasimida|5 years ago|reply
You can actually download the whole wikipedia if you like.
[+] OJFord|5 years ago|reply
Great, just a shame it isn't more 'tradititionally' transparent & democratised IMO. Claims no custom contracts, but is enterprise sales team contact us anyway, for example.

.proto on GitHub is nice, but no pricing, no public docs? This is probably great for Wikimedia coffers, but at the headline I hoped for new/improved Wikidata; instead it's.. different bordering on 'don't care'.

[+] ThinkBeat|5 years ago|reply
I hope this is not the first step into a worrisome future.

It appears now that they are offering "read-only" access to existing data structured and packaged in a more convenient way.

How long before paying enterprises would like to be able to "update" content on a more efficient basis?

Perhaps Sony would like to add articles about movies that will be released soon, or as they are released? That is a pretty benign example.

Creating alerts that enterprises can subscribe to so that they will be informed if anyone adds any negative content would also be valuable.

These systems already exist in some manner, it would just make it more efficient and more common.

[+] cblconfederate|5 years ago|reply
This just feels the wrong, trying to push the new concept of open source that SV created in the past decade to the general public. Most wikipedians are still in early 00s idealism , and will push back against this "dual model" crap, and they will be right.
[+] shinkim0914|5 years ago|reply
If this sets them on a self-sustaining path without having to rely on running highly conspicuous donation campaigns on Wikipedia, I think that's a wonderful thing.
[+] 29athrowaway|5 years ago|reply
Not so fast.

Imagine Wikimedia Enterprise becomes the #1 source of revenue for Wikimedia. Shortly after, people will see that Wikimedia is doing OK and become reluctant to open their wallets and donate.

Then, the top Wikimedia Enterprise customers will acquire leverage over Wikimedia and try to get Wikipedia curated to their convenience. Wikipedia articles will start being indistinguishable from advertisement.

Governments will intervene and want their share of influence too.

Top volunteers will start asking to be paid, many others will leave, some others will become critics of the project.

People will start being skeptical of Wikipedia because of their biased editorial line and then the project will be declared a failure, once everyone is angry and a beautiful project is torn apart by greed.

[+] jmercouris|5 years ago|reply
Very cool. I hope Wikipedia sees success with this strategy!
[+] mrkramer|5 years ago|reply
Why would Google pay for this when they already crawled and are crawling whole Wikipedia and have complete index of it?

Better way for Wikipedia to earn extra revenue are affiliate links. A lot of people when they read and learn about some topic go to Amazon and buy a book about that topic. Wikipedia could embed book affiliate links and earn commission from book sales.

[+] superluserdo|5 years ago|reply
That sounds like a horribly perverse incentive for the world's main free and open source of information.
[+] PopePompus|5 years ago|reply
I do a lot of Wikipedia editing, and I'm fine with them monetizing an Enterprise API. But affiliate links are too close to advertising. IMHO one of the best features of Wikipedia is the lack of Ads, and if they start going down that route I'm gotta there.
[+] vosper|5 years ago|reply
> Why would Google pay for this when they already crawled and are crawling whole Wikipedia and have complete index of it?

Google's not the only enterprise out there :) I believe Wikipedia's taxonomy is used by lots of people for ML purposes, for example.

[+] ckoerner|5 years ago|reply
There’s an SLA involved in this service. Business people like SLAs. :)
[+] busyant|5 years ago|reply
> affiliate links

Sounds well-intentioned, but it would be immediately gamed by every unscrupulous entity and ruin Wikipedia.

[+] markdown|5 years ago|reply
Google has already set a precedent by agreeing to pay massive corporations for news. If they're willing to do that, why shouldn't they pay WikiMedia for all the content they use?
[+] m463|5 years ago|reply
That will lead to many unexpected, possibly perverse, incentives.
[+] schappim|5 years ago|reply
Does anyone know how much the Wikimedia Enterprise API costs?
[+] kradroy|5 years ago|reply
It's "enterprise", so you have to talk to a human and haggle. More info is located on the FAQ link in the article.
[+] rambojazz|5 years ago|reply
They didn't mention pricing, did they?