Coinciding with its 25th anniversary celebrations, the Wikimedia Foundation has publicly unveiled a significant expansion of its commercial partnerships, welcoming major technology firms including Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI, and Perplexity as customers of Wikimedia Enterprise.
While a similar deal with Google was announced in 2022, this is the first time the organization has formally shared its relationships with these other industry giants, alongside agreements with smaller players such as Ecosia, Pleias, ProRata, Nomic, and Reef Media. These partnerships center on Wikimedia Enterprise, a commercial product developed by the foundation to facilitate the large-scale reuse and distribution of content from Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.
These agreements represent a critical strategy for the non-profit’s financial sustainability in an era where artificial intelligence increasingly intermediaries online information. By signing on as enterprise customers, tech companies gain access to Wikimedia’s vast data repositories at a volume and speed specifically designed to meet their needs, allowing them to power their AI models and services with factual, up-to-date information. Crucially, this creates a formal revenue stream from the very entities that utilize Wikipedia’s content to provide direct answers to consumers, ensuring the platform remains viable even if direct website traffic fluctuates due to changing user behaviors.
Despite the rise of AI-generated answers, the foundation emphasized the enduring value of human-curated information, noting that Wikipedia remains one of the top 10 most-visited websites globally. The site currently hosts over 65 million articles in more than 300 languages and attracts nearly 15 billion views per month.
Selena Deckelmann, the Foundation’s CPO/CTO, highlighted this distinction, stating that “knowledge is human, and knowledge needs humans.” She argued that in the age of AI, the human-powered consensus of Wikipedia is more essential than ever, serving as a crucial hub for reliable information supported by readers, donors, and volunteer editors worldwide.
To mark the quarter-century milestone, the organization has launched a “25 Years of Wikipedia” campaign, which includes a docuseries offering a behind-the-scenes look at global volunteers and a time capsule narrated by founder Jimmy Wales that explores the site’s history and future. The celebrations also featured a livestreamed event on January 15 replete with guests and entertainment across social platforms. Beyond the festivities, the foundation highlighted ongoing technical improvements, including upgrades to its infrastructure, a defined approach to AI integration, and new experimental formats such as games and short-form video to engage future generations of knowledge seekers.
