In a press release, the Wikimedia Foundation has shared that Google and the Internet Archive have become the first clients of the Enterprise Wiki.
While Google is a paying client, the Internet Archive is a non-paying client. Content from the Internet Archive has helped to fix 9 million broken links on Wikipedia.
What is Wikipedia?
Wikipedia is a website that allows everyone to add knowledge content. The origin of Wikipedia was as a crowd-sourced, free encyclopedia. Wiki is Hawaian for quick, and Pedia is taken from encyclopedia.
According to the website, the story of Wikipedia started on 15th January, 2001. The founders are Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger.
Larry was laid off in March 2002 but remained involved with the project till 2003.
In 2005, Wikipedia was approved as a non-profit “Adult Continuing Education” foundation. This means the legal status of Wikimedia foundation is that it is a nonprofit entity.
How does Wikipedia work?
There are various levels and categories, but at its very core, Wikipedia works like this:
A. Someone creates a knowledge article.
B. It is published.
C. Wiki editors take editorial decisions.
All these are unpaid, volunteering roles.
The community largely self-regulates. This means that there is no central control on the quality of data/information. All control is done by thousands of volunteer editors who do this out of personal interest and commitment.
The fact checking, if any, is done entirely by Wiki editors who are volunteers themselves. Any user can edit any article on Wikipedia and change information on it.
It is possible for people to contribute anonymously (without sharing their real name) to Wikipedia.
However, not everyone can edit everything. Some pages are protected. In some cases, the identity of the author is also protected and no one can change anything on that page.
There are levels of access.
Does Wikipedia check the veracity (truth) of what is printed on its site?
The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, does not check the truth of what is published on the site. The volunteering editors do that. One does not need to be a subject matter expert to be elected as an editor on that topic. But people who do editing do have a lot of experience in Wikipedia editing. Fact check is a very personal, community driven initiative at Wikipedia.
Has this led to conflicts and untruth?
Yes. Both within the Wiki contributors and editors, as well as in the larger world. However, Wikipedia is a much referenced website.
Most schools and educational institutions do not allow Wiki to be cited as a reference because of the level of fact checking on the website.
Believers of Wiki feel that because the site is crowd-sourced, the information is more likely to be accurate and updated, because the layers of review are not there.
It is also one of the most referenced websites in the world for knowledge content.
Who pays for Wikipedia?
According to Crunchbase, Wikimedia Foundation has 3 key investors:
- Craig Newmark Philanthropies
- Google.org
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
2 kinds of funds
There are two kinds of funds:
A. Endowment Fund
B. Operations Donations
Operations Donations
These pay for the day to day expenses of the Foundation.
According to its own Fundraising Report, Wikipedia raised 154 million in 2020-21 from retail donors alone. This was a 41% growth over the previous year.
Endowment Fund
The Wikipedia Endowment was set up in 2016 to generate long term funds for the Foundation.
The main donors to the Endowment Fund are:
What is Wikipedia Enterprise
According to the website of the service offering, this service allows the enterprise client to get Wikipedia data quickly and seamlessly. They also get a support desk that will answer all their queries.
Customers never need to pay for this data. It is theirs to use once they subscribe to the Enterprise Wiki solution of their choice.
According to their press release:
As Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects continue to grow, knowledge from Wikimedia sites is increasingly being used to power other websites and products. Wikimedia Enterprise was designed to make it easier for these entities to package and share Wikimedia content at scale in ways that best suit their needs: from an educational company looking to integrate a wide variety of verified facts into their online curricula, to an artificial intelligence startup that needs access to a vast set of accurate data in order to train their systems. Wikimedia Enterprise provides a feed of real-time content updates on Wikimedia projects, guaranteed uptime, and other system requirements that extend beyond what is freely available in publicly-available APIs and data dumps.
Why should clients pay for Wikipedia?
According to the home page of the Enterprise Wiki, clients can use this service to:
Use Wikimedia Enterprise to build knowledge graphs, voice assistants or bots, training models, massive enriched datasets, and so much more.
Wikimedia Enterprise – Modern API for Wikimedia Project Data
What all content is included in the Enterprise Wiki?
At this time, the following projects are included:
A. Wikipedia
B. Wikibooks
C. Wiki News
D. Wiktionary
E. Wikisource
F. Wikiquote
G. Wikivoyage
H. Wikiversity
Questions for you
- If the content on Wikipedia is created by volunteers, who owns that content? The volunteers, or the Wikimedia foundation?
2. If you could get all the information on Wikipedia for your own use, what would you use it for?
3. Have you used Wikipedia? Do share your experience.