As it celebrates 25 years of Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation has announced a major expansion of its commercial partnerships with leading artificial intelligence companies, strengthening the role of its paid data service, Wikimedia Enterprise.
Wikimedia Enterprise is designed to offer structured, large-scale access to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia project content for technology companies building AI models and consumer products. The service focuses on delivering reliable, high-quality information in a scalable and responsible way, responding to the growing dependence of AI systems on encyclopedic data.
While Google was revealed as Wikimedia Enterprise’s first major customer in 2022, the foundation has now disclosed additional agreements with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI and Perplexity. It also reaffirmed existing collaborations with Ecosia, Pleias and ProRata, and announced new partnerships with Nomic and Reef Media.
These deals underline Wikimedia’s effort to build a sustainable revenue stream at a time when AI-driven platforms increasingly draw from Wikipedia to generate answers, summaries and contextual knowledge. According to the foundation, monetisation is only one part of the strategy; equal emphasis is being placed on accuracy, ethical use and proper attribution of Wikimedia content.
In a blog post, Wikimedia highlighted Wikipedia’s continued global relevance, noting that it remains among the world’s top 10 most-visited websites. The platform hosts over 65 million articles across more than 300 languages and attracts nearly 15 billion page views each month.
Marking the anniversary, Wikimedia has also launched a global birthday campaign featuring a documentary series on volunteers, a digital “25 Years of Wikipedia” time capsule narrated partly by founder Jimmy Wales, and a livestreamed celebration. Recent infrastructure upgrades and experiments with new formats such as games and short-form video signal Wikimedia’s intent to stay modern as it enters its next chapter.
