From free to fee? Wikipedia partners with big tech on its 25th birthday

WorldTechnology
16 Jan 2026 • 9:32 AM MYT
Malay Mail
Malay Mail

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SAN JOSE (California), Jan 16 — The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia announced multi-million dollar deals with several major tech companies on Thursday, as the platform turned 25, reported German Press Agency (dpa).

While Wikipedia’s content is freely accessible to everyone, the foundation behind it has developed Wikimedia Enterprise - a paid service that enables the use of Wikipedia’s technical infrastructure and eases the large-scale reuse and distribution of the platform’s content.

“Over the past year, several companies - including Ecosia, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Pleias, and ProRata - became new Wikimedia Enterprise partners, joining existing partners such as Amazon, Google, and Meta,” the company announced on Thursday.

This allows them to access content “at a volume and speed designed specifically for their needs,” while supporting Wikimedia’s nonprofit operations, the statement added.

OpenAI, the home of ChatGPT, remains notably absent from the list of Wikimedia Enterprise’s paying customers. It has extensively used Wikipedia’s content to train its large language models. — Bernama-dpa