Monetising content

Wikipedia's new initiative will make it more sustainable

Some 20 years after its launch, the online encyclopaedia, Wikipedia, is seeking to create a sustainable revenue model by charging platforms like Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook for customised reuse of its content. This not only changes the way the Wikipedia model operates; it is also a sign of a broader change in mindsets. Big tech platforms are now facing many demands to share revenue with content creators. “Wiki” is a Polynesian word meaning “quick”. It now describes crowd-sourced websites as a direct result of Wikipedia, which is by far the world’s largest repository of information (along with large dollops of misinformation), and the fifth-most popular website, with over six billion unique monthly visitors. It has approximately 57 million articles in 300-odd languages, which dwarfs the 252-year-old Encyclopaedia Britannica (120,000 articles). Search for anything on any search engine, and the relevant Wikipedia entries will pop up on the first screen.

Wikipedia is run by a non-profit, the Wikimedia Foundation, established by entrepreneur Jimmy Wales. All content is crowd-sourced. The foundation has always run on that basis on successive donation drives. However, revenue has remained static with about eight million individuals and organisations donating an average of $15 per annum. Wikipedia content is also available on other, for-profit platforms, which reduces traffic. Anybody can start an entry and edit it. Every article must have footnotes, citing sources. This model leads to “edit-wars” and wild swings in tone and substance on controversial subjects. There are discussions and justifications for every edit, and debates on every new entry. Even in controversial topics, the edit wars usually eventually lead to the creation of a comprehensive balanced perspective. The model is very efficient when it comes to technical subjects, with less room for bias. Studies done by reputable organisations suggest that, on average, the Wikipedia has only marginally more errors/entries than encyclopaedias written by paid experts.

The Wikimedia Foundation is set to roll out “paid developer tools that make it easier for companies and organizations to consume and re-use Wikimedia data”. It will start charging big platforms for high-end services, like Google’s “knowledge boxes” on searches, Wikipedia content delivered to voice assistants like Google’s Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa, and Apple’s Siri, and augmented information on digital maps, etc. These value-adds are currently created by the enterprises themselves, which download and re-program content. The Wikimedia premise: It can develop requisite tools internally to service a wider range of clients, who will need less effort to re-program for customised delivery.

Wikipedia content will remain free for individuals and non-profits that don’t monetise it. Currently available resources such as scraping of web pages, Wiki data dumps, and Application Programming Interfaces will continue to be provided freely to all. If this initiative works, it will help put Wikipedia on a more sustainable footing. It’s unclear if it will meet resistance from big tech platforms, which may choose to continue doing their own programming for reasons such as the protection of IP. This initiative adds another use-case to the debate around sharing revenues generated from content. The big tech platforms have always received a free ride in terms of monetising content and data drawn from many sources, ranging from conventional media to bloggers and social influencers. That era may be coming to an end as regulators, media organisations, and institutions like Wikipedia demand a slice of the pie.