Apple might soon have to pay up for the Wikipedia data it uses

The headline seems misleading—the article doesn't say anything about "having" to pay up. All the content is under a free license—CC-BY-SA for Wikipedia and CC-0 for Wikidata—so Apple is entirely free to just use it without paying.

What is happening here, it sounds like, is that the WMF is somehow offering to provide some enhanced way to access/clean/handle the data, for a price.

Will wikipedia pass any of that $ onto the original sources for any of the knowledge its comprised of? Much of it of course public domain, but a lot not: news stories, published books etc.

In the case of of professionally reported news stories, which I suspect in the end form the core of many of the most trafficked wikpedia pages, obviously the creators are getting squeezed, laid off etc & could use as much support as wikipedia!

Is this a "have to" or a "will?"

Big tech understands the incredible value that Wikipedia provides, and the link suggests that this move is the Wikimedia Foundation recognizing that they can exploit that to raise more money by catering to these companies' use cases.

I do find it fascinating this information can be offered as a service, given: 1. the data is already in the public domain, 2. is published as a single, easily-ingestable file, and 3. free to download and use already-licensed.

Maybe this will lead to less intrusive or frequent calls for user donations?

They said it was opt-in and would just be a faster alternative to the public api