I find this extremely concerning - this could be the beginning of a slide into financial dependence on Big Tech companies, not to mention the many conflict of interest issues.
I donated and contribute to wikipedia so it's material would be free to use for /anyone/ even corporates.
If it improves other services I use or even others that I need to pay for, I'm glad. That's the point of a free, public resource.
It also depends if you consider it's core mission is just English Wikipedia. Expanding into additional languages and keeping the content consistent between languages is a huge undertaking that won't work on a purely volunteer basis. If this dependable revenue stream can help with some of these other very capital intensive but worthy initiatives I'm for it.
The person who suffers in this scenario is not the Scots speaking subject matter expert who chooses not to contribute their time for free, but the Scots speaking child who doesn’t have the resources to learn.
Absolutely not, and this isn't whats happening today. Third parties do not use the existing Wikipedia APIs to begin with, cache page results, and create their own machine readable versions. These "enterprise customers" entirely bear the costs and risk of maintaining a machine readable API. There are also businesses that compete and innovate in this space already.
I'm also not okay with my donations financing an upstart like this targeting enterprise.
This needs to exist outside of Wikimedia. It's completely out of scope. Profit incentives warp missions. Why can't Apple/Google et al start their own consortium that does this themselves. Why does Wikimedia need to do this?
Think of the scale of operations required to support an entity like Google or Apple. This is going to require a /ton/ of investment and talent and it may even fail. Why is Wikimedia incurring start up risks like this to appease the needs of big tech?