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Comment by LordDragonfang | Hacker News Reader

Google already scrapes and utilizes all of Wikipedia's contents to use in its "knowledge graph", and donates a substantial amount to the WMF in return. This simply formalizes the financial agreement and moves the data exchange to an api that is presumably more convenient and less resource intensive for both parties, while offering the same access for any other enterprise customer (and the internet archive gets it for free).

This seems like a good idea for both the WMF and the open internet.

(Contrary to what seem to be a lot of early knee-jerk negative responses in this thread - I suspect I'm seeing a bit of "early-thread contrarian dynamic")

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Yeah, I think this is spot on. The version of WMF Enterprise being described here is formalizing / codifying an informal relationship that already existed (Google using Wikipedia content all over the place, and making various one-off donations to WMF), and as you say, formalizing has benefits for both parties! Certainly ways this could have some long-term negative impacts, but WMF is obviously thinking pretty hard about mitigations, it seems.

The discussion linked in a comment above (https://meta.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Enterprise/Essay...) also provides a pretty nice FAQ to the negative responses.

This is accurate. It isn't a big money grab for wikimedia nor does it really substantially change things for anyone. There is a constant drive for growth at Wikimedia and many of the concerns expressed in this thread are valid but Wikipedia Enterprise doesn't represent a threat to the freedom of Wikipedia.

It really just represents a formalized way for commercial entities to donate to the foundation while accounting for it in their budget as a service rather than a charitable donation. It makes total sense if your business depends on Wikipedia in some way then you should contribute to it's continued existence. This is a totally sensible way to do that.

It also ensures that Google follows the license requirements of Wikimedia data as as it becomes a contractual issue rather than a license issue with each contributor.

It seems for example that Google has recently resolved some long standing issues with attribution in various products(YouTube Music comes to mind).

> to an api that is presumably more convenient and less resource intensive for both parties

Not quite. It sounds like they will increase bandwidth for the API.

> What many of the largest commercial technology organizations require in order to effectively utilize Wikimedia content goes beyond what we currently provide.

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