Google and Wikipedia have been in a kind of unspoken partnership: Wikipedia produces the information Google serves up in response to user queries, and Google builds up Wikipedia’s reputation as a source of trustworthy information. Of course, there have been bumps, including Google’s bold attempt to replace Wikipedia with its own version of user-generated articles, under the clumsy name “Knol,” short for knowledge. Knol never did catch on, despite Google’s offer to pay the principal author of an article a share of advertising money. But after that failure, Google embraced Wikipedia even tighter—not only linking to its articles but reprinting key excerpts on its search result pages to quickly deliver Wikipedia’s knowledge to those seeking answers.
Source: Wikimedia
[Clip]
Today, the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the Wikipedia project in more than 300 languages as well as other wiki-projects, is announcing the launch of a commercial product, Wikimedia Enterprise. The new service is designed for the sale and efficient delivery of Wikipedia’s content directly to these online behemoths [like Google] (and eventually, to smaller companies too).
Conversations between the foundation’s newly created subsidiary, Wikimedia LLC, and Big Tech companies are already underway, point-people on the project said in an interview, but the next couple of months will be about seeking the reaction of Wikipedia’s thousands of volunteers. Agreements with the firms could be reached as soon as June.
“This is the first time the foundation has recognized that commercial users are users of our service,” says Lane Becker, a senior director at the foundation, who has been ramping up the Enterprise project with a small team. “We’ve known they are there, but never really treated them as a user base.”
Gary Price (gprice@mediasourceinc.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. Before launching INFOdocket, Price and Shirl Kennedy were the founders and senior editors at ResourceShelf and DocuTicker for 10 years. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com, and is currently a contributing editor at Search Engine Land.
From the ACLU: …last month, a Virginia resident initiated obscenity proceedings against two acclaimed books: Gender Queer, a Memoir, by Maia Kobabe, an autobiographical graphic novel that depicts the author’s ...
From the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office: Beginning August 1, 2022, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) Patent Center system—available to the public since 2017—will fully replace the legacy ...
CORE: Our Commitment to The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure Elsevier’s Acquisition of Interfolio: Risks and Responses GPO to Discontinue Assigning Library of Congress Classification Numbers in Records for Hearings ...
From National Geographic: In the early 1990s, a Canadian student named Adam Smith opened a dumpster in the basement of his apartment building in Vancouver, Canada, and discovered a stack ...
From the Google Scholar Blog: Scholar Metrics provide an easy way for authors to quickly gauge the visibility and influence of rec. This release covers articles published in 2017–2021 and ...
The Rare Book School (U. of Virginia) video embedded below (a National Endowment for the Humanities-Global Book Histories Initiative Lecture by Kelly Wisecup) was recorded on June 15, 2022. From ...
From a W3C Release: The World Wide Web Consortium is set to pursue 501(c)(3) non-profit status. The launch as a new legal entity in January 2023 preserves the core mission ...
Full Text of a Texas A&M University Libraries Announcement: We are pleased to announce the appointment of Julie Mosbo Ballestro as University Librarian and Assistant Provost of University Libraries at ...
From an EBLIDA (European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation Associations) Post: EBLIDA is laying the foundation for “sustainable copyright” in public libraries through the publication of the “First European ...
From a DPLA Announcement: Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is pleased to announce an $850,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to support its effort to advance racial justice in ...
From the Report: Technical methods for effectively archiving complex digital research publications and for creating an integrated collections of content in different formats have not yet been developed. As part ...
Coherent Digital Launches South Asia Archive on the Coherent Commons Platform The Longest-Running Queer News Radio Show Is Headed to the Library of Congress (via NPR) University of Cambridge Now ...
