Wikimedia Enterprise/FY25-26
 | The Annual Plan draft is in the process of being translated across languages. |
 | This content is currently in development as part of the 2025–2026 Annual Plan drafting process. We are seeking feedback on the talk page until May 31st, 2025 to shape our priorities for the next fiscal year. |  |
| Wikimedia Enterprise | |
|---|---|
 Building new opportunities for both revenue generation and free knowledge dissemination through partnerships and earned income. | |
| enterprise.wikimedia.com | |
| Project | |
| Technical | |
FY25-26 Wikimedia Enterprise & Technical Partnerships
[edit]Strategy & Goals
[edit]Wikimedia Enterprise (Meta wiki) is a service for high-volume re-users of Wikimedia content. Enterprise provides improved data access, dedicated customer support, service level guarantees (SLAs), and professional consulting to companies who sign commercial agreements.
The Technical Partnerships team strengthens strategic relationships with the largest reusers of Wikimedia content, such as companies making search engines, voice assistants, and AI chat products, as well as mission-aligned organizations that incorporate Wikimedia content, including other nonprofit, free and open source, and community-driven websites.
These two teams operate independently from one another but now sit underneath the same organizational umbrella within Advancement, recognizing that they serve separate but related needs of external commercial and non-commercial partners. Combined these help to address the Wikimedia Movement strategic direction that “Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge, and anyone who shares our vision will be able to join us.”
Wikimedia Enterprise
[edit]Wikimedia Enterprise exists to serve three interrelated Foundation and Movement goals:
- Revenue: As readership trends for Wikimedia projects shift from visits to our websites to various third party environments, Wikimedia Enterprise is intended to diversify the Foundation’s revenue sources beyond the fundraising channels that depend on direct communication with readers, such as fundraising banners. Enterprise allows for commercial organisations that have built upon high-volume usage of Wikimedia content to consistently invest in our infrastructure, rather than Wikimedia donors subsidising their business-model. Wikimedia Enterprise provides a consistent and predictable way for large scale re-users of Wikimedia content to reinvest a meaningful portion of the benefit they derive from our data back into the Wikimedia movement.
- Resource Management: Commercial re-users of Wikimedia content often access Wikimedia servers at a significantly higher rate than non-commercial re-users, placing a larger burden on our computing resources than other re-users or website visitors. Wikimedia Enterprise’s infrastructure shifts the burden of supporting high-intensity usage and site-scraping by third party reusers from our freely available public service onto a dedicated commercial platform, allowing Wikimedia resources to be more equitably distributed to all visitors to our content.
- Data and Understanding: Through qualitative and quantitative data collection, Wikimedia Enterprise has begun to develop a better understanding of the contexts in which Wikimedia data is used outside our own websites. This data collection provides the Enterprise team with necessary insights needed to develop commercially desirable features, functionality, and data formats to better support content reuse. It also helps the Foundation and the Movement better understand all the ways and environments in which Wikimedia content is put into the world via third party re-use.
Revenue
[edit]For FY 2023-24, as detailed in the most recent Wikimedia Enterprise financial report (fiscal year 2023-24), both annual revenue and expenses increased slightly compared to the previous year, to $3.4M and $3.8M respectively. The net operating loss of $400k resulted from small shifts in contract signing periods, which registered additional revenue in the first months of fiscal year 2024-2025 instead of the final quarter of 2023-2024.
Projections for fiscal year 2024-2025 show that revenue from new customer contracts are likely to both exceed projected expenses and repay the initial investment from previous fiscal years, which will be reflected in the next financial report to be released before the end of the 2025 calendar year.
Resource Management
[edit]External usage of Wikimedia content has grown significantly in recent years, driven primarily by the massive growth in the use of Wikimedia content from companies and organizations either developing or making use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. In response, the Wikimedia Foundation is becoming more diligent in establishing ways for developers and reusers to support the sustainability of Wikimedia projects and the ability of humans to access human-curated knowledge. This requires pathways for these groups to either reduce their usage to acceptable levels or move to the Enterprise service, which was specifically designed to support high levels of activity from commercial organizations.
While these changes are being driven primarily by our Product & Technology and Legal teams, Wikimedia Enterprise plays a key role in supporting these changes by providing a platform that can support this level of growth in high-volume commercial usage without affecting our human readership. Ensuring that high-volume content reusers are able to migrate effectively and efficiently to the Enterprise platform will be a major focus for the Enterprise team in FY 2025-2026.
Data & Understanding
[edit]Wikimedia data is used extensively by many companies involved in AI, and our data plays a significant role in all stages of AI development, from its use in the training of all major foundational Large Language Models (LLMs) and the fine-tuning of these LLMs, to its increasing use as part of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to enhance the accuracy and reliability of generative AI models.
For Wikimedia Enterprise, this means that commercial opportunities exist with both companies building foundational AI tools as well as companies using these tools to develop their AI-powered business models. Last fiscal year, the Enterprise team began a market research project to understand how best to serve this quickly emerging field through the development of features and functionality specifically intended for AI companies. This work is ongoing, with the goal of having a robust set of functionality to serve this market in place by the midpoint of this fiscal year, and a further goal to bring a meaningful number of AI companies onto the platform by the end of the fiscal year.
Additionally, after a successful debut of free “trial” accounts for the Wikimedia Enterprise platform in the last fiscal year, the team intends to further expand our free tier of access. Through this step, we hope to make it significantly more useful and robust for organizations that have commercial needs but are not high-volume reusers to make use of the Enterprise platform as their primary environment for accessing Wikimedia content. This will ultimately encourage more commercial organisations to migrate from our public servers towards our Enterprise APIs, allowing us to serve different types of third party reusers with the resources that are most appropriate to their different use cases.
Technical Partnerships
[edit]Now that the infrastructure of the Enterprise platform is in place, it has become far more feasible to proactively offer support to a wide range of content reusers who wish to responsibly use Wikimedia content to cater to the customised needs of their audiences. Working closely with teams from across the Foundation, and in particular Regional Partnerships and Community Programs, the Technical Partnerships team provides a comprehensive response to external organizations who wish to participate in any part of “the “flywheel” of Wikimedia content — creation and ingestion, improvement and curation, and dissemination and access. Technical Partnerships advises organizations on the wide range of solutions the Foundation makes available for external partners, including providing them technical support, ensuring they follow attribution guidelines appropriately, and understanding how they can best make use of any part of our infrastructure, including when appropriate access to the Enterprise platform either for free or at a significantly reduced cost.
Objectives & Key Results
[edit]1. Customer acquisition
[edit]Meet or exceed our revenue and customer acquisition goals
Key Results:
- Support revenue diversification for the foundation through additional enterprise contracts that grow revenue by no less than 10% year over year.
- Finalize product segmentation and pricing for the Artificial Intelligence market.
- Have at least five AI contracts in the Enterprise and/or Technical Partnerships portfolio.
2. Destination for commercial organisations
[edit]Become the primary destination for commercial organizations reusing Wikimedia content
Key Results:
- Ensure the sustainability of the Foundation’s mission by supporting the responsible infrastructure strategy, working alongside the Product & Technology team.
- Support the implementation of a more cohesive overall developer experience, in partnership with the MediaWiki team, to provide a productive environment for commercial developers.
- Evaluate the value of referral traffic growth through research on a causal relationship between referrals and revenue, editor growth, and/or engagement.
- Evaluate commercial use of existing endpoints to plan development of future Enterprise features.
3. Product development
[edit]Meet our contractual obligations regarding product development
Key Results:
- Support requests and contractual obligations from existing reusers by integrating additional Wikimedia projects into the Enterprise platform.
- Support requests and contractual obligations from existing reusers by providing structured, machine-readable access to a significant portion of outstanding Wikimedia content within the Enterprise platform.
4. Establish Technical Partnerships
[edit]Establish Technical Partnerships vision, strategy, and goals and share with the Foundation and the broader movement
Key Results:
- Cultivate a new approach to establishing technical partnerships with external organizations, consistent with responsible infrastructure and movement strategies, that informs Wikimedia’s approach toward revenue models and attribution requirements with content reusers.
- Convert inbound partnership interest into collaborations that advance Wikimedia objectives.
- Leverage at least one existing partner relationship to expand the resources available to a Community Growth/Regional Partnerships priority area.