Wikimedia projects are, have always been, and will always remain libre. The principles of free cultural works mean that anyone can use Wikimedia without restriction, including commercially. As a movement, we embrace this. It is why we reject ‘non-commercial’ licenses, as they would limit the kinds of reuse possible. And it is why we consider commercial reuse an important means of distributing knowledge to audiences.
Equally, Wikimedia projects are, have always been, and will always remain gratis. The ability to freely access the knowledge available across all Wikimedia projects has always been core to the mission of the Foundation and the movement. We provide this access not only to individuals visiting our websites but also programmatically to machines so that our content can be repurposed in other environments. The full corpus of Wikimedia content always has been, and will continue to be, made available for reuse in various forms (including but not limited to database dumps, APIs, and scraping) at no cost.
As a result, our content is often repurposed by for-profit organizations that rely on it to support their business models, and which consequently earn revenue from it. Outside of voluntary corporate donations to the Wikimedia Foundation, the movement has never received benefits from any of this revenue through return investment. In acknowledgement of this, under the heading of Increase the sustainability of our movement the Movement Strategy process asked the Wikimedia Foundation to explore, among other things, “enterprise-level APIs...models for enterprise-scale for-profit reusers, taking care to avoid revenue dependencies or other undue external influence in product design and development.” Furthermore, under the heading Improve User Experience, a further recommendation stated, "Make the Wikimedia API suite more comprehensive, reliable, secure, and fast, in partnership with large scale users where that aligns with our mission and principles, to improve the user experience of both our direct and indirect users, increase the reach and discoverability of our content and the potential for data returns, and improve awareness of and ease of attribution and verifiability for content reusers."
The Enterprise project team is developing a new resource aimed at for-profit content reusers, who have product, service, and system requirements that go beyond what we freely provide. Use of this offering will not be required for for-profit content reuse; companies can continue to use the current tools available at no cost. All Enterprise API revenue will unequivocally be used to support the Wikimedia mission—for example, to fund Wikimedia programs or help grow the Wikimedia Endowment.
This project represents a new kind of activity at the Foundation. The project is at a very early stage that should be considered a learning period. We will have successes, we will make mistakes, and we will need to adapt our strategies. The team is committed to listening, engaging, and where possible, integrating the feedback we get on our work. This document is organic and is reflective of the team's current thinking; we are attempting to document as much work as possible in the open. Up until now, our work has been shaped by a series of initial interviews with community members, Wikimedia Foundation Board and staff, researchers, and reusers.
The primary use case of the suite of Enterprise APIs is paid access for large commercial organisations, with associated Service Level Agreements and dedicated customer support. Nevertheless, and in accordance with the project's project's principle of access for all, there are also various ways to access the Wikimedia Enterprise APIs for free.
For the vast majority of use cases, these three options are more than sufficient.
Exceptional access
If you have a Wikimedia mission-aligned use case and your requirements exceed what is offered at no cost, you may request free exceptional access to the higher rate of the Enterprise APIs.
If you would like to request this, please contact <techpartnershipswikimedia.org> with a response to the six criteria described below.
Requests will be reviewed by Wikimedia Foundation staff in accordance with the following criteria, and granted at the Wikimedia Foundation's discretion. If the request includes substantive access to Wikidata content, the request will be reviewed in coordination with staff from Wikimedia Deutschland.
Exceptional access criteria
1. Who (individual or organisation) is requesting exceptional access?
Please list the contact person’s name, organisation (if applicable), email address, and Enterprise API account username.
2. What is the request for?
Please specify what specific exception is being requested, and for what purpose. Please link to any documentation, existing service or project, research proposal, etc. that shows the use-case.
3. Need. Can the intended use-case be fulfilled via any of the existing free access methods?
Please specify how the existing public services (e.g. public database dumps, APIs, or bots, etc.) are insufficient for your needs.
Notes
Exceptional free access to a paid account can only be granted when all standard options are exhausted – including the free account of the Enterprise services. Possible examples include:
Persistent need for access above the Enterprise API requests/second, or datasets/month, free thresholds
Creation of a new feature/dataset
Formal customer-service or Service Level Agreement (SLA) requirements
4. Obligation. Would the intended use case require custom development to support or maintain? What is the duration of the requested exception?
Please specify if the proposal can be fulfilled using the features of the existing APIs and datasets. If necessary features or datasets are not already available, please clarify with reference to the published documentation.
Notes
Providing exceptional access is effectively a form of in-kind support. The value includes any initial and ongoing development support, and infrastructure expense (in particular, data transfer costs). Contributions back to the Wikimedia movement (e.g., through content donations and data reports, tools, infrastructure, volunteer support and activities, and technical collaborations) could be understood as reciprocal in-kind contributions.
In accordance with the Wikimedia Enterprise operating principles regarding non-exclusivity, any newly developed software feature or dataset must be made available to all. This might raise the financial cost of operating the service considerably, or decrease the strategic value of the proposed use case.
Please explain how the intended use will help the Wikimedia movement reach at least one of these goals.
Notes
There is no perfect definition of “mission alignment”. Nevertheless, the Movement Strategy recommendations (2020) represent the culmination of wide-ranging consultation across the Wikimedia community and stakeholders about our future. Its recommendations are broad in scope, stable, and independent of any one stakeholder’s needs.
Special consideration would be given to organizations serving marginalized communities, underrepresented languages, or Wikimedia sister projects. The proposed use-case should not deliberately create or reinforce closed knowledge silos, proprietary forks of the content, or circumvent community norms or policies.
6. Values alignment. Do the requester’s professional practices or business model align with Wikimedia’s values? Please explain how the request (individual or organization) is in support of these values.
Notes
A human rights assessment is undertaken by the WMF for certain users of paid accounts for the Enterprise APIs (regardless of payment or exceptional access), in accordance with the Human Rights Policy and Commercial Sales and Contracts Policy.
However, in order to receive free access to a paid account, the user should also be able to demonstrate a commitment to open knowledge, transparency, and/or public-benefit mission (such as education, cultural heritage, intergovernmental agency).
If requesting from a commercial organisation, specify if the lack of exceptional access would significantly jeopardize a public-benefit mission – essential for research, accessibility, public information or safety, for example.
The business-model should at the very least not be in conflict with Wikimedia’s values – for example by being built upon harmful misinformation, disinformation, human rights violations, extractive data use, unethical generative AI, or undisclosed paid-editing practices on Wikimedia sites.
If you have any questions, please leave a message on the Talkpage or email <techpartnershipswikimedia.org>
現在、大規模な再利用者は、自社の製品更新をウィキメディアのコミュニティが施す変更に大きく依存しており、EventStream API を使用してそれら変更にアクセスし、アルタイムで更新しています。大規模な再利用者は、より便利なサービスに関心を寄せ、具体的には処理の制限に使える受信した変更のフィルター、データ損失を防ぐ安定した HTTP 接続の保証と、発生時ごとに必要な API 呼び出し数を制限するスキーマの提供です。
エンタプライズのリアルタイム API の利用者はウィキメディアのいずれの対応プロジェクトに置かれたアップロード素材もリアルタイムでストリーム再生できます。
Initial Wikimedia Foundation Diff blogpost note: media stories listed below are written and published independently and were neither pre-reviewed nor approved by the WMF
25th Birthday customer announcement - January 2026
Wikimedia Foundation Press release & Wikimedia Enterprise blogpost note: media stories listed below are written and published independently and were neither pre-reviewed nor approved by the WMF. Some publications described this as a "licensing" deal - which is a misrepresentation.
wikimedia.org> with a response to the six criteria described below.
Christopher Petrillo
Stephanie Delbecque
Chuck Reynolds
Francisco Navas
Jolan Wuyts
Haroon Shaikh
Prabhat Tiwary
Luvo Dlulisa
Ruairi O'Donnell
Ehi Enabulele
2022年
2022年-2023年
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