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by ROARosen 1922 days ago
> Free information means anyone can use it ...

Of course anyone can use it commercially and for whichever reason they like. But by creating a walled 'premium' offering you are going against the premise of 'anyone can use it' since not anyone can use the commercial api.

Surely if Google or anyone wants the api so badly they're willing to pay for it, they should fund it. Why does that mean it needs to be 'locked'?
2 comments
abbe98 1922 days ago
Google and co will essentially pay for the SLA, free access will be available through Wikimedia Cloud Services and I'm sure that the team is investigating how to make the API available to the wider public.
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pimlottc 1922 days ago
Devils advocate: Google clearly already has a working pipeline to import and format Wikipedia data for its needs. Why would they stop using it and start paying Wikipedia? Will Wikipedia be able to build an enterprise API thats faster/cheaper/more reliable/more scalable than the internal one build by one of the world’s top engineering companies?

No doubt the enterprise API will add attractive value for smaller companies without the resources to process the raw dumps but I’m skeptical that this will convert Google et al into well-paying customers. Unless they start restricting the free dumps...

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abbe98 1922 days ago
While Google already have a pipeline in place the bottleneck of that pipeline is on the Wikimedia end of things, this project addresses that. No more scraping and data dumps when they can stream changes over gRPC. WMF didn't build this without consultation with these big companies.
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sunir 1922 days ago
What is the difference between a funder and a paying customer?

They are both users who are paying for the service.

The difference is that funders have political power over the project beyond the scope of their own use.

Customers are always better and more fair to everyone than funders.

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ROARosen 1922 days ago
A service that's available to the 'public' is called a 'public service' even though it is funded by 'funders'. But a service that's available only to 'customers' is by definition not a 'public' service.
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