[anaganisk]

> The new API is an opt-in product, meaning that everyone (including those companies) can continue to use the current publicly-available tools at no cost and no restriction. The ability to freely access the knowledge across all Wikimedia projects remains unaffected–it is core to our mission.

Not sure what you have to worry about.

[ROARosen]

>Not sure what you have to worry about.

>From op: It's just too often that a commercial offering just disincentives bettering the 'free' product.

Instead of the public foundation focusing on bettering and modernizing the public option, they are -and will continue to be - putting their efforts to create a better api to be used solely for private purposes (albeit with good intentions).

Sure, it's opt-in to use the 'better' api. But that comes at the expense of this better api not being available publicly. So going forward by default the public is always going to be getting the inferior api, saving the 'better' ones for commercial use. That doesn't seem very opt-in-like to me...

[anaganisk]

They state better API, is just a way to scrape data easier think like a structured JSON, regular public don't scrape data they visit for info once in a while, some people use other tens of apps to export data offline. Wikipedia wants to charge some money from freeloading corporates so, instead of facing the backlash about scraping being paid, they chose to charge these mega corps in a different way to avoid the hassle of commercial and non commercial BS. If they don't provide a fancy API, no different from free ways, corporates would rather use the free stuff than pay for the API.