Movement Strategy/Recommendations/Iteration 1/Revenue Streams/1

Overview

Recommendations

Implementation

Reports

FAQ

This is an archive for draft recommendations. Visit Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2018-20/Recommendations to read the final recommendations.

Recommendation 1: Turn the Wikimedia API into a revenue source

Q 1 What is your Recommendation?

The APIs of Wikipedia and Wikidata are among the most widely used on the planet.

While keeping the APIs free for everyone, there can be a way to offer “tiered”, premium service for large enterprises such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon, and smaller ones as well. The tiered may cost between thousands of dollars to millions of dollars, depending on usage amount, and will enable the Movement to provide dedicated development time for the APIs, as well as services like dedicated API gateways or better provisioning of API regions, if those are requested by clients.

Inspiration for this can be the GNIP / Twitter service, which has tiered support - the basic API is free for everyone, but access to the Twitter “firehose” (tweets generated in real-time) costs up to 100,000$ / month.