I think why it needs to start selling data services should also be asked. At the very least everyone should have equal access to Wikipedia. Using "Big Tech" as an excuse to charge is not relevant in my humble opinion.
Edit: I would like to add that I think the Wikipedia Enterprise is not about big tech as Wikimedia suggest, but selling real-time streams of edit data to financial organisations.
I'm concerned by WMF's cancerous growth, but this particular initiative makes sense to me. Wikipedia already provides free APIs for everybody to use, and they work fine for typical users who want to grab a page or a hundred, but the Googles of the world are essentially scraping the entire site multiple times a day. This imposes a real cost on WMF, and it's a win-win for both sides if companies pay for support and get better service in return.
“ the WMF is launching a for-profit company named Wikimedia, LLC. This will sell API services to big tech companies, making it easier for them to process Wikimedia content, which powers voice assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa as well as Google’s infoboxes.”
“ The WMF emphasizes time and again that Wikipedia never tries to sell the public anything.”
Those can’t both be true. Selling to google is just indirectly selling to the general public.
The alternative is search engines and bots hammering on the doors of Wikipedia and costing huge infrastructure dollars. Their Enterprise API AFAICT is a value-add, and does not prevent scraping.
https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedia-finally-asking-big-tec...
Edit: I would like to add that I think the Wikipedia Enterprise is not about big tech as Wikimedia suggest, but selling real-time streams of edit data to financial organisations.