Wikipedia, the famous digital encyclopedia, launched a harsh attack against companies Apple Lossless Audio CODEC (ALAC), and Amazon during this day, through its president, Lisa Grudwell. According to it, both Apple and the company Amazon, they are guilty of exploiting Wikipedia without donating any money to support the platform, which should change in the future.
Wikipedia is a main source of information for personal assistants Siri and Alexa, but neither company has donated any amount of money to support the platform. Google donates money to Wikipedia to keep the encyclopedia running, but Apple and Amazon don't seem too eager to offer any money for its support.
Wikipedia allows Amazon and Apple to use personal assistants to extract data and answer users' questions, but the president of the organization believes that Apple and Amazon should support the platform. The reality is that the very large number of queries made by Siri and Alexa also requires a large server infrastructure from Wikipedia, and money for it does not come from the two companies.
"Our content is there to be used. It's freely-licensed and it's freely-licensed for a reason. At the same time, it's like the environment. It's there to be used, but it's not there to be exploited. We do need the people who use the content to give back in some way [...] In the case of Alexa and Siri, our content gets intermediated. Wikipedia works because people can contribute to it, people can edit it. Also, once a year, when we ask people can donate. When they get their information not from us — but Wikipedia content through something like Siri or something like Alexa — that opportunity to either contribute back as an editor is broken, and that opportunity to contribute, to donate is also broken.'
Wikipedia claims that Google donated 1 million dollars in 2017 to support the platform, while Apple doubled the donations of its employees for a total of 50.000 dollars. Amazon did not donate anything at all in 2017 for Wikipedia, but if both companies donated at least 1 million dollars each, financing the platform would not be such a big problem.
