United Kingdom, Jan. 15 -- Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and more are paying for access to the Wikimedia Foundation.

The tech giants - alongside Perplexity and Mistral AI - are joining Google in paying for access to the organisations projects, which includes Wikipedia's collection of articles.

The initiative provides large companies with access to a premium version of Wikipedia's API, which is "tuned" for commercial use and AI firms.

Lane Becker, Wikimedia Foundation's senior director of earned revenue, told The Verge: "We take feature requests, we build features and functionality, and sort of try to structure the data in ways that support what these companies' needs are."

Meta and Amazon - both listed as "existing" partners - have been con...