Big Tech firms will soon have to whip out their wallets in order to use Wikipedia

Many tech firms rely on Wikipedia for information that is passed along to users. Google Assistant, Siri, and rivals including Amazon’s Alexa often reply to queries by repeating information gleaned from Wikipedia and the latter does not charge these cash-rich companies for the data. tried to build its own rival by creating a service called Knol (short for knowledge) that would give the principal author of an article a slice of the advertising money generated. That failure caused Google to hold on to Wikipedia even tighter. Not only does Google use excerpts from Wikipedia for its Search app, …