Talk:Wikimedia Enterprise/Archives/2022

Revenue goal

What is the revenue goal of Wikimedia Enterprise for the time of the fiscal year 2022-2023 and what profit do you expect. In what class of taxation is the Wikimedia LLC classified and how high are the expected operating costs for the next fiscal year. After it is a buisness it is from my point of view important to treat the Wikimedia LLC like a company that is for profit in the buisness. The sentence with the plan about the taxation that I have found in the Wikimedia LLC Operating Agreement is not clear to me. I am not sure if I understand this sentence in the right way. I suggest to calculate the prices for the products you offer with a not to high markup. I suggest as a goal to reach a 5 percent profit with the company as the so called EBT, also known as Equity before Taxes. This is a from my point of view acceptable profit if it is made sure that the money is reinvested and a part goes back to the Wikimedia Foundation and goes there to the communty. If it is possible I think the Wikimedia LLC is a chance to try out how free knowledge can be used in companies and what kind of transparency can be offered to the customers. So if the amount the customer pays is lower or higher to reach the before calculated profit I think the customer should be informed. In my ideal understanding of business the prices should cover the costs but be not much higher or lower than that. There I see a chance to try if something like that can work in a company. I am interested in an office hour to hear about the current status of Wikimedia Enerprise and to talk about the plan for next year.--Hogü-456 (talk) 19:11, 30 April 2022 (UTC)

Dear Hogü-456,

With regards to the revenue goal: the “how much money will this raise” question on the FAQ has this note: As per the project's financial goals that were initially defined during the development-phase, the 2021-22 Annual Plan predicts "$10.2 million in contractual revenue and approximately $3.6 million in expense for Wikimedia Enterprise...". As this sentence implies - this is the assumption that was made early in the development of the project. Now that we are a further year ahead, things are becoming clearer - and consequently so is potential customer base. The most important thing is that we generate, as you said yourself, sufficient revenue such that Enterprise’s activities are self-funding - but not too much as to alter our fundamental focus on small-donations. Next month will also be the next public milestone and associated announcement, which will have details that answer some of your questions in this topic. ​​As per the project’s published Principles, we will also be publishing overall revenues and expenses at least annually - but that won’t be until there’s approximately a year’s worth of financial data to report upon. As things stand, we’ve only been “open for business” since January. The publication of the first full year’s worth of revenue/expenses will include more practical information, rather than the necessarily-hypothetical response I can give today.

As for the taxation topic: As also noted on that FAQ, “The assessment of appropriate tax treatment of the LLC activities has been coordinated with the Wikimedia Foundation auditors KPMG.” We expect that there will be a small portion of Wikimedia Enterprise’s revenues which are subject to unrelated business income tax [UBIT], while the majority will be tax exempt.

With regards to the pricing itself - we will have more information coming soon. There will be a pricing structure that the potential customers (and the interested public/wikimedians) can calculate for themselves. This is both ‘better for business’, and also more equitable + more transparent.

I have scheduled a community-office-hours for early June, where you can bring follow-up questions. See the details at "office hours" subsection below. Sincerely, LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 21:08, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

Thank you @LWyatt (WMF): for the answer,

currently I have not a clear description why I havent read your answer earlier as I was since then on the page and wrote something below. I think that the expected profit is much to high. I think for a business more than 25 percent profit in total are not responsible and so I think the prices for the services should be reduced and I think for the business the Wikimedia Foundation should pay taxes. Now I hope that there will be then discussions about it at the Office Hour or before during the annual plan discussions at this talk page and it is an example that I do not look to all relevant sides and will need to look more detailed and recently to board resolutions and talk pages. Because the business started already as you wrote there are some customers there.--Hogü-456 (talk) 20:12, 19 May 2022 (UTC)

How are we doing?

Hi @LWyatt (WMF):, Hogu asks above about revenue and an office hours (and so I am a +1 to both those queries) - I just thought I'd ask more generally about how Enterprise is doing? What progress has it made at standing up? Are the initial customers happy with the offering (if we are active)? Does Enterprise specify its year's plans at the same time as the rest of the WMF is doing the Annual Plan - if so, what are the key highlights? Nosebagbear (talk) 14:40, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

Hello Nosebagbear - I'm working on a reply to Hogu's questions so you can follow that thread. As for initial customers, highlights, annual plan... "watch this space!" While this page has been quiet in recent months, that is deceptive: a lot of work has been going on in the background and we're about one month away from our next major press-release with updates. I'll schedule and publicise a community-office-hours for that 'announcement week' where you can bring these kinds of questions (if they're not already answered by the news announcement itself). LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 10:43, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

Sounds good, look forward to the update Nosebagbear (talk) 11:19, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

Nosebagbear - This is now scheduled. See Talk:Wikimedia_Enterprise#June_9_-_"office_hours"_conversation. LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 21:43, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

Speaking for myself, I generally prefer having questions asked and answered on-wiki (as you have been doing admirably well, thank you). Office hours take a lot of time out of work/family life, the timing is always inconvenient for some people, and the information ends up dispersed across multiple pages, with no one place tracking the progress of discussions.

With this in mind, may I suggest you provide a summary here as well? Best, Andreas JN466 10:33, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

A video conversation is an addition to, not a replacement for, this talkpage. Some people prefer different methods of communication and so we’re trying to suit all preferences. If all participants are happy with it, we will record the video and upload it to commons and embed it here - as we did with the other ‘office hours’ calls last year. LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 11:23, 26 May 2022 (UTC)

LWyatt is indeed responsive - I think Andreas' request is specifically for a textual update/summary (along with any video upload to commons) Nosebagbear (talk) 10:17, 27 May 2022 (UTC)

I can't promise to be 'taking detailed minutes' of the conversation. However, if I've the presence of mind, while also facilitating the call, I'll try to take note of the approximate topic (and, if possible, the timecode to make it easier to 'skip to the relevant part') and put that in the file description when I upload it to Commons. LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 10:30, 27 May 2022 (UTC)

@LWyatt (WMF): YouTube videos these days have an automated transcript (available both with or without timecodes, accessible via the three-dot icon in the line under the video's title). Could you copy that out and put it onto the talkpage here, "hatted" (i.e. so it is only visible when a person clicks on it)? Andreas JN466 21:26, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

As with previous video-meetings, this will be conducted on Zoom (not Meet/YouTube). This allows for better moderation tools and video recording extraction/transcoding to Commons. We’ll see what the automatic transcription functionality is like (accuracy + extraction). LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 21:58, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

@Nosebagbear and Hogü-456: According to Advancement's quarterly review, Wikimedia Enterprise is behind schedule: "Although we successfully closed an initial set of paying customers for Wikimedia Enterprise at the end of the last calendar year, and have continued to have ongoing sales conversations with additional potential customers, we have been unable to close additional customers as quickly as we projected due to unanticipated legal and product requirements, and will not hit the revenue target for FY21/22." At the end of Q3, WE had achieved 30% of its revenue goal, unchanged from Q2. Progress has been made in Q3 though in terms of laying the groundwork for supporting small and medium enterprises. (On a different topic, the quarterly review also mentions that a number of Google staffers will join the Abstract Wikipedia team.) Andreas JN466 15:38, 15 June 2022 (UTC)

I wouldn't summarise that quarterly review description as "Behind schedule" but rather that it is "lower than the initial estimates". This might seem merely semantics but the difference is that the former implies there's a rigid 'sales expectation calendar' - which there isn't. Rather, the latter phrase indicates that as things progress, initial assumptions are steadily being replaced with real-world data. As I already stated above in the #Revenue goal subheading, and will reiterate here:

As per the project's financial goals that were initially defined during the development-phase, the 2021-22 Annual Plan predicts "$10.2 million in contractual revenue and approximately $3.6 million in expense for Wikimedia Enterprise...". As this sentence implies - this is the assumption that was made early in the development of the project. Now that we are a further year ahead, things are becoming clearer - and consequently so is potential customer base. The most important thing is that we generate, as you said yourself, sufficient revenue such that Enterprise’s activities are self-funding - but not too much as to alter our fundamental focus on small-donations... -- LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 16:04, 15 June 2022 (UTC)

What stuck in mind was "unable to ... as quickly as we projected" rather than the lower revenue. It sounded like "the unanticipated legal and product requirements" were simply causing a delay, rather than a reassessment of revenue expectations. But naturally you know more about the background than I do, so I am happy to take your point. Regards, Andreas JN466 18:58, 15 June 2022 (UTC)

June 23 - "office hours" conversation

Come and meet the Wikimedia Enterprise team and ask questions you may have:

When & where: Thursday 23 June @ 1700 UTC on Zoom.

It's been a while since we last did one of these, and the intention is to have the next major updates about the project published earlier in that week, so this is a good opportunity to meet. Sincerely, on behalf of the team, LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 21:42, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

Hello @LWyatt (WMF):, in this year June 9 is a Thursday and not an Tuesday. Can you please correct the day in the link or tell if it will happen at another date. I am interested in attending and like that you have scheduled an Office Hour.--Hogü-456 (talk) 20:45, 15 May 2022 (UTC)

Hogü-456 thank you very much for noticing and informing me. I have corrected it here, and in the main page. It is indeed THURSDAY June 9. LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 21:02, 15 May 2022 (UTC)

NOTE: This event was originally advertised as on the 9th. It has now been delayed by precisely two weeks to Thursday 23rd. I have updated the sections subheading to ensure it is not confusing. (Ping Hogü-456 in particular).
The reason for this change is because the major update announcement itself (mentioned above) is being pushed by two weeks for a couple of pragmatic reasons including covid. Sincerely LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 11:16, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

Hello @LWyatt (WMF):, I have changed the date at the page belonging to this discussion page. There was the 9th of June mentioned as the date, when the office hour will happen. Can you please mark the page for translation or where can I ask for that.--Hogü-456 (talk) 19:05, 9 June 2022 (UTC)

Ah - thank you Hogü. I thought I had updated them all, but missed that (prominent) one! I will do. LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 19:08, 9 June 2022 (UTC)

---

This meeting has now occurred.
The video of this conversation is now available on Commons - and a summary (with approximate timecodes) is:

• 1 - Introductions
• 3 - What are the goals for the next 12 months?
• 9 - What is the usecase for the Internet Archive?
• 12 - What are the criteria for 'free access' to the commercial scale product?
• 16 - How does money move between LLC and WMF; how is the money accounted for; how is the price calculated?
• 26 - What are the expenses thus far?
• 32 - Can the information in the most recent quarterly update slides be elaborated upon?
• 42 - Will the project have its own datacentre?
• 45 - Can public updates on customer needs that the team discovers be provided?

Thank you to the attendees for your questions. LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 21:12, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

Update: First customers, self-signup, free-access trial accounts

TL;DR: Today the WMF published a press release about the ‘Wikimedia Enterprise’ API project - announcing our first set of customers, as well as a new self-signup system. This is a significant milestone because it fulfills several promises we have made to ourselves and to the movement. There will be a public community open meeting on Thursday 23 June @ 1700 UTC on Zoom. This is a reformatted copy of a text that is also published on Wikimedia-l.

Details I am writing today with details of the latest developments in the Wikimedia Enterprise API project. This follows the project’s community-discussion phase, which began approximately one year ago on this page. Then, this past October, we issued a press release announcing that we were “open for business” on the new project site: https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/ .

Now is the third and final major announcement in this journey from “idea” to “reality”. This press release, and associated story on the project’s new “news” page, states that:

1. Two well known organisations will be announced as the first customers of the project. One is a major social/search corporation [Google], as our first official paying customer. This also means that the project is now covering its current operating costs. The other is a movement partner and nonprofit organization [The Internet Archive] that will receive access at no cost.
2. Anyone will be able to sign up for an account and use/access the service [but not at a commercial scale] for free. Furthermore, payments for usage above that threshold will be calculated simply and publicly based on the number of API requests and gigabytes of data used. (Other free access methods for the dataset continue to exist)
3. The API’s metadata has been expanded to include the beta version of what we are calling “credibility signals”. This is already public information (such as pageviews, edit-rates, and page-protection status changes) packaged within the single data feed to help users make more informed decisions about when they should refresh their copy of the dataset. (Emphasis on ‘beta’, as this is not available on all versions of the product yet.)

This announcement is a significant milestone because it fulfills several promises we have made to ourselves and to the movement, namely that:

• We have built a service that commercial organisations who are already heavy users of Wikimedia content and WMF services are willing to invest in. The pricing is based on estimated usage, resulting in a more manageable and transparent cost structure. This project is now covering its current operating expenses. In addition, we requested and received a public affirmation/support letter from the Board for the project’s financial operating principles, ensuring that commercial revenue will only ever be a minority of the total and their oversight for any future high value contracts.
• The nonprofit will receive access at no cost, demonstrating a first practical example of how this project supports the mission of knowledge access while also providing a new revenue stream.
• The ‘trial’ tier of the service is primarily designed to allow potential customers to determine whether they want to use it in commercial production environments, but it also allows anyone to see what is ‘in’ the API. Moreover, it will allow volunteers or researchers to access the service for free at a non-commercial scale. If those people have a mission-relevant use-case that requires them to continue to use the Enterprise API above that scale (i.e. that isn’t viable using other APIs/dumps), we will continue to provide them with free access.
• The ‘credibility signals’ concept means that vandalism and errors should appear less often and/or be removed more quickly in downstream services such as search engines. Note, this will not happen immediately, it takes time to update workflows.

While we are proud to announce these customers, it is important to note that our market research has identified a significant gap in our movement’s ability to have Wikimedia knowledge used. The world’s largest companies are already using Wikimedia; we’re just providing a better way for them to do so. But for everyone else, it is often too hard and they do not have the resources (financial, technical, and human) to incorporate Wikimedia information – even though they want to. In short: simply providing legally-reusable knowledge is insufficient to enable reuse for a very large portion of society.

And so, we are focusing a lot of our future product development on this Knowledge as a Service model - consistent with the Movement Strategy’s “strategic direction”. This is what OpenFuture.eu’s interview with the Enterprise team referred to as our attempt at “lowering the playing field” – a term we quite like.

We are increasingly realising that the future of Wikimedia Enterprise is much more nuanced than merely “making big tech pay”, but is about enabling access to the many companies who want to use Wikimedia knowledge in their own products but currently can’t. These organisations are willing to pay us to find ways to better support their specific use of Wikimedia content, both through more accessible technology, contractual guarantees of service availability, and professional services to help them make the best use of our content in their systems. As per our principles, all customers get the same product - there are no exclusive or bespoke features - they only pay for the volume of usage. This will allow smaller companies to compete and will ensure that Wikimedia knowledge is more widely available. Our goal is for the future business model of Enterprise to resemble “many paying a little” rather than “few paying a lot” – an approach similar to our movement’s “many small donors” fundraising methodology.

Still to come later this year will be:

• Exploring options to integrate Wikidata in the dataset, which is a common customer request. We are working closely with WMDE to discuss how to best do this.
• Small, and non-U.S. based customers. This is crucial to demonstrating the Knowledge as a Service value of the project. We already work with relevant Chapters when we have a potential ‘local’ customer who has expressed strong interest.
• Publishing aggregate revenue/expense data, but only after there’s enough aggregate financial data collected, over a sufficient period of time, and with enough customers to be informative.
• The “news” page on the Enterprise website itself will be where future software updates, customer case-studies, etc. will be published. This ensures that the information is available, while not detracting from community-focused places like the Diff blog. The first post on that news page is available today.

In order to not distract from community-centric discussions, in the future we will announce new customers, product updates etc on the project website’s news page and on Meta, rather than on this mailing list etc. - but we felt it was important to do it this time.

Finally, I would also like to ask you to keep your eyes and ears open for anyone in your corner of the Wikimedia community who has questions or concerns about the project. Please ask them to read and comment on the documentation on the Meta FAQ, to contact me directly, or to attend the public community open meeting on Thursday.

Sincerely, and on behalf of the Wikimedia Enterprise team, LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 16:05, 21 June 2022 (UTC)

Dumps for 20220620 and 20220701

I noticed there are no recent enterprise dumps available - the following folders are empty:

• https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/enterprise_html/runs/20220620/
• https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/enterprise_html/runs/20220701/

Is this a (temporary) technical problem or no more free versions of those dumps? Prof.DataScience (talk) 13:25, 4 July 2022 (UTC)

P.S.: just to notify - @LWyatt (WMF) --Prof.DataScience (talk) 14:51, 4 July 2022 (UTC)

Hi Prof.DataScience. Yes, this is a known problem and is being tracked here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T311441. A fix is scheduled to be deployed this week, I’ll followup with a note here when there’s results from it. LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 15:12, 4 July 2022 (UTC)

This issue has now been resolved and the next scheduled run should occur on the 20th (FYI Prof.DataScience). LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 14:14, 12 July 2022 (UTC)

Contracts and Cost coverage for free use

Can you please ask the InternetArchive if they are willing to publish their contract with Wikimedia Enterprise. I am interested in reading the contract. From my point of view it is interesting to read the contract and to understand what it contains. Can you please also ask Google if they are willing to publish their contract. From my point of view it would be a interesting experiment running a fully transparent company regarding fincial situation and contracts with customers and Wikimedia Enterprise offers the chance to try that. It has from my point of view not a bad impact for getting new customers after they propably have a further understanding of the specials of Wikimedia Enterprise and through that the expections of relation between service and costs, so the efficiency, are not too high. These are at least my expections and maybe BigTechCompanies act in another way as I expect at the moment. I think that the costs of the usage of the APIs through the InternetArchive should be covered from the Wikimedia Foundation. It is from my point of view important to not include the expenses that occur through the free use of the APIs of Wikimedia Enterprise in the calculation of the fees for API use. Can you please describe how you will calculate the usage fees and if the Wikimedia Foundation pays money for the free use of Wikimedia Enterprise. You have answered it in some parts in the office hour and I think it would be great to have it here again. Then I understand it better after I am not a native English speaker and maybe there will come up a further discussion here after that. Hogü-456 (talk) 19:10, 14 July 2022 (UTC)

Dear Hogü,

[Sorry for not replying sooner - please make sure to link to my username when publishing a message, to be sure that I will see any messages as soon as possible.]

At the moment this project is, as you know, very young and only just beginning to get customers. As a result - we are still learning what specific options customers want, and if those specific options are different between different industry sectors (news/press, social media, search engines, academic, finance-tech, medicine-tech, education-tech…) and the company’s size. By “specific options”, these are the things that are listed in the FAQ at “What is in the contracts?”.

In summary, a contract lists things like the time duration of the contract, the formal contact details of the two signatories, the cost and payment schedule (e.g. monthly), the legal procedure if either side breaks/wants to change the contract, the required notification period to change the software (e.g. deploying a new version of the code that requires going offline for a short time), how much time after an edit is saved before it is available in the API, the maximum allowed time before a technical is fixed/formal email answered, whether they need support also on weekends, whether they want specific assistance to be trained how to use the API (or is the published documentation sufficient)… It is also careful to clarify that content on the wikis is already freely-licensed and requires attribution - and that this service does not change that. So, with regards to your question about being curious about what is contained in a contract - that's what's in it.

Over time, we will learn what the most “standard” preference is across all of those variables, and at that point we intend to provide a public, standardised, contract document that people can just click to sign-up to immediately - just like they might for any other sign-up to other online services. We want to make it as easy as possible to use this service (that is both good sense as a business, and good sense for our Mission!) so, making a single, simple, standard, public contract is the plan. We are already halfway there now that we have a public “pricing estimate calculator” (click on the “create estimate” link here to try it for yourself https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/pricing/ ) and creating the public standard contract is the important next step.

I think this "pricing calculator" link also answers your second question - about the way that costs are defined. Ily should add, that these prices only start once a person/company is using it more than the level of the free-access usage: 10,000 requests, or monthly snapshot. To answer your final question: the Internet Archive and any ‘internal’ WMF use is not being charged at all.

For the benefit of other people reading this conversation - the recent ‘office hour’ conversation which is mentioned in Hogü's question can be found on Commons at File:June_2022_Wikimedia_Enterprise_API_community_conversation_meeting.webm (with the timecodes for each topic discussed listed in the file metadata).

Sincerely, LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 15:37, 22 July 2022 (UTC)

@LWyatt (WMF) thank you for the answer. I have asked something about the planned income and expenses for Wikimedia Enterprise at the last Conversation with the Trustees. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYg9sJ4Ml3M It starts at 36:35. @Laurentius can you please tell me why you think that publishing the plan brings a weaker position in contractual negotations. From my point of view a basic principle of the Wikimedia Foundation is openess and free knowledge and I really like that. Please publish the Total number of requests sent to the different APIs of Wikimedia Enterprise and how many of these come from paying customers. I am also futher interested in the specific contracts for example the one between Google and Wikimedia LLC. From my point of view this is an interesting information and if I know the relation and the expected volume I can better evaluate how far I think that it is possible and acceptable that the Wikimedia LLC makes a profit. From my point of view the profit of a company should be not higher than 20 percent and this should be also true for specific business relations. So if you sell the API-Services to Google the amount that Google has to pay for should be not more as 20 percent higher than the costs that Googles use of the APIs causes. This means that if more than 20 percent of the API-calls are sent from not paying customers the Wikimedia LLC should not make profit. I wish further discussions about what is a responsible profit and what amount is the limit. Hogü-456 (talk) 19:08, 22 July 2022 (UTC)

Dear Hogü-456,

I understand the desire for maximal transparency of process - that is how we as a movement have built an encyclopedia that has a fundamentally different editorial method to other major educational publications. It is part of what motivates myself, and Lorenzo, to have been part of this movement for a long time. Nonetheless, when trying to work with external organisations - We can be transparent about our own service/product/pricing structure, but we cannot promise actions on behalf of others.

There is no specific $$$ revenue goal that the Enterprise project must reach by a specific date - so, it is impossible to share a formal plan which does not exist. Instead, it is a continually revised/updated plan (a summary of which is published in the WMF's quarterly department updates) where the Enterprise team reports to its managers (and up to the Board of Trustees) about its progress on building features that potential future customers have asked for before they will become customers. That work is published in specific detail on the Phabricator board and in summary on the Product Roadmap. As per the Principles, any features are all available to all customers (free and paid) so there is no exclusivity.

As for publishing an aggregated "dashboard" of the usage-rates of the different Enterprise APIs - that is a good future-feature request. Ideally it would be integrated with the data for existing APIs etc. so everyone can make comparisons etc. We are currently in version 1 and there are a lot of big-priority things to do for version 2 (see aforementioned roadmap).

As for the costs of individual usage of the project - I have described above how you can investigate the price per-GB/API-call on our public calculator. I believe Shani also responded to your enquiry during the Conversation with Trustees, reaffirming that the Enterprise project IS designed to make revenue for the use of the Wikimedia Movement - that this is the specific request from the Board to this project: to help diversify the revenue of the Wikimedia Foundation. And also to ensure that large, commercial, re-users of Wikimedia content are financial contributors to our movement and not the reverse. Anyone can, and always will, be able to use Wikimedia content for their own purposes - including commercially - in accordance with the Free Licenses we use. But for those organisations which desire specific commercial services (like contractual agreements of uptime, and immediate customer service) they should pay for that privilege. Donors' money should not be used to subsidise their business. The "limit" you refer to is already mandated in the Principles I linked above - at 30% of the total revenue of the WMF. However, I want to emphasise: that we are nowhere near that level because we are so young. There will be aggregated financial data published by this project at least annually, but we are now at the stage of being able to cover the costs of our current month-by-month expenses (which is an excellent start for a young commercially-oriented project). LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 13:11, 26 July 2022 (UTC)

@LWyatt (WMF) Thank you for the answer. There seems to be different point of views about what profit is acceptable and I have calculated it in a wrong way. It is a important principle that the costs of a usage are covered, when something is used in a commercial manner. Up to that the profit that is done with something is good if this is not too high. In the calculations I have done up to now to evaluate the acceptable profit I have not thinked about the costs that occure at the Wikimedia Foundation. In a price calculation to estimate the from my point of view acceptable profit these should be included. I will ask other people what they think about and maybe there will be a possibility during Wikimania to talk about that with some people. Hogü-456 (talk) 18:15, 26 July 2022 (UTC)

Confidential Information

@LWyatt (WMF) I read the Terms of Wikimedia Enterprise. There section 6 it is about Confidentiality. What kind of information is classified as confidential. So is for example the response time of the customer support of Wikimedia Enterprise in an individual contract or the price the customer pays a confidential information or not. Please try to answer what is classified as confidential information. I would classify as less as possible as confidential information. The future will show how much acceptance for Wikimedia Enterprise exists. It will depend propably on how transparent Wikimedia Enterprise is. If the revenue at Wikimedia Enterprise will come in the majority from Google maybe there is somewhere in the future the risk that there will be then not enough trust that the Wikimedia Foundation is independent from the interests of Google. I hope that Wikimedia Enterprise will be very transparent and the basic principle that companies pay for the costs that occure through their usage of something is an important principle. Hogü-456 (talk) 21:18, 27 August 2022 (UTC)

Dear Hogü,

Firstly, it is important to clarify the purpose of these “Terms”. The Terms here are the obligations upon the individual user of the free-access “Trial Tier” account of the product. You mentioned two specific examples - response time of the customer support, and the price:

- The response time for customer support obligations is not covered by this since there are currently no customer service promises by Enterprise for the users of the Trial Tier. If there were, these would likely be publicly advertised since providing free customer service to free users would be a feature. As a result, they would not be confidential.

- The individual price a Trial Tier user currently pays is not confidential because it is advertised as free (which is public information). Should there be new pricing tiers accessible on the website in the future for different types of users, then those would be public, non-confidential information as well. We already offer a public (and therefore not confidential) “pricing calculator” where potential customers can see how much things costs - click on the “create estimate” button which is linked from our "Pricing" page to see for yourself.

To give a sense of what could be confidential information under this free-tier agreement, here’s an hypothetical example:

Imagine you are a Trial Tier user who encountered a bug, and you told us one of our support staff in a support ticket. The support person responds that, "We plan on fixing that bug quickly because that is blocking our progress on building <an important feature>, which we plan to launch and announce at the 2023 World API Conference. Please keep the announcement confidential, since disclosing it would ruin the surprise."

In that case, the fact that you "found a bug" is not necessarily confidential information. But the private statement we made via email to you about our business plan is confidential.

Agreements for the paid/commercial tier of the product will tend to be more stringent and include obligations on us, the seller, too. This would likely also include a mutual obligation to keeping confidential very practical things: Personal like contact info; Technical like passwords, bank account details; and Business like how important different features are to a customer’s future products. I have already detailed this in my previous response to you question on this page with reference to the FAQ section which is titled: “What’s in the Contracts?”.

I also want to clarify that a “confidentiality clause” is a standard text in contracts - it is not a general statement about Wikimedia knowledge or the Wikimedia Foundation - it relates only to details of the contract itself. Sincerely, LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 19:09, 29 August 2022 (UTC)

@LWyatt (WMF) thank you for the answer. I hope will you will use that only in a few situations. Hogü-456 (talk) 20:34, 9 September 2022 (UTC)

I love what you're doing but please reconsider the branding

A squirrel doesn't exactly scream "enterprise-grade API" and it is confusing (i.e. I look at the current site and if I was a potential customer and not a Wikipedian, my first reaction would be assume this was some kind of sketchy company not actually related to the Foundation or Wikipedia). When I opened the home page with a giant hero image of a squirrel I literally said "WTF?" out loud. Steven Walling • talk 23:16, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

Hi Steven. Your feedback has been noted and passed on. LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 22:11, 13 October 2022 (UTC)

Financial Report of the Wikimedia LLC

When will you publish the Financial Report of the Wikimedia LLC. The financial statement of the Wikimedia Foundation was published a few days ago. Wikimedia Foundation FY2021-2022 Audit Report.pdf Please publish the amount it costs to offer the services to organisations that dont pay something for that separately in the financial report. This is the fee for the Internet Archive and maybe some trial user and also volunteers. I am interested in the costs of Wikimedia Enterprise splitted into categories and also in the Full time equivalent including third party service providers and in the revenue it generates. From my point of view Wikimedia Enterprise should pay taxes. As I understand the financial statement of the Wikimedia Foundation this is not the case. I have written something about that as far as I remember somewhen a few months and as I read the statement on today I have thinked about it again. In Germany companies that generate profit have to pay taxes. There are public benefit corporations but they are not allowed to make profit or at least not much and the one they generate they have to use for their purpose again.--Hogü-456 (talk) 21:39, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

Hello Hogü-456,

With regards to "when" - The project has been "open for business" since the beginning of this year, and we have always promised that we would make a clearly separated financial reports (in order that the Enterprise information isn't lost among the much larger WMF data) annually too. Our current plan, therefore, is to report about the finances whole calendar year of 2022 for Enterprise in early 2023.

You ask about the fee we charge the Internet Archive (or trial users, volunteers): there is no such fee. You can signup and make a trial account today and test this fact for yourself. As described in the announcement - the I.A. receives ongoing/full access at no charge whatsoever.

As for taxes - Whatever the tax requirements of the Enterprise revenue are... they will be paid in accordance with the law, as overseen by the WMF Finance staff and the WMF's external auditors.

With regards to splitting the costs of Enterprise into different categories: while I can't make promises for what specific information and information-format will be in the report, the intention is indeed to try to show the costs for hosting-infrastructure differentiated from the costs for salaries etc.

I hope this helps, LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 15:39, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

Hello @LWyatt (WMF), is the fiscal year of the Wikimedia LLC the same as the fiscal year of the Wikimedia Foundation or is it different. The contracts located in this category in the Foundationwiki are effective since the July 1 2021. This was the start of the last fiscal year of the Wikimedia Foundation whose financial statement was published a few days ago. Please create a report with the figures of Wikimedia Enterprise since the start of the business in January until June. I think it is better for comparison if you publish it at the same time as the Wikimedia Foundation. If you publish a report at the end of the year again this will be great. From my point of view it is important to report regularly about Wikimedia Enterprise and how the business works. To avoid that it is a less transparent way to get big donations from Big Tech companies regular reports are important and also if possible disclosing the amount you get from a specific company. Hogü-456 (talk) 19:04, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

Hello again Hogü-456. The dates contracts that you linked to refer to the legal beginning of the relationships they refer to, but don't necessarily mean anything actually started on that day specifically. Another example - the legal registration date for the LLC being created is 1 January 2020 (search for "Wikimedia LLC" and number "7828447" here), but that does not mean anything happened then. I am not an accountant, but I assume a financial report for that day would have no substantive content.

As I said in the previous message, the calendar-year of 2022 is the first actual year of being "in business" and therefore a financial report covering 2022 would have something useful to say. But you are correct that July-June reporting would be consistent with WMF's normal practice. Because of this, the intention is to align the financial reporting times to be synchronised. We had just thought it would be preferable to give a "first year" report as soon as it was viable to do so, rather than waiting for 6 more months for the sake of being parallel to WMF general reports. We still aim for a "first report" in January (covering the 2022 year) and we can treat that as a trial - a test report. I am confident that you will review it and provide your suggestions for how it could be improved for the next time e.g. different data, different structure, different details/explanations. That way, at the second report we can be more aligned with the WMF general financial report timing, and also take into account any feedback on the structure that you or others have provided. LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 11:49, 5 November 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for this dialogue, both of you, it answered questions I didn't know I had and was thoughtful and kind :) –SJ talk  10:29, 3 December 2022 (UTC)

Quick update - especially for your benefit Hogü-456 - while I previously said January, my latest assumption is now early February for the "first report" (covering the calendar year 2022). This is because it will take a few weeks to finalise the annual numbers (especially with people returning from end of year holidays) and also because we intend to release some new technical features at that time. Therefore, we can talk about them all at the same time (including an "office-hours" meeting for public conversation). LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 19:08, 15 December 2022 (UTC)

@LWyatt (WMF) When will the "first report" covering the calendar year 2022 be published. Hogü-456 (talk) 14:05, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

Hello Hogü-456 - Tuesday. I said early February and I believe the 7th counts as keeping to that promise. I will send a note here and the actual document will be a post on the ‘Diff’ blog. We will also host a public meeting (“office hours” video call) on Friday. The December numbers were finalised in late January. Furthermore (and particularly because I know you are the person most interested in reading the report), I’m also making sure it is professionally translated and simultaneously published in German. Sincerely, LWyatt (WMF) (talk) 16:27, 4 February 2023 (UTC)

@LWyatt (WMF) thank you for the answer. It is good to know when the report will be published. It is great if it is translated in to German. I do not need it if there is probably no other person interested in reading the report in German. I also understand English and I think it is enough for understanding the content of the report. Hogü-456 (talk) 21:57, 4 February 2023 (UTC)