Enterprise and the commons

In 2021, the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia, Wikidata and several other complementary projects, launched a commercial subsidiary called Enterprise. Twenty years after the creation of Wikipedia, why has this iconic player in collaborative web and non-commercial internet taken this turn? This article analyses this initiative as the latest chapter in a long history of mutual ties between a digital commons and Big Tech. It traces the trajectory of Wikimedia’s ‘platformization’ and analyses how its interactions with dominant corporate players, particularly Google, have shaped its dynamics. The political economy perspective allows us to analyse the forms of power exercised in these relationships and their effects on the movement, from the point of view of building an alternative to the prevailing models of platform capitalism. The creation of Enterprise thus goes beyond a strictly defensive approach to the commons, using commercial leverage as an offensive tool to support alternatives.