Wikipedia plans to start charging companies such as Google, Amazon and Apple for special access, the first time the giant online encyclopedia has launched a paid-for product in more than a decade.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organisation behind Wikipedia, said it planned to charge for tools that would make it easier for services like search engines and voice assistants to plug into the encyclopedia, although the service itself will remain free.

Wikipedia has historically been financed by donations and says it will not introduce advertising or sell users’ data. However, major tech companies have been criticised for piggybacking off the encyclopedia.

In 2018, YouTube began showing information from Wikipedia to debunk conspiracy theory videos, without informing the Wikimedia Foundation itself. Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri both use information from the encyclopedia, while Google includes them in search results.

The foundation has said more people accessing Wikipedia’s material without visiting the website itself – and thus being encouraged to donate - means it is important to diversify how it is funded. “What many of the largest commercial technology organisations require in order to effectively utilise Wikimedia content goes beyond what we currently provide,” it said as it announced the new service.

Wikimedia Enterprise could start charging commercial customers as soon as June, the foundation said, although it added that it will continue to be financed largely by donations. The organisation said it was in discussions with big tech companies, but was still looking at the cost.

Customers would pay for a set of tools known as an application programming interface (API), which allows information from Wikipedia to automatically work with other software. While Wikipedia already has a free API that is already in use, the enterprise product will provide a feed of updates in formats more suited to companies using it for their own means.

The foundation, which runs Wikipedia in hundreds of languages as well as other projects, had a paid-for product that let customers build their own databases, but it shut down the service in 2014.

The Wikimedia Foundation spent $91.4m (£65.7m) on salaries, hosting, grants and other expenses in the year to July 2019, the last set of available accounts, and brought in $120m. Both Google and Amazon have announced donations to the encyclopedia.