I'm concerned by WMF's cancerous growth, but this particular initiative makes sense to me. Wikipedia already provides free APIs for everybody to use, and they

I'm concerned by WMF's cancerous growth, but this particular initiative makes sense to me. Wikipedia already provides free APIs for everybody to use, and they work fine for typical users who want to grab a page or a hundred, but the Googles of the world are essentially scraping the entire site multiple times a day. This imposes a real cost on WMF, and it's a win-win for both sides if companies pay for support and get better service in return.