As part of Wikipedia's 25th anniversary, parent company Wikimedia a slew of partnerships with AI-focused companies like Amazon, Meta, Perplexity, Microsoft and others. The deals are meant to alleviate some of the cost associated with AI chatbots accessing Wikipedia content in enormous volumes by giving the tech companies streamlined access. As noted by , the timeline on these deals is a little squirrely.
Wikimedia has called on AI companies to take responsibility for using Wikipedia content in their language models. This can be achieved by stopping scraping and using the paid API instead. In a blog post, the organization states that artificial intelligence cannot exist without the human knowledge collected and maintained on platforms such as Wikipedia. To maintain that balance, Wikimedia asks developers of generative AI to clearly cite their sources and contribute to the continued existence of the open knowledge project via the paid Wikimedia Enterprise platform.
In a blog post, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs the popular online encyclopedia, called on AI developers to use its content "responsibly" by ensuring its contributions are properly attributed and that content is accessed through its paid product, the Wikimedia Enterprise platform. The opt-in, paid product allows companies to use Wikipedia's content at scale without "severely taxing Wikipedia's servers," the Wikimedia Foundation blog post explains.