Wikipedia on Monday laid out a simple plan to ensure its website continues to be supported in the AI era, despite declining traffic.
In a blog post, the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the popular online encyclopedia, called on AI developers to use their content “responsibly” by ensuring their contributions are properly attributed and accessed through the Wikimedia Enterprise Platform, a paid product.
The opt-in, paid product allows businesses to use Wikipedia content at scale without “putting significant strain on Wikipedia’s servers,” a Wikimedia Foundation blog post explains. Additionally, because the product is paid, AI companies can support organizations’ nonprofit missions.
While the post stopped short of threatening penalties or any legal action for the use of scraped material, Wikipedia recently pointed out that AI bots were scraping websites while posing as humans. After updating its bot detection system, the organization discovered that unusually high traffic in May and June came from AI bots attempting to “evade detection.” On the other hand, it announced that “human page views” decreased by 8% from the previous year.
Wikipedia is currently developing guidelines for AI developers and providers, stating that generative AI developers must provide attribution to credit the human contributors whose content was used to create their output.
“To help people trust the information they share on the internet, platforms need to make it clear where the information comes from and increase opportunities to visit and engage with those sources,” the post reads. “If there is less access to Wikipedia, there will be fewer volunteers to add to and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors will support this work.”
The organization released an AI strategy for editors earlier this year, saying it would use AI to help editors with their workflows around tedious tasks, automate translations and provide other tools that support rather than replace editors.
