Wikipedia wants AI to stop mooching (and maybe pay up a little)

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Wikipedia has a message for the robots: if you’re going to gorge on our knowledge buffet, at least leave a tip.

In a Monday blog post, the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit brain behind everyone’s favorite online encyclopedia, unveiled its plan to stay relevant (and solvent) in the AI age. 

The pitch is simple: AI companies can keep using Wikipedia’s content, but they need to play nice, give credit where it’s due, and ideally pay for access through Wikimedia Enterprise, the foundation’s subscription-based product for large-scale content use.

Wikimedia Enterprise isn’t new, but it’s suddenly looking like a crucial lifeline. 

The idea is that companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic can tap into Wikipedia’s data firehose without clogging its servers with endless scraping. 

In return, the fees help fund Wikipedia’s mission to keep human-curated knowledge freely available, for humans, that is.

This friendly reminder comes after Wikipedia noticed a surge of what looked like user traffic earlier this year, except the “users” turned out to be sneaky AI bots pretending to be people. 

After tightening its bot-detection systems, the site realized that while the machines were busy feasting, actual human visits had dropped by 8% year over year.

Now, the foundation is spelling out what it wants from AI developers: proper attribution for the countless volunteer editors who keep the world’s trivia (and actual facts) organized. 

“For people to trust information online,” Wikimedia said, “it should be clear where it comes from.” 

If your chatbot knows who invented Velcro, it’s because some Wikipedia editor wrote it up for free (maybe send some love back their way).

Meanwhile, Wikipedia isn’t anti-AI. It’s just anti-freeloader. 

The foundation is already experimenting with AI tools to make life easier for its editors, automating dull tasks like translation or formatting, but always with humans in the driver’s seat.

Wikipedia doesn’t want to fight the robots. It just wants them to chip in for the Wi-Fi.