Wikipedia’s parent organization, the Wikimedia Foundation, has urged artificial intelligence developers to use its content responsibly by providing attribution and accessing it through its paid Wikimedia Enterprise platform.
In a blog post, the Foundation said the product allows companies to use Wikipedia’s content at scale without straining its servers, while also supporting the nonprofit’s mission.
The statement follows a rise in AI bots scraping Wikipedia’s content, often disguising themselves as human users. The organization said AI-driven traffic had inflated visitor numbers earlier this year while genuine human traffic declined by 8%.
Wikipedia said it expects AI firms to credit the human contributors whose work powers generative AI systems and to promote opportunities for users to visit and support the encyclopedia directly.
“With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer donors may support this work,” the post stated.
Earlier this year, Wikimedia outlined its own AI strategy, emphasizing that it would use artificial intelligence to assist editors — not replace them.
