Wikipedia has laid out a plan to ensure its website continues to be supported in the age of AI, despite declining traffic. In a post on its blog, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that manages the most used online encyclopedia on the planet, asked AI developers to use their content responsiblyensuring that your contributions are correctly attributed and that content is accessed through your paid product, the platform Wikimedia Enterprise.
This service allows companies to use Wikipedia content on a large scale “without seriously overloading Wikipedia’s servers”explains the Foundation. Additionally, the paid nature of the product allows AI companies to support the organization’s non-profit mission and avoid scraping, a serious problem in the jungle of the AI era that in practice ends up being a “theft” of content without compensation to its authors.
While the encyclopedia stops short of threatening sanctions or any kind of legal action for the use of its material through web crawling, Wikipedia recently noted that AI bots had been crawling its website while attempting to appear human. After updating its bot detection systems, the organization discovered that its unusually high traffic in May and June came from AI bots trying to evade detection. Meanwhile, human page visits had decreased by 8% year-on-year.
Now Wikipedia is setting out its guidelines for AI companies, stating that generative AI developers must provide attribution to give credit to human contributors whose content they use to create their results:
“For people to trust information shared on the Internet, platforms should make it clear where the information comes from and offer opportunities to visit and engage with those sources”they say from Wikipedia. “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may develop and enrich content, and fewer individual donors will support this work.”they conclude.
Earlier this year, the organization published its AI strategy for publishersin which it announced that it would use AI to help them with workflows related to tedious tasks, automate translation and other tools that Help your editors, not replace them.
