Wikipedia tells AI companies to stop scraping and start paying
The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that operates Wikipedia, laid out a new plan on Monday for how artificial intelligence developers should interact with its content. The move comes as the online encyclopedia faces declining human traffic and a massive increase in automated scraping by AI bots.
In a blog post, the foundation called on AI companies to use its content “responsibly.” It outlined two main guidelines: first, that AI developers must provide proper attribution to credit the human volunteer contributors whose work is used in AI-generated outputs. Second, it urged companies to access Wikipedia’s content at scale by using its paid product, the Wikimedia Enterprise platform, rather than by “scraping” the live website, which “severely taxes Wikipedia’s servers.”
The foundation noted that the paid platform allows AI companies to use the content they need while also financially supporting Wikipedia’s nonprofit mission. The post did not threaten legal action against scrapers but framed the guidelines as a matter of sustainability.
This new plan follows a recent discovery by Wikipedia that its unusually high traffic in May and June was not from human readers. After updating its bot-detection systems, the organization found the traffic came from AI bots “trying to evade detection.” During that same period, Wikipedia’s “human page views” had declined by 8% year-over-year.
The foundation warned that this trend threatens its operating model. “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work,” the post stated.
Earlier this year, Wikipedia also released its internal AI strategy, which focuses on using AI as a tool to assist its human editors with tedious tasks and automation, not to replace them.