Wikipedia Pushes Back Against AI Scraping, Urges Companies to Use Paid API

Wikipedia urges AI companies to use its paid API, and stop scraping | TechCrunch

Wikipedia on Monday laid out a simple plan to ensure its website continues to be supported in the AI era, despite its declining traffic. In a blog post, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs the popular online encyclopedia, called on AI developers to use its content "responsibly" by ensuring its contributions are properly attributed and that content is accessed through its paid product, the Wikimedia Enterprise platform. The opt-in, paid product allows companies to use Wikipedia's content at scale without "severely taxing Wikipedia's servers," the Wikimedia Foundation blog post explains. In addition, the product's paid nature allows AI companies to support the organization's nonprofit mission. While the post doesn't go so far as to threaten penalties or any sort of legal action for use of its material through scraping, Wikipedia recently noted that AI bots had been scraping its website while trying to appear human. After updating its bot detection systems, the organization found that its unusually high traffic in May and June had come from AI bots that were trying to "evade detection." Meanwhile, it said that "human page views" had declined 8% year-over-year. Now, Wikipedia is laying out its guidelines for AI developers and providers, saying that generative AI developers should provide attribution to give credit to the human contributors whose content it uses to create its outputs. "For people to trust information shared on the internet, platforms should make it clear where the information is sourced from and elevate opportunities to visit and participate in those sources," the post reads. "With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work." Earlier this year, the organization released its AI strategy for editors, which said it would use AI to help editors with workflows around tedious tasks, automating translation, and other tools that help its editors, not replace them.

Wikipedia Asks AI Companies to Stop Scraping Data and to Start Paying Up

Imad is a senior reporter covering Google and internet culture. Hailing from Texas, Imad started his journalism career in 2013 and has amassed bylines with The New York Times, The Washington Post, ESPN, Tom's Guide and Wired, among others. The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia, wants AI companies to stop scraping its data to train AI models and to begin paying to use its Application Programming Interface instead, the foundation said in a blog post on Monday. Wikimedia says AI companies need high-quality human-curated information to keep their models working. Wikipedia's extensive volunteer network of editors ensures that its information remains well-sourced, and its content is available in over 300 languages. At the same time, running Wikipedia is a costly endeavor. It's currently the seventh-most visited website in the world, according to Semrush. It cost $179 million to run Wikipedia for the 2023-2024 fiscal year, according to a Wikimedia Foundation audit. Wikimedia keeps Wikipedia afloat primarily through donations and doesn't run advertising. Don't miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source. But AI is changing people's research habits. Instead of researching subjects on Wikipedia, people are turning to AI to answer their questions. Although Wikipedia is free to use, if people circumvent it by using ChatGPT, they won't see donation requests at the top of the Wikipedia home page, and the site could lose money. Wikimedia is asking AI companies to pay to use its Enterprise API, which will allow them "to use Wikipedia content at scale and sustainably without severely taxing Wikipedia's servers, while also enabling them to support our nonprofit mission." Representatives for Google, OpenAI, Meta, Perplexity, Anthropic, Microsoft, DeepSeek and xAI didn't immediately reply to requests for comment, and a representative for Wikimedia also didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Google did agree to a deal with Wikimedia in 2022 to commercially access Wikipedia content. Wikimedia's request comes as online content creators are pushing back against AI companies using online data without permission or payment. Online publishers, such as Penske, the New York Times and News Corp, are suing AI companies for copyright infringement. Other companies, such as the Associated Press and Reuters, have signed licensing deals with AI firms. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET's parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.) During the AI boom, Big Tech stocks have soared to stratospheric heights. Nvidia briefly became the world's first $5 trillion company late last month, with Microsoft and Google's parent company, Alphabet, breaking the $4 trillion barrier earlier this year.

Wikipedia Urges AI Companies to Use Its Paid API Instead of Website Scraping | PYMNTS.com

By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. A Monday (Nov. 10) blog post explained that making Wikimedia Enterprise a paid service sustains Wikipedia's global volunteer editor base and nonprofit funding model. The post highlighted that Wikimedia Enterprise enables organizations to efficiently use Wikipedia's vast repository of human-generated knowledge without overburdening its servers. The foundation asked AI developers to provide proper attribution to Wikipedia content contributors when incorporating information into AI answer outputs to maintain transparency and respect for the human effort behind its content curation. Another blog post from the foundation said that in recent months, there was a significant spike in automated bot traffic from AI companies scraping Wikipedia's pages, many of which attempted to evade detection by mimicking human users. Per the post, updated monitoring revealed that peak traffic in May and June 2025 was largely driven by AI bots, while also indicating an 8% decline in authentic human page views year-over-year. Wikipedia, however, hasn't written off AI completely. Earlier this year, the Wikimedia Foundation launched a strategy for editors to leverage AI tools to automate routine tasks and improve editorial workflows. It should be noted that the Wikimedia Foundation stopped short of threatening legal action against AI developers for site scraping. Other businesses are also taking measures to curb data scraping, execs told PYMNTS. The site scraping woes come on the heels of a legal defeat for the Wikimedia Foundation this summer. The U.K. High Court dismissed a legal challenge by the foundation against parts of the U.K.'s Online Safety Act, which could impose strict compliance regulations on Wikipedia. These could include being required to verify the identities of volunteer contributors and limiting access to the number of U.K. visitors able to access or edit the site.