To guarantee continuous support for its site in the age of AI, despite decreasing traffic, Wikipedia unveiled a straightforward strategy on Monday.
In a blog post, the Wikimedia Foundation, the entity behind the well-known online encyclopedia, urged AI developers to employ its content “responsibly” by guaranteeing proper attribution of contributions and accessing content via its commercial offering, the Wikimedia Enterprise platform.
The paid, opt-in product enables companies to utilize Wikipedia’s content at scale without “severely taxing Wikipedia’s servers,” according to the Wikimedia Foundation blog post. Furthermore, the paid aspect of the product allows AI companies to bolster the organization’s nonprofit goals.
While the post refrains from explicitly threatening penalties or legal repercussions for scraping its material, Wikipedia recently observed that AI bots were scraping its site while attempting to mimic human behavior. After enhancing its bot detection systems, the organization discovered that unusually high traffic volumes in May and June stemmed from AI bots striving to “evade detection.” Meanwhile, it stated that “human page views” had seen an 8% decline year-over-year.
Now, Wikipedia is outlining its guidance for AI developers and providers, stating that generative AI developers should offer attribution to acknowledge the human contributors whose content is utilized to generate its outputs.
“For people to have confidence in information disseminated on the internet, platforms should clearly indicate the source of the information and promote opportunities to explore and contribute to those sources,” the post states. “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, the number of volunteers expanding and enhancing the content may decrease, as may the number of individual donors supporting this endeavor.”
Earlier in the year, the organization shared its AI strategy for editors, outlining its intention to leverage AI to support editors with workflows involving repetitive tasks, automate translation, and deploy other tools that aid its editors, without replacing them.
