Wikipedia Urges AI Companies To Use Its Paid API, and Stop Scraping

Wikipedia on Monday laid out a simple plan to ensure its website continues to be supported in the AI era, despite its declining traffic. From a report: 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.

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