Overview
- the wikimedia foundation said it signed licensing agreements with amazon, meta, microsoft, perplexity, and mistral ai to provide tailored, high‑speed access to wikipedia data.
- google became an enterprise customer in 2022, and the foundation said the expanded roster reflects a push to move large users from free scraping to paid, reliable feeds.
- financial terms were not disclosed, but officials said the deals target costs driven by surging bot traffic and an 8% year‑over‑year drop in human page views reported in october 2025.
- jimmy wales welcomed ai training on wikipedia’s human‑curated content and urged major developers to help shoulder the operational costs their usage creates.
- leadership is shifting as maryana iskander departs and bernadette meehan becomes ceo on january 20, with the project still relying on about 250,000 volunteers and facing competition from ai‑generated rivals like grokipedia.