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Wikipedia Turns 25, Strikes AI Licensing Deals With Microsoft, Meta and Amazon

The paid access is designed to cover rising server costs caused by AI-driven scraping.

Overview

  • The Wikimedia Foundation said Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity and Mistral joined its Wikimedia Enterprise service over the past year, with Google already a client since 2022.
  • OpenAI has not reached a licensing agreement, even as major AI developers rely on Wikipedia for training data.
  • Enterprise provides structured, high-volume feeds tailored for commercial use, creating a revenue stream to support the donation-funded, volunteer-run encyclopedia.
  • The foundation reported an 8% drop in human visits and warned that undisclosed bot scraping is straining infrastructure, while Spain’s edition has seen visits fall by about half.
  • Wikipedia counts more than 65 million articles across 300+ languages edited by roughly 250,000 volunteers, and the foundation plans editor-assistive AI tools as CEO Maryana Iskander departs Jan. 20 for Bernadette Meehan.