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

The foundation links costly AI scraping to an 8% decline in human visits that threatens its volunteer-driven model.

Wikipedia is not looking to change its open-access model but wants AI companies to compensate.
International newsroom reports only confirmed lack of source data
Wikipedia has asked AI companies to stop scraping content and use its paid API for proper attribution.
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Overview

  • The Wikimedia Foundation asked AI developers to access Wikipedia at scale through the paid Wikimedia Enterprise platform rather than scraping the live site.
  • The guidance calls for clear attribution so AI outputs credit Wikipedia and the volunteer editors whose work they rely on.
  • After upgrading bot-detection this year, Wikimedia found May–June traffic spikes were AI bots evading filters, while human pageviews fell 8% year over year.
  • Co-founder Jimmy Wales urged companies such as Google and OpenAI to pay for use and cover technical costs, calling a full block on AI crawlers “possible but complicated.”
  • Wikimedia framed the request as a voluntary sustainability measure and emphasized that Enterprise access reduces server strain and helps fund nonprofit operations.