Wikipedia Brings No Content Scraping Policy For AI Models: Pay If You Want To Use The Data

Wikipedia, after a pretty long time, is getting more than serious about the boundaries it wants to set against AI models. The platform has issued a clear message for AI developer companies, suggesting

to stop scraping its pages and start using its paid API service. The Wikimedia Foundation which operates the free online encyclopedia, has asked all AI developers to access its content responsibly via the paid Wikimedia Enterprise platform to ensure continued support for the website. In an official blog post published on Monday, the Wikimedia Foundation said that AI developers are supposed to properly credit Wikipedia's contributors and get the data via official channels instead of automated scraping. The enterprise product authorises the large-scale utilization of Wikipedia's content without overloading its servers. The foundation also said that the revenue from its paid product supports the nonprofit operations. This step has been taken by Wikipedia after the platform realised that AI bots have been scraping its website while pretending to be human users. After solidifying its bot detection systems, the organisation found that most of the increased traffic is coming from bots attempting to bypass the detection. In the same timeframe, the website witnessed an 8 percent decline in human visits, which comes out as a major concern for the platform.

What Are The Main Concerns Of Wikimedia Foundation?

The Wikimedia Foundation said that it is expecting all the AI developers to give credit where its due to all the human editors who have worked on the data. The blog said, 'For people to trust information shared online, platforms must make it clear where that information originates and highlight opportunities to visit and participate in those sources.'Also Read: Intel AI Chief Joins OpenAI To Work On Models Possessing Human-Like Intelligence, All Details HereWikipedia said, fewer human visits mean less volunteers and lesser donors to support its mission. Previously, the platform also brought an AI strategy focused on assisting the editors with repetitive tasks, workflow improvements, and language translation. In the future, we can expect the AI models making peace with Wikipedia APIs or the platform going legal against freeloading AI developers.