Wikipedia Asks AI Developers to Stop Scraping the Site for Free

Wikipedia is one of the premier internet institutions, relied on by millions of people worldwide for accurate, up-to-date information. The latest generative AI models also rely on this resource, but they're placing too great a strain on its servers and not delivering a significant return on all the site's hard work and server costs. So, Wikipedia has officially asked: Can they please use the API instead?

Wikipedia Enterprise is a paid API that allows AI developers to scrape Wikipedia's content at will, without licensing fees or potential server outages. It's trustworthy, human-curated, annotated, and reliably accurate data. More importantly, it stops the site from being battered by AI requests that only serve to help the companies running them, not Wikipedia, and not its users.

"Wikipedia's strength is its volunteer editor communities, hundreds of thousands strong, who constantly improve the site's information", the Foundation said ...