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Wikipedia Announced a series of new business agreements with several well-known artificial intelligence companies to commemorate its 25th anniversary companyinclude Amazonmeta platform, confusion, Microsoftand FranceMistral AI.
Online crowdsourced encyclopedia, early long-term mainstay internetare now increasingly dominating the digital landscape Big tech companies and generating artificial intelligence chatbots.
These new licensing deals come amid growing questions about who should bear the costs of the AI boom, especially given the aggressive data collection methods employed by AI developers, often from Wikipedia’s vast, freely available knowledge base. this Wikimedia Foundationthe non-profit organization behind the site, had previously secured Google became a customer in 2022 and has since struck deals with smaller AI companies such as search engine Ecosia.
The latest partnership aims to help one of the world’s most visited websites monetize the massive traffic it gets from artificial intelligence companies. The companies now pay to access Wikipedia content “at volumes and speeds specifically designed to meet their needs,” the Wikimedia Foundation said, without disclosing financial details.
Despite legal disputes elsewhere over copyright and AI training, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales expressed his approval. “I’m personally very pleased that the AI model is being trained on Wikipedia data because it’s been curated by humans,” Mr Wales told The Associated Press.
“I really don’t want to use an AI that’s only trained on X, you know, like a really angry AI,” he added, referring to the billionaire Elon Musksocial media platform. Mr Wales stressed that the site wanted to work with AI companies rather than hinder them, but insisted they “probably should fund and pay your fair share of what you bring to us.”
Last year, the Wikimedia Foundation urged AI developers to pay for access through its enterprise platform, citing an 8% drop in human traffic. At the same time, visits from bots (often disguised to avoid detection) put severe strain on servers as they crawled content to feed large language models.
The trend highlights a shift in online behavior, with AI summarizing and chatbots summarizing information rather than directing users to the original website.
Wikipedia is the ninth most visited website in the world, with more than 65 million articles in 300 languages and maintained by approximately 250,000 volunteers.
While its content is free to everyone, its underlying infrastructure is not. “But our infrastructure is not free, right?” Mariana Iskander, CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, said in an interview in Johannesburg. South Africa. She explained that there are significant costs associated with maintaining servers and other infrastructure that enable individuals and tech companies to “get data from Wikipedia.” Ms Iskander will resign on January 20 and will be replaced by Bernadette Meehan.
Most of Wikipedia’s funding comes from 8 million individual donors. Mr. Wales emphasized their expectations: “They’re not donating money to subsidize these big AI companies.” He added, “You know, you can’t actually just break our site. You have to go in the right way.”
Looking ahead, the Wikimedia Foundation has outlined an artificial intelligence strategy that Mr Wales believes could introduce tools to ease tedious tasks edit. While AI can’t yet write Wikipedia entries from scratch, it can update dead links by scanning the text and finding alternative sources. “We’re not there yet, but I think we’ll see it in the future,” Mr Wales predicted.
AI can also enhance the Wikipedia search experience, evolving from traditional keyword searches to a more conversational, chatbot-like interface. “You could imagine a world where you could ask a question to a Wikipedia search box and it would quote something from Wikipedia,” Mr. Wales explained.
It could respond with something like: “Here’s the answer to your question in this article, and here’s the actual paragraph. This was really useful to me, so I think we’ll move in that direction as well.”
Looking back on Wikipedia’s early days, Mr. Wales described it as an exciting time, with many people actively contributing after he and co-founder Larry Sanger launched it as an experiment. However, he acknowledges that the early internet also had a dark side. “people It was also very toxic back then. We don’t need algorithms to be mean to each other. ” he said. “But, you know, it was a time of excitement and a real spirit of possibility. “
Recently, Wikipedia has faced criticism from the political right, with some calling it “Wokepedia” and accusing it of left-leaning bias. republican US lawmakers are investigating alleged “manipulative practices” in its editing process, claiming they could undermine neutrality and impact artificial intelligence systems that rely on its data.
Prominent critic Elon Musk launched his own artificial intelligence rival, Grokipedia, last year and accused Wikipedia of being filled with “propaganda” urging people to stop donating. However, Mr Welsh sees Grokipedia as a “real threat”, explaining that the large language model it is based on is not yet capable of producing high-quality reference material. “So a lot of it is just Wikipedia rebuttal,” he said. “It’s often messy and a bit nonsense. And I think the more obscure the topic you work on, the worse it gets.” He clarified that his criticism was not directed at Grokipedia, but “just at the way large language models work.”
Mr. Welsh mentioned knowing Mr. Musk for many years, but noted that they had not been in touch since Grokipedia launched. “I should probably call him,” he said thoughtfully, adding that his message was simple: “‘How’s your family?’ I’m a good guy and I don’t want to get into an argument with anybody.”