Wikipedia Urges AI Companies to Use Its Paid API and Halt Scraping

On Monday, Wikipedia unveiled a straightforward initiative aimed at ensuring the long-term sustainability of its platform amid declining traffic and the growing influence of artificial intelligence.

In a blog post, the Wikimedia Foundation—the nonprofit behind the widely used online encyclopedia—urged AI developers to use its content “responsibly,” emphasizing proper attribution to contributors and encouraging access through its paid offering, the Wikimedia Enterprise platform.

This opt-in commercial service enables organizations to access Wikipedia content at scale without “overwhelming the site’s servers,” according to the foundation. Moreover, the revenue generated helps sustain Wikimedia’s nonprofit mission.

While the post stopped short of threatening legal action against those who scrape its content, it highlighted recent concerns about AI bots disguising themselves as human users. After upgrading its bot detection systems, Wikimedia observed unusually high traffic in May and June originating from AI crawlers attempting to “evade detection.” Meanwhile, genuine human page views dropped by 8% year-over-year.

Wikimedia is now drafting guidelines for AI developers and providers, stressing that generative AI systems should clearly attribute content to the human volunteers who created it.

“For people to trust information shared online, platforms must be transparent about sources and enhance opportunities for users to access and engage with them,” the post stated. “As fewer people visit Wikipedia, there may be fewer volunteers contributing content and fewer individual donors supporting this vital work.”