Wikipedia Celebrates 25 Years with New AI Partnerships
LONDON (AP) — Wikipedia celebrated its 25th anniversary on Thursday by announcing new business collaborations with several artificial intelligence companies, including Amazon, Meta Platforms, Perplexity, Microsoft, and France’s Mistral AI. The online encyclopedia, known for its crowdsourced content, faces challenges as the dominance of major tech companies and generative AI chatbots, which rely on web-scraped information, continues to grow.
The rise of AI has led to aggressive data collection practices, raising concerns about the costs associated with the booming industry. The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, signed Google as one of its initial clients in 2022, and has since established partnerships with other smaller AI firms, like the search engine Ecosia.
The new agreements aim to help Wikipedia monetize the substantial traffic generated by these AI companies. According to the foundation, these companies are purchasing access to Wikipedia content tailored to their specific needs, although no financial details were disclosed.
Amid growing legal concerns regarding copyright and other issues tied to AI training, Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales expressed a welcoming stance. In an interview with The Associated Press, he stated, “I’m very happy personally that AI models are training on Wikipedia data because it’s human curated.” Wales emphasized the need for AI companies to contribute fairly to the costs incurred by the platform.
Despite a decline in human traffic by 8%, Wikipedia has experienced a surge in visits from bots that scrape its content for AI training. Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander drew attention to the operational costs associated with maintaining the site, highlighting the importance of funding from around 8 million individual donors, who do not intend to subsidize large AI firms.
Looking to the future, Wales noted the potential for AI to enhance user experience on Wikipedia. He described possible advancements, such as AI aiding in updating references or improving the search functionality. “You can imagine a world where you can ask the Wikipedia search box a question and it will quote to you from Wikipedia,” he mentioned.
Wales reflected on the early days of Wikipedia, which he described as a time of excitement mixed with challenges. Recently, Wikipedia has faced criticism from certain political figures who accuse it of bias. Notable detractors, including Elon Musk, have launched competing platforms and criticized Wikipedia’s credibility. However, Wales is not overly concerned about these rival initiatives, believing that AI-generated content typically lacks the quality and reliability of original reference material on Wikipedia.
