Wikipedia has signed deals with major tech companies including Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon for AI content training. Wikimedia Foundation, the operator of the online encyclopedia, said it also signed on AI startup Perplexity and France’s Mistral AI, among other firms, over the past year, having enlisted Meta and Amazon as partners previously.
Wikipedia already has such an agreement with Google, which dates back to 2022. Content from Wikipedia is considered crucial to training AI models, with companies using its 65 million articles across over 300 languages as a key part of training data for generative AI chatbots and assistants developed by tech majors.
However, server demand, as well as costs at the non-profit have risen due to companies scraping high volumes of freely available Wikipedia knowledge for AI training. Wikimedia has been pushing for greater adoption of its enterprise product, which allows tech companies to pay for training access to its content while receiving data in ways that cater to their large-scale training needs.
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“Wikipedia is a critical component of these tech companies’ work that they need to figure out how to support financially,” Lane Becker, president of Wikimedia Enterprise, told Reuters in an interview. “It took us a little while to understand the right set of features and functionality to offer if we’re going to move these companies from our free platform to a commercial platform … but all our Big Tech partners really see the need for them to commit to sustaining Wikipedia’s work.”
Wikipedia’s content is created and maintained by about 250,000 volunteer editors globally, who write, edit and fact-check the information. “Access to high‑quality, trustworthy information is at the heart of how we think about the future of AI at Microsoft … (With Wikimedia), we’re helping create a sustainable content ecosystem for the AI internet, where contributors are valued,” said Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President Tim Frank.
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Last year, the Wikimedia Foundation mentioned that that relentless AI scraping is putting strain on Wikipedia’s servers. Automated bots seeking AI model training data for LLMs have been vacuuming up terabytes of data, growing the foundation’s bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content by 50 percent since January 2024.
A recent Wired report claims that Wikipedia is facing an “existential threat”. Issues like excessive AI-scraping, unverified accusations of political bias, and threat of replacement by AI have made the platform increasingly at risk. Wikipedia has been an essential part of the internet and a handy tools for years, and only time will tell if it will survive the age of AI.