Wikipedia on Monday outlined a straightforward strategy to safeguard its platform in the age of artificial intelligence, amid signs of declining human traffic.
In a blog post, the Wikimedia Foundation — the nonprofit organization behind the globally popular encyclopedia — urged AI companies to use its content “responsibly” by ensuring proper attribution and accessing it through its paid service, Wikimedia Enterprise.
The Enterprise platform is a subscription-based product that allows large-scale use of Wikipedia’s data without overloading its servers. According to the foundation, the paid model not only supports responsible usage but also helps sustain its nonprofit mission through financial contributions from AI firms.
Although the post stopped short of warning about legal repercussions for web scraping, Wikipedia recently disclosed that several AI bots had been disguising themselves as human users to harvest its data. After strengthening its bot-detection systems, the foundation discovered that a surge in traffic during May and June was largely generated by AI activity rather than real users. During the same period, human page views dropped by 8% year-over-year.
To address this, Wikipedia has now issued clear guidelines for AI developers, emphasizing that generative AI systems must credit the human contributors whose work underpins their outputs.
“For people to trust information online, platforms need to clearly show where that information comes from and encourage users to engage directly with the original sources,” the foundation said. “When fewer people visit Wikipedia, it means fewer volunteers contributing to its growth and fewer donors supporting its mission.”
Earlier this year, Wikimedia also published its AI strategy for editors, outlining how the organization plans to leverage AI tools to assist its community — automating repetitive tasks, improving translations, and streamlining workflows — all while keeping human editors at the heart of the platform’s creation process.
