Wikipedia has outlined new guidelines to ensure its content is responsibly used in the growing age of artificial intelligence. In a blog post on Monday, the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind the online encyclopedia, urged AI developers to properly credit its content and access it through its paid platform, Wikimedia Enterprise, rather than scraping the website directly.
The paid Enterprise service allows AI companies to use Wikipedia’s vast database at scale without overloading its servers, while also helping to financially support the non-profit’s mission. This move comes as Wikipedia experiences a drop in human traffic, even as automated bots increasingly pull its data to train AI systems. The foundation disclosed that recent surges in web traffic were traced to AI bots masquerading as human users.
Wikipedia’s new guidelines stress that AI developers must give clear attribution to human contributors whose work powers much of the world’s online knowledge. The foundation warned that if human visits continue to decline, there could be fewer volunteer editors and donors contributing to the site’s sustainability and accuracy.
Earlier this year, Wikimedia also introduced an internal AI strategy to support, not replace, its human editors. The plan includes using AI tools to assist with translations, streamline editorial workflows, and automate repetitive tasks, ensuring that technology enhances the encyclopedia’s collaborative spirit rather than undermining it