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Wikipedia on Monday laid out a simple plan to ensure its website continues to be supported in the AI era, despite its declining traffic. <\/p>\n
In a blog post, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs the popular online encyclopedia, called on AI developers to use its content \u201cresponsibly\u201d by ensuring its contributions are properly attributed and that content is accessed through its paid product, the Wikimedia Enterprise platform<\/a>.<\/p>\n The opt-in, paid product<\/a> allows companies to use Wikipedia\u2019s content at scale without \u201cseverely taxing Wikipedia\u2019s servers,\u201d the Wikimedia Foundation blog post explains<\/a>. In addition, the product\u2019s paid nature allows AI companies to support the organization\u2019s nonprofit mission. <\/p>\n While the post doesn\u2019t go so far as to threaten penalties or any sort of legal action for use of its material through scraping, Wikipedia recently noted<\/a> that AI bots had been scraping its website while trying to appear human. After updating its bot detection systems, the organization found that its unusually high traffic in May and June had come from AI bots that were trying to \u201cevade detection.\u201d Meanwhile, it said that \u201chuman page views\u201d had declined 8% year-over-year. <\/p>\n Now, Wikipedia is laying out its guidelines for AI developers and providers, saying that generative AI developers should provide attribution to give credit to the human contributors whose content it uses to create its outputs. <\/p>\n \u201cFor people to trust information shared on the internet, platforms should make it clear where the information is sourced from and elevate opportunities to visit and participate in those sources,\u201d the post reads. \u201cWith fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.\u201d<\/p>\n Earlier this year, the organization released its AI strategy for editors<\/a>, which said it would use AI to help editors with workflows around tedious tasks, automating translation, and other tools that help its editors, not replace them. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n