Wikipedia inks deals with Big Tech

Wikimedia just announced licensing deals with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Perplexity, and Mistral AI, formalizing what had long been a one sided relationship where tech giants scraped its 65M articles without compensation.

The foundation reported an 8% decline in human traffic, attributed to AI chatbots that answer questions directly without sending users to sources.

Disguised bots have been heavily taxing Wikipedia’s servers as they scrape massive amounts of content to train large language models.

Founder Jimmy Wales endorsed the arrangement, noting he’s happy AI trains on Wikipedia's human curated content compared to alternatives like X.

Wikipedia is also exploring AI tools that could reduce tedious editor tasks, like automatically updating dead links by scanning surrounding text.