Wikipedia touts human advantage in AI era, asks for attribution, money

Wikipedia asking for attribution on AI use, and for scrapers to use their paid service.
Human traffic to Wikipedia is down a little, but it might be helped with proper citations from AI bots. (Picture: Wikipedia)
Wikipedia’s volunteer editor army is indispensable to AI, they write in a blog post, and without it, AI would surely devolve into model collapse.

— Generative AI tools may be able to synthesize or summarize existing knowledge, but they cannot engage in the process of discussion, debate, and consensus that Wikipedia’s volunteer editors undertake every day, they say.

AI comes with some challenges, with TechCrunch reporting that AI scraping of the site is way up, and human traffic is down by 8%.

To counter this, Wikimedia is asking for two things; citations for authors, and paid AI scraping with the Wikimedia Enterprise platform.

Citations are important for humans and «maintains a virtuous cycle that continues those human contributions that create the training data that these new technologies rely on.»

Read more: Wikimedia’s blog post, summary by TechCrunch.