Tag: wikipedia

Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral and Perplexity join Wikipedia’s AI program

Some of the companies joined last year, but this is the first time it’s made public. (Picture: Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 4.0)
The Wikimedia Enterprise collaboration grew by five new members in time for Wikipedia’s 25th anniversary, joining to receive structured data directly from the web’s largest knowledge repository.

— In the AI era, Wikipedia’s human-created and curated knowledge has never been more valuable, Wikimedia, the encyclopedia’s parent, writes in a blog post.

They currently have more than 65 million articles in 300 languages, and get more than 15 billion views a month.

The Wikimedia Enterprise program is both a way to support Wikipedia’s efforts, as it is a paid service, and gives access to some powerful data.

The on-demand API gives labs the most recent version of specific articles, the snapshot API provides a downloadable file for every language and is updated hourly, and the realtime API is a stream of updates as they happen.

Together, they provide better access than just scraping the data off the public servers, and Wikipedia hopes for more to join, if only to stave off having to pay for extensive scanning of its archives — which is more costly.

Read more: Reuters, CNBC, The Verge.

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.

Wikipedia scraps AI summaries after editor pushback

No more AI summaries for Wikipedia unless they figure out editorial control.
Wikipedia’s editors wanted editorial control over the AI summaries, and wanted to ensure accuracy. (Picture: Wikipedia)
You’ve probably seen lots of AI summaries on articles by news sites all over the web by now, but when Wikimedia thought it would be a good feature, its editors rebelled.

— This would do immediate and irreversible harm to our readers and to our reputation as a decently trustworthy and serious source, one editor wrote in the discussion about the announcement, as reported by 404 Media.

The experiment was supposed to run on 10% of the mobile site for two weeks to gather reactions and responses, but it was canned early due to an onslaught of comments like this.

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Wikipedia to use AI — to augment editors, not content

Ai on wikipedia? To automate "tedious tasks," not for writing.
The Wikimedia foundation sees use for AI in translating articles. (Picture: Wikimedia)
The recent strategy on AI use at Wikipedia primarily focuses on making the editing and writing process easier by automating «tedious tasks.» And they won’t use AI to produce content, with one major caveat.

— The community of volunteers behind Wikipedia is the most important and unique element of Wikipedia’s success, the document begins.

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