Key insights
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1
Wikimedia Enterprise is positioned as a paid alternative to scraping and free APIs: Wikimedia Enterprise sells higher-speed, higher-volume API access than free public APIs, and the foundation is using licensing deals to move major AI developers onto the commercial platform.
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2
Bot activity is stated as a major driver of infrastructure strain and traffic measurement changes: The foundation reported a 50 percent increase in multimedia bandwidth since January 2024 and said bots generated 65 percent of the most expensive infrastructure requests; it also disclosed an 8 percent year-over-year drop in human traffic after improved bot detection.
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3
Wales supports AI training on Wikipedia but rejects uncompensated use at scale: Jimmy Wales said he welcomes AI models training on Wikipedia data but said companies should pay their fair share of the costs they create.
Takeaways
The Wikimedia Foundation is expanding paid licensing for Wikipedia content used in AI training while reporting significant bot-driven infrastructure costs and changes in measured human traffic.