{"id":8096,"date":"2026-01-15T21:18:19","date_gmt":"2026-01-15T21:18:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wikipedia-ai-deal\/"},"modified":"2026-01-15T21:18:19","modified_gmt":"2026-01-15T21:18:19","slug":"wikipedia-ai-deal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/musictechohio.online\/site\/wikipedia-ai-deal\/","title":{"rendered":"After Being Pillaged By AI Companies, Wikipedia Signs Deal to Get Paid By Them"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Wikipedia has signed training deals<\/a> with a host of major AI companies, helping it recoup some of the exorbitant costs it accrued from being relentlessly pillaged by data scrapers.<\/p>\n

The companies include Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Perplexity, and France\u2019s Mistral AI. As part of the series of licensing deals, revealed Thursday by Wikipedia\u2019s operator the Wikimedia Foundation, the AI developers are joining Wikimedia\u2019s Enterprise program, which provides direct access to its collection of over 65 million articles.<\/p>\n

Using Wikipedia and its contents is of course free, but the official program allows quicker access at a \u201cvolume and speed designed specifically\u201d for \u201clarge-scale reusers and distributors,\u201d like AI chatbots.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Wikipedia had already agreed a licensing deal with Google in 2022, and also signed deals with smaller AI firms like the search engine Ecosia. Now, with the new slew of deals, Wikipedia has partnered up with every big name in town, and it sees the commercial partnerships as a way to keep the lights on, though it didn\u2019t provide specifics on the financials of the deals.<\/p>\n

\u201cWikipedia is a critical component of these tech companies\u2019 work that they need to figure out how to support financially,\u201d Lane Becker, president of Wikimedia Enterprise, told Reuters<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cIt took us a little while to understand the right set of features and functionality to offer if we\u2019re going to move these companies from our free platform to a commercial platform\u2026 but all our Big Tech partners really see the need for them to commit to sustaining Wikipedia\u2019s work.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an interesting direction for the nonprofit, which has faced its fair share of struggle over AI\u2019s increasing stranglehold over the internet. AI companies heavily relied on free sources of information like Wikipedia to train their AI models in the first place, and continue to frequently cite the encyclopedia for their responses. But as more people turn to chatbots for answers, fewer are visiting Wikipedia, which relies on small donations to stay afloat, and non-paid volunteers to maintain its articles.<\/p>\n

Moreover, the large-scale data scraping of Wikipedia by AI web crawlers placed a heavy toll on its servers, which are growing more expensive to maintain. In effect, Wikipedia was paying for the AI industry\u2019s voracious training \u2014 which isn\u2019t what its readers were donating money for, says Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re not donating in order to subsidize these huge AI companies,\u201d Wales told the Associated Press<\/em><\/a>. The donors are saying, \u201cYou know what, actually you can\u2019t just smash our website. You have to sort of come in the right way.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s another reason Wales is onboard with the partnerships: better us than less scrupulous sources.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m very happy personally that AI models are training on Wikipedia data because it\u2019s human curated,\u201d he told the AP<\/em>. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t really want to use an AI that\u2019s trained only on X, you know, like a very angry AI.\u201d (Wales is referring to the website owned by Elon Musk. Musk, by the way, has a vendetta against Wikipedia and launched his own AI-generated \u201cGrokipedia<\/a>\u201d as an anti-woke alternative, which immediately turned out to be racist<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

All told, it\u2019ll be interesting to see how the deal is received by Wikipedia\u2019s editors and writers, who have crusaded against AI content being used on the platform<\/a>, and rebelled against the site owners<\/a> when they tried to deploy AI-generated summaries over articles.<\/p>\n

More on AI:<\/strong> Google Now Stuffing Ads Into Its AI Products<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The post After Being Pillaged By AI Companies, Wikipedia Signs Deal to Get Paid By Them<\/a> appeared first on Futurism<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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