Wikipedia is making it clear that AI companies need to give proper credit and compensation when using its content.
In a recent blog post, the Wikimedia Foundation warned that human-curated knowledge like Wikipedia is essential for keeping AI systems accurate. While generative AI models are good at summarizing information, they can’t actually research, verify, or debate facts on their own, Wikimedia writes.
AI cannot exist without the human effort that goes into building open and nonprofit information sources like Wikipedia. That’s why Wikipedia is one of the highest-quality datasets in the world for training AI, and when AI developers try to omit it, the resulting answers are significantly less accurate, less diverse, and less verifiable.
Wikimedia
That’s why the foundation is urging AI developers to label Wikipedia content correctly and license it fairly, using tools like the Wikimedia Enterprise API. Without proper recognition and financial support, Wikipedia says the open knowledge model could be at risk.
This new push comes just after Elon Musk launched "Grokipedia," a conservative-focused knowledge service that pulls heavily from Wikipedia without giving back.
Wikipedia has already seen a drop in visitors as more AI systems show its content directly, rather than bringing people to the site - an issue also affecting news publishers.
