Wikipedia has unveiled a new plan to safeguard its sustainability in the rapidly evolving AI era, calling on artificial intelligence developers to responsibly use and credit its content while supporting its nonprofit mission through paid access.
In a blog post published Monday, the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the online encyclopedia, urged AI companies to attribute Wikipedia’s human contributors and use its material via the Wikimedia Enterprise platform — a paid, opt-in service designed for large-scale data use.
According to the foundation, Wikimedia Enterprise allows organizations to integrate Wikipedia’s content without overloading its servers, while also ensuring that the platform’s revenue helps sustain the free encyclopedia’s global operations.
While the foundation did not threaten legal action against AI companies that scrape its content without authorization, it revealed that AI bots had been scraping Wikipedia while trying to mimic human users, significantly inflating traffic in May and June. After upgrading its bot-detection systems, the foundation discovered that human page views had declined by 8% year-over-year.
Wikipedia emphasized that proper attribution by AI developers is essential to maintain public trust in online information and to encourage continued participation by human contributors.
“For people to trust information shared on the internet, platforms should make it clear where the information is sourced from and elevate opportunities to visit and participate in those sources,” the foundation said. “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.”
Alongside its guidance for AI developers, Wikipedia also outlined an AI strategy for its editors, focusing on using artificial intelligence to assist with repetitive tasks — such as translations and editorial maintenance — without replacing human editors.
The Wikimedia Foundation’s message underscores a key challenge in the digital age: balancing open access to knowledge with sustainable, ethical use as AI systems increasingly rely on human-generated information to power their outputs.
