Wikipedia turns 25, announces AI partnerships with tech giants

Wikipedia unveiled new business deals with a slew of artificial intelligence companies yesterday (15 January) as it marked its 25th anniversary.

The online crowdsourced encyclopedia revealed that it has signed up AI companies including Amazon, Meta Platforms, Perplexity, Microsoft and France's Mistral AI.

Wikipedia is one of the last bastions of the early internet, but that original vision of a free online space has been clouded by the dominance of Big Tech platforms and the rise of generative AI chatbots trained on content scraped from the web.

Aggressive data collection methods by AI developers, including from Wikipedia's vast repository of free knowledge, has raised questions about who ultimately pays for the artificial intelligence boom.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs the site, signed Google as one of its first customers in 2022 and announced other agreements last year with smaller AI players like search engine Ecosia.

The new deals will help one of the world's most popular websites monetize heavy traffic from AI companies. They're paying to access Wikipedia content "at a volume and speed designed specifically for their needs," the foundation said. It did not provide financial or other details.

While AI training has sparked legal battles elsewhere over copyright and other issues, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he welcomes it.

"I'm very happy personally that AI models are training on Wikipedia data because it's human curated," Wales told The Associated Press in an interview. "I wouldn't really want to use an AI that's trained only on X, you know, like a very angry AI," Wales said, referring to billionaire Elon Musk's social media platform.

Wales said the site wants to work with AI companies, not block them. But "you should probably chip in and pay for your fair share of the cost that you're putting on us."

The Wikimedia Foundation last year urged AI developers to pay for access through its enterprise platform and said human traffic had fallen 8%. Meanwhile, visits from bots, sometimes disguised to evade detection, were heavily taxing its servers as they scrape masses of content to feed AI large language models.

The findings highlighted shifting online trends as search engine AI overviews and chatbots summarize information instead of sending users to sites by showing them links.

Wikipedia is the ninth most visited site on the internet. It has more than 65 million articles in 300 languages that are edited by some 250,000 volunteers.

The site has become so popular in part because its free for anyone to use.

"But our infrastructure is not free, right?" Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander said in a separate interview in Johannesburg, South Africa.

It costs money to maintain servers and other infrastructure that allows both individuals and tech companies to "draw data from Wikipedia," said Iskander, who's stepping down on Jan. 20, and will be replaced by Bernadette Meehan.

The bulk of Wikipedia's funding comes from 8 million donors, most of them individuals.

"They're not donating in order to subsidize these huge AI companies," Wales said. They're saying, "You know what, actually you can't just smash our website. You have to sort of come in the right way."

Editors and users could benefit from AI in other ways. The Wikimedia Foundation has outlined an AI strategy that Wales said could result in tools that reduce tedious work for editors.

While AI isn't good enough to write Wikipedia entries from scratch, it could, for example, be used to update dead links by scanning the surrounding text and then searching online to find other sources.

"We don't have that yet but that's the kind of thing that I think we will see in the future."

Artificial intelligence could also improve the Wikipedia search experience, by evolving from the traditional keyword method to more of a chatbot style, Wales said.

"You can imagine a world where you can ask the Wikipedia search box a question and it will quote to you from Wikipedia," he said. It could respond by saying "here's the answer to your question from this article and here's the actual paragraph. That sounds really useful to me and so I think we'll move in that direction as well. "

Reflecting on the early days, Wales said it was a thrilling time because many people were motivated to help build Wikipedia after he and co-founder Larry Sanger, who departed long ago, set it up as an experiment.

However, while some might look back wistfully on what seems now to be a more innocent time, Wales said those early days of the internet also had a dark side.

"People were pretty toxic back then as well. We didn't need algorithms to be mean to each other," he said. "But, you know, it was a time of great excitement and a real spirit of possibility."

Wikipedia has lately found itself under fire from figures on the political right, who have dubbed the site "Wokepedia" and accused it of being biased in favor of the left.

Republican lawmakers in the U.S. Congress are investigating alleged "manipulation efforts" in Wikipedia's editing process that they said could inject bias and undermine neutral points of view on its platform and the AI systems that rely on it.

A notable source of criticism is Musk, who last year launched his own AI-powered rival, Grokipedia. He has criticized Wikipedia for being filled with "propaganda" and urged people to stop donating to the site.

Wales said he doesn't consider Grokipedia a "real threat" to Wikipedia because it's based on large language models, which are the troves of online text that AI systems are trained on.

"Large language models aren't good enough to write really quality reference material. So a lot of it is just regurgitated Wikipedia," he said. "It often is quite rambling and sort of talks nonsense. And I think the more obscure topic you look into, the worse it is."

He stressed that he wasn't singling out criticism of Grokipedia.

"It's just the way large language models work."

Wales say he's known Musk for years but they haven't been in touch since Grokipedia launched.

"I should probably ping him," Wales said.

What would he say?

"'How's your family?' I'm a nice person, I don't really want to pick a fight with anybody."