AI data scrapers are an existential threat to Wikipedia

Wikipedia is one of the greatest knowledge resources ever assembled, containing crowdsourced contributions from millions of humans worldwide – and it faces a growing threat from artificial intelligence developers.

The non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, says since January 2024 it has seen a 50 per cent increase in network traffic requesting image and video downloads from its catalogue. That surge mostly comes from automated data scraper programs, which developers use to collect training data for their AI models.…