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AI data scrapers are an existential threat to Wikipedia

As AI developers harvest Wikipedia content to train their models, the resulting surge in automated traffic is driving up costs for the non-profit that runs the popular crowdsourced encyclopaedia

4 April 2025

Wikipedia is under threat from the AI boom
Chris Dorney / Alamy

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.

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Google tool makes AI-generated writing easily detectable

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.…

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