Wikipedia encourages AI developers to use paid APIs

The Wikimedia Foundation, which supports the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, has issued a statement urging AI developers who use Wikipedia to provide proper attribution and use paid APIs.

In the AI era, Wikipedia has never been more valuable – Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation emphasizes the importance of Wikipedia being entirely written by humans in an age where AI is generating text and video.

For example, AI cannot participate in the daily discussions between editors on Wikipedia, or in the source research and photographic capture required to supplement information.

Since generative AI only generates sentences that sound natural to humans, the generated content often contains inaccuracies. Furthermore, there is also the problem that the process that explains why the content was generated is not disclosed, so transparency cannot be guaranteed, making it impossible to entrust generative AI with writing Wikipedia articles.

The Wikimedia Foundation called on AI developers to use and support Wikipedia responsibly, citing the strength of the site being written, edited, and reviewed by humans.

Responsible use and support can be achieved through two actions: attribution and financial support.

Attribution is the practice of citing Wikipedia as the source of generative AI output. The Wikimedia Foundation points out, 'This maintains a virtuous cycle of human contributions to the creation of training data. For people to trust information, it must be clearly attributable and accessible to its source. Fewer visitors to Wikipedia could mean fewer volunteers to grow and enrich its content, and potentially fewer individual donors to support this work.'

To support Wikipedia financially, companies are encouraged to use the Wikimedia Enterprise platform , which provides paid APIs that allow companies to use content on a large scale without overloading Wikipedia's servers. Additionally, companies can support Wikipedia directly by paying a fee.

The Wikimedia Foundation stated that 'Wikipedia is the last great place on the Internet,' expressing its desire to continue providing accurate human knowledge.