Wikimedia Foundation – Weekly Geek

Wikipedia will share content with AI firms in new licensing deals

The cost of “free” knowledge The push for paid licensing follows years of rising infrastructure costs as AI companies scraped Wikipedia content at an industrial scale. In April 2025, the foundation reported that bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content had grown 50 percent since January 2024, with bots accounting for 65 percent of the most… Read More »

AI bots strain Wikimedia as bandwidth surges 50%

Crawlers that evade detection Making the situation more difficult, many AI-focused crawlers do not play by established rules. Some ignore robots.txt directives. Others spoof browser user agents to disguise themselves as human visitors. Some even rotate through residential IP addresses to avoid blocking, tactics that have become common enough to force individual developers like Xe… Read More »