Wikipedia Signs AI Deals with Amazon, Meta on 25th Birthday

Wikipedia celebrated its 25th birthday this week by announcing something that could secure its future for the next 25 years. The beloved free encyclopedia signed licensing deals with Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Perplexity, and France's Mistral AI.

For years, AI companies quietly scraped Wikipedia's massive library of 65 million articles across 300 languages to train their chatbots. The bots were taxing Wikipedia's servers so heavily that human traffic dropped 8% last year while disguised bot visits skyrocketed.

Founder Jimmy Wales saw a problem with this picture. The site runs on donations from 8 million people who give because they love Wikipedia, not to subsidize billion-dollar tech companies.

"They're not donating in order to subsidize these huge AI companies," Wales told the Associated Press. His message to Big Tech was simple: chip in and pay your fair share.

Now those companies are paying to access Wikipedia content at the volume and speed they need. The deals let Wikipedia keep its servers running without constantly begging donors to cover costs created by corporate giants.

Wales actually welcomes AI training on Wikipedia's human-curated content. "I wouldn't really want to use an AI that's trained only on X, you know, like a very angry AI," he joked, referring to Elon Musk's platform.

The Ripple Effect

This matters beyond Wikipedia's bank account. The deals prove that beloved nonprofit platforms can survive in an AI-dominated internet without selling out their mission.

Wikipedia remains completely free for the 250,000 volunteer editors who maintain it and the billions who read it monthly. It's still the ninth most visited site on the internet, still run by a nonprofit foundation, still built by people who care.

The money from AI companies will help Wikipedia explore using AI to help those volunteers. Future tools could automatically update dead links by scanning text and finding new sources, saving editors countless tedious hours.

Search could get smarter too. Instead of just keywords, imagine asking Wikipedia a question and getting quoted paragraphs with sources, like chatting with a knowledgeable friend who always cites their work.

Outgoing CEO Maryana Iskander put it simply: infrastructure costs money, even when the content is free. Now the companies drawing massive amounts of data are helping foot that bill.

Wales reflected on Wikipedia's journey from scrappy experiment to essential internet institution. While some romanticize the early internet, he remembers it wasn't all innocent: "People were pretty toxic back then as well. We didn't need algorithms to be mean to each other."

What made Wikipedia special was people choosing to build something good together, and 25 years later, that spirit endures with a sustainable path forward.