- Sure. AI companies have ALWAYS been training their models on Wikipedia content, which under the free and open access model is available to anyone — including AI companies. Agreements like these require AI companies to limit and offset the strain they place on Wikimedia infrastructure.
- Hoping that @molly.wiki can help explain.
- I think people are erroneously interpreting the headline to mean that the Wikimedia Foundation is embracing AI for purposes like generating encyclopedia content, or are providing AI companies with more training data than they were already scraping.
- Neither is true. The first isn’t even really possible without community buy-in, and so far the English Wikipedia community has been extremely resistant to AI or AI-assisted editing. As for the latter, all Wikimedia content has always been free, and was already widely used for AI training.
- With “Wikimedia Enterprise”, AI companies have to use (and pay for) dedicated APIs to scrape data, which helps to limit the strain on Wikimedia servers. (See eg arstechnica.com/information-...) This is a good thing for Wikimedia and for its readers.
- These programs help to offset what I’ve previously described as a vampiric relationship between AI companies and the commons: www.citationneeded.news/free-and-ope...
Jan 15, 2026 18:53
- And FWIW these programs have been in place since 2021. While the WMF just announced new participants, I’m not sure why some of these articles suggest that the program is new, or that this signals that the WMF is “embracing AI”
