Wikipedia faced an unexpected threat due to AI modes. According to the Wikimedia Foundation, the platform’s bandwidth usage has increased by 50 percent since the beginning of 2024.
AI bots will bring about the end of Wikipedia
However, the source of this increase was not human readers, but productive AI bots. This situation strains the platform’s infrastructure by using Wikipedia’s rich content pool. Bots create a huge load on the system by scanning all kinds of data from images to articles.
These bots focus on rarely visited pages instead of popular content. This further strains Wikimedia’s infrastructure, leading to serious costs. According to the Wikimedia Foundation’s investigations, it is stated that 65 percent of Wikipedia’s resource consumption comes from bots.
As a result, security teams have to detect and block new bots every day. This situation slows down page access for real users. Another problem is that AI companies use content from Wikipedia without proper attribution.
Wikipedia is an organization that survives on donations, so it tries to encourage community contributions. However, since bots do not receive information and provide feedback, this model is not sustainable. The Wikimedia Foundation will try to develop alternative solutions to this problem.
So what do you think about this issue? What do you think the Wikimedia administration should do in this situation? You can share your views with us in the comments section below.
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