Wikipedia Turns 25, Charges Big Tech for AI Training Data Access

• Wikipedia celebrated its 25th anniversary by expanding commercial partnerships with AI companies like Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Perplexity, and Mistral AI.
• These companies joined "Wikimedia Enterprise" to access Wikipedia's vast knowledge base for training Large Language Models (LLMs).
• The move aims to monetize the free scraping of its 65 million articles by AI developers, addressing the "relentless" strain on its infrastructure.
• Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales supports AI training on human-curated, neutral content, contrasting it with social media-trained models.
• The revenue from these deals is crucial as human traffic dropped 8% due to AI chatbots providing direct answers, impacting Wikipedia's sustainability.

Why It Matters: Wikipedia now charges AI giants for data access, ensuring fair compensation for its valuable, human-curated content.