On Monday, the Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia, unveiled a strategy to tackle the issue of dwindling website traffic amidst the artificial intelligence boom. In a blog post, the foundation appealed to AI developers to employ Wikipedia's content "in a responsible manner." It insisted on proper source attribution and encouraged the acquisition of content via its paid offering, the Wikimedia Enterprise platform, instead of directly scraping data from the website.

This paid service serves as a voluntary option, designed to prevent the significant strain on Wikipedia's servers that could result from extensive usage. Simultaneously, it offers AI companies a means to financially support Wikipedia's non-profit endeavors. Earlier, Wikipedia detected that AI bots were masquerading as human users to scrape information. This led to an unusually high surge in traffic during May and June of this year, while traffic from actual human users dropped by 8% compared to the same period last year.