Since January 2024, Wikimedia has seen a 50% increase in the bandwidth used to download multimedia content from its servers. This increase is mainly attributed to these scraper bots, and now represents a significant burden on the foundation's operations. — AFP Relaxnews
For more than a year, the Wikimedia Foundation, which publishes the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, has seen a surge in traffic with the rise of AI web-scraping bots. This increase in network traffic poses major infrastructure and cost management issues.
The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit organisation that manages Wikipedia and other projects related to free knowledge. It is highlighting the growing impact of web crawlers on its projects, particularly Wikipedia. These bots are automated programs that mass-retrieve freely licensed articles, images and videos in order to train different generative artificial intelligence models.
