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The Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees Wikipedia, is facing a surge in bandwidth usage due to AI bots scraping the site for data to train AI models. Representatives from the Wikimedia Foundation have stated that since January 2024, the bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content has increased by 50%. This increase is not attributed to human readers, but rather to automated programs that are scraping the Wikimedia Commons image catalog of openly licensed images.

This unprecedented level of bot traffic is straining Wikipedia's infrastructure and increasing costs. The Wikimedia Foundation has found that at least 65% of the resource-consuming traffic to the website is coming from bots, even though bots only account for about 35% of overall page views. This is because bots often gather data from less popular articles, which requires fetching content from the core data center, consuming more computing resources. In response, Wikipedia’s site managers have begun imposing rate limits or banning offending AI crawlers.

ImgSrc: cdn.mos.cms.fut

References :

• Platformer: How AI bots are suffocating Wikipedia
• The Register - Software: Wikipedia's overlords bemoan AI bot bandwidth burden
• PCMag Middle East ai: Wikipedia Faces Flood of AI Bots That Are Eating Bandwidth, Raising Costs

Classification:

• HashTags: #AI #Wikipedia #WebScraping
• Company: Wikimedia
• Target: Wikipedia
• Attacker: AI Scrapers
• Product: Wikipedia
• Feature: Web Scraping
• Type: AI
• Severity: Medium