Wikimedia Faces Mounting Strain from AI Crawlers as Bandwidth Usage Soars 50%

Wikimedia Foundation bemoans AI bot bandwidth burden

: Crawlers snarfing long-tail content for training and whatnot cost us a fortune

AI bots strain Wikimedia as bandwidth surges 50%

Automated AI bots seeking training data threaten Wikipedia project stability, foundation says.

Wikipedia Faces Flood of AI Bots That Are Eating Bandwidth, Raising Costs

'Our content is free, our infrastructure is not,' the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia says, warning that AI scrapers are wasting the site's bandwidth.

Artificial intelligence: The online encyclopedia can handle the increasing number of people visiting Wikipedia. But the onslaught of bots from…

AI crawlers cause Wikimedia Commons bandwidth demands to surge 50%

The Wikimedia Foundation says bandwidth consumption for multimedia downloads has surged by 50% since January, 2024.

Wikipedia is struggling with voracious AI bot crawlers

Wikimedia has seen a 50 percent increase in bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content since January 2024, the foundation said in an update. But it's not because human readers have suddenly developed a voracious appetite for consuming Wikipedia articles and for watching videos or downloading files from Wikimedia Commons. No, the spike in usage came from AI crawlers, or automated programs scraping Wikimedia's openly licensed images, videos…