The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, said it has signed extensive contracts with AI companies to mark its 25th anniversary.
Companies that have signed contracts with Wikipedia range from large companies such as Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft to startups such as Mistral, Purple, and Ecosia.
These companies purchase data from the foundation that republished Wikipedia’s contents for AI training purposes.
Through this, AI companies will secure refined data, and the foundation will have the funds to run Wikipedia.
Wikipedia, which ranks ninth in terms of the number of visitors among the world’s Internet sites, is considered suitable for AI training as it is considered to be objective and reliable while the content is vast.
The foundation did not disclose the specific terms of the contract with these companies.
The foundation said it will also use AI to help human editors create Wikipedia.
When the source web page that supports the content disappears, technical support can be provided through AI, such as finding a new source to replace it.
It is also considering the function of AI to answer questions in the search box of Wikipedia based on the entire encyclopedia.
However, he stressed that the main task of writing and editing the contents of the encyclopedia will continue to be handled by human editors.
“Personally, it is a great pleasure for AI models to train with Wikipedia data,” Jimmy Wales Foundation founder told the Associated Press. “Because Wikipedia is a human-edited material.”
The Welsh founder then criticized Elon Musk’s grokipedia, saying, “You don’t want to use AI trained only with X’s data,” adding, “It’s an angry AI.”
In November last year, the Wikimedia Foundation said that AI robots scraped a large amount of Wikipedia content, putting a serious burden on servers, and ordered them to use paid products for AI development.
SAM KIM
US ASIA JOURNAL
