Wikipedia Celebrates 25 Years With Major AI Deals With Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Perplexity

In honour of its 25th anniversary, the Wikimedia Foundation announced on January 15 that it has reached agreements with many AI firms. Wikipedia, a free online knowledge base and online crowdsourced encyclopaedia, is owned by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Leading AI companies like Amazon, France's Mistral AI, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Perplexity have all inked agreements, as per various media reports. According to the AP article, this follows the non-profit's initial agreements with Google in 2022 and other smaller companies like Ecosia in 2025. Let us find out how these deals will change the face of Wikimedia.

How these Deals will Transform Wikimedia?

With these new agreements, Wikipedia will be able to profit from the high volume of traffic from AI businesses. According to the foundation, AI businesses pay to access Wikipedia articles "at a volume and speed designed specifically for their needs." Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, expressed his satisfaction with this development. In an interview with AP, he expressed his personal happiness at the fact that human-curated Wikipedia data is being used to train AI models.

He wouldn't really want to use an AI that has solely been educated on X, such as an extremely irate AI. He was alluding to the social media site owned by billionaire Elon Musk, which changed its name from Twitter and is home to his AI bot Grok. Wales stated that Wikipedia wants to collaborate with AI businesses as long as the pay is reasonable, but it will not stop them.

It would be wise for AI businesses to contribute and cover their fair portion of the expenses incurred by Wikipedia. Notably, lawsuits and intellectual property challenges asserting copyright and payment concerns have been triggered globally by AI businesses' aggressive scraping and training of chatbots. The CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, Maryana Iskander, told AP from Johannesburg, South Africa, that 8 million individual donors provide the majority of Wikipedia's revenue. On January 20, Iskander will leave her position, and Bernadette Meehan will take over.

Strong Web Nexus of Wikipedia

Wikipedia is the ninth most popular website on the internet and is free to use. It is edited by about 2,50,000 individuals and contains more than 65 million articles in 300 languages. These agreements with AI firms are noteworthy. As noted by Wikipedia, the use of generative AI (gen AI) to provide answers on search engines that do not send users to specific websites resulted in an 8% decrease in human pageviews in 2024.

The Wikimedia Foundation then observed that sophisticated bot traffic and changing internet patterns are changing how individuals access content worldwide. It's also important because, as the AP investigation pointed out, Wikipedia is still one of the last remaining strongholds of the early internet. Wikipedia's idea of a free online environment has been clouded by the rise of Big Tech, GenAI, and AI chatbots that are trained on web scrapes. With aggressive data-gathering techniques employed by AI developers, particularly from Wikipedia's extensive collection of free knowledge, the topic of who pays for the AI boom is becoming more and more pressing.