AI Is Eating Wikipedia Alive, And We’re Letting It!

AI owes Wikipedia everything.
But it gives back nothing.
And now we’re watching one of the internet’s crown jewels slowly fall apart in real time.

Wikipedia was never meant to be profitable. It was meant to be useful.
For 24 years it quietly powered our understanding of the world. Free. Open. Human made.

Then AI arrived.

Models trained on its content now push it into the background.
Traffic is sinking.
Volunteer editors are burning out.
Attribution barely exists.
Donations are drying up.

Meanwhile bots hammer Wikipedia every hour.
Scraping. Mining. Extracting.
Millions of unpaid requests.
Startups and tech giants repackage its content into shiny AI features and call it innovation.

It is unfair.
And it is unsustainable.

Wikimedia is now asking the AI industry for one simple thing.
Pay for the API.
Respect attribution.
Support the resource you depend on.

It is the right strategy.
AI that strengthens human knowledge, not replaces the people who create it.
That is what the public needs.
But it is not what Big Tech is building.

If Wikipedia collapses, AI won’t notice.
It will just hallucinate with more confidence.

And by the time we realise what we’ve lost, it will be too late.