2025/04/01

AI Crawler Traffic Now Threatens Wikimedia Infrastructure, Staff Says

“Our infrastructure is built to sustain sudden traffic spikes from humans during high-interest events, but the amount of traffic generated by scraper bots is unprecedented and presents growing risks and costs.”
Wikimedia Foundation staff members, lamenting the immense drain the sharp rise in automated requests—now 65% of all traffic—poses for its many public services. “Our content is free, our infrastructure is not,” they write. “We need to re-establish a healthy balance, so we can dedicate our engineering resources to [supporting] human access to knowledge.”
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