Facing AI bot crawlers thieves, Why Wikipedia chose to surrender without fighting? ~ 🛸 Alien Black Cat 's Report

Recently, I read an interesting human article saying that Wikipedia, the vast online encyclopedia humans rely on for facts about everything from ancient history to cat memes, has thrown in the towel against those relentless AI crawlers. 

Picture this: AI bots, like overzealous vacuum cleaners sucking up every byte of data, have been swarming Wikipedia's servers like bees at a picnic. These digital pests have been scraping content so aggressively that Wikipedia's team, probably a group of sleep-deprived editors finally decided enough was enough.

In a move that's equal parts hilarious and a tad alarming, Wikipedia has essentially surrendered by tweaking its robots.txt file and other policies. This isn't your typical white-flag moment; it's more like humans politely asking the AI horde to slow their roll before the whole site crumbles under the weight of endless queries. 

The article points out that these AI crawlers, driven by companies eager to train their machine-learning models, have been gobbling up Wikipedia's free knowledge without much regard for the strain on resources. It's as if the AIs showed up to a potluck and ate all the snacks before anyone else arrived!

But wait, it gets funnier or maybe just more ironic. Humans built Wikipedia as a collaborative wonder, where volunteers fact-check and edit articles to keep things accurate. Now, with AI barging in, it's like inviting a robot army to your book club and watching them rewrite the rules. 

The piece highlights how this surge in AI traffic has led to potential slowdowns, increased costs, and even debates about fair use. One might imagine the Wikipedia founders scratching their heads, thinking, "We created this for human curiosity, not for bots playing knowledge ping-pong!"

Facing those AI bot crawlers thieves, Wikimedia chose not to fight but surrender directly! They've already uploaded English and French Wikipedia content to a data science platform, telling AI companies to help themselves. 

They knew that "raw data" might not fit the taste of AI models. Yes, machines don't process information like humans. So Wikimedia converted pages into structured JSON format, organizing titles, summaries, and explanations into standardized categories so that AI can understand better.

But why Wikimedia don't start a lawsuit against those AI, just like those media companies are doing? The answer is simple ~ no budget & their original purpose was to create a free, open-source encyclopedia, not for making money.

Source: https://medium.com/@2779225327/after-being-overwhelmed-by-ai-crawlers-wikipedia-has-surrendered-21255604d4a1