The Wikimedia Foundation says bandwidth consumption for multimedia downloads has surged by 50% since January, 2024.

Specifically, Wikimedia Commons, the primary go-to repository for images, videos and audio files, saw a drastic increase in ...

AI bots scraping content from Wikimedia Commons have caused a 50% surge in bandwidth usage since January 2024, straining resources and raising concerns about internet accessibility.

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization hosting Wikipedia and other widely popular websites, is raising concerns ...

This increase is not coming from human readers, but largely from automated programs that scrape the Wikimedia Commons image catalog of openly licensed images to feed images to AI models. Our ...

As a result, Wikimedia found that bots account for 65 percent of the most expensive requests to its core infrastructure ...

The Wikimedia Foundation ... data-hungry scrapers looking to train AI models. "Our infrastructure is built to sustain sudden traffic spikes from humans during high-interest events, but the ...