Wikimedia expands AI data deals with Amazon, Google, Meta and others as it turns 25

New Delhi: As Wikipedia turned 25 on January 15, the Wikimedia Foundation said it has expanded paid licensing and data-access partnerships with major technology and AI companies through its Wikimedia Enterprise platform. 

Wikimedia has positioned the move as a way to manage large-scale reuse of Wikipedia content for AI products and model training. 

Partners include Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Perplexity, Mistral AI and Ecosia, though the Foundation has not disclosed financial terms. 

The AI partnerships came into focus on a milestone day for the online encyclopedia, founded in 2001 and now hosting more than 65 million articles across 300-plus languages. 

The Foundation’s enterprise deals are aimed at shifting AI developers and large-scale reusers away from heavy scraping and towards structured, high-volume access designed for commercial use. 

The push follows concerns about infrastructure strain as bot traffic rises with AI companies collecting data at scale, even as referral patterns change with AI-generated search summaries and chat interfaces.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, speaking in interviews around the anniversary, said he was broadly supportive of AI models training on Wikipedia because it is human-curated, but argued that companies using Wikipedia at scale should pay a fair share of the costs they impose on the platform’s infrastructure.

Separately, the Wikimedia Foundation rolled out a “Wikipedia 25” campaign and released a new video docuseries profiling eight volunteer editors from different regions, focusing on the people behind Wikipedia’s editing and fact-checking work. 

The series includes an Indian medical doctor based in Sweden, Dr Netha Hussain, featured for her contributions to COVID-19-related medical information on Wikipedia.

The Foundation also launched a “25 Years of Wikipedia” digital time capsule, which includes founder commentary on Wikipedia’s early years and revisits high-traffic moments that tested Wikipedia’s infrastructure, including the spike in visits after Michael Jackson died in 2009.

India-specific metrics were also highlighted as part of the anniversary messaging. The Foundation said India contributes one of the highest levels of Wikipedia consumption globally, with roughly 800 million page views per month, and that India ranks among the largest contributor bases for English Wikipedia. 

Wikipedia is available in over 25 Indic languages, covering nearly all of India’s scheduled languages, making India one of the platform’s biggest multilingual user markets.

The anniversary also comes during a leadership transition at the nonprofit. Wikimedia Foundation CEO Maryana Iskander is set to step down on January 20, with Bernadette Meehan named as the incoming CEO.

Beyond licensing, the Foundation has said it is developing an AI approach that supports editors rather than replacing them, including tools that reduce repetitive work and experiments that could reshape how users search Wikipedia content.