{"id":107147,"date":"2025-04-02T17:06:06","date_gmt":"2025-04-02T17:06:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ushopwell.com\/ublog\/ai-bots-strain-wikimedia-as-bandwidth-surges-50\/"},"modified":"2025-04-02T17:06:06","modified_gmt":"2025-04-02T17:06:06","slug":"ai-bots-strain-wikimedia-as-bandwidth-surges-50","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ushopwell.com\/ublog\/ai-bots-strain-wikimedia-as-bandwidth-surges-50\/","title":{"rendered":"AI bots strain Wikimedia as bandwidth surges 50%"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>On Tuesday, the Wikimedia Foundation <a href=\"https:\/\/diff.wikimedia.org\/2025\/04\/01\/how-crawlers-impact-the-operations-of-the-wikimedia-projects\/\">announced<\/a> that relentless AI scraping is putting strain on Wikipedia&#8217;s servers. Automated bots seeking AI model training data for LLMs have been vacuuming up terabytes of data, growing the foundation&#8217;s bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content by 50 percent since January 2024. It\u2019s a scenario familiar across the free and open source software (FOSS) community, as we&#8217;ve <a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/ai\/2025\/03\/devs-say-ai-crawlers-dominate-traffic-forcing-blocks-on-entire-countries\/\">previously detailed<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The Foundation hosts not only Wikipedia but also platforms like <a href=\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/Main_Page\">Wikimedia Commons<\/a>, which offers 144 million media files under open licenses. For decades, this content has powered everything from search results to school projects. But since early 2024, AI companies have dramatically increased automated scraping through direct crawling, APIs, and bulk downloads to feed their hungry AI models. This exponential growth in non-human traffic has imposed steep technical and financial costs\u2014often without the attribution that helps sustain Wikimedia\u2019s volunteer ecosystem.<\/p>\n<p>The impact isn\u2019t theoretical. The foundation says that when former US President Jimmy Carter died in December 2024, his Wikipedia page predictably drew millions of views. But the real stress came when users simultaneously streamed a 1.5-hour video of a 1980 debate from Wikimedia Commons. The surge doubled Wikimedia\u2019s normal network traffic, temporarily maxing out several of its Internet connections. Wikimedia engineers quickly rerouted traffic to reduce congestion, but the event revealed a deeper problem: The baseline bandwidth had already been consumed largely by bots scraping media at scale.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/information-technology\/2025\/04\/ai-bots-strain-wikimedia-as-bandwidth-surges-50\/\">Read full article<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/information-technology\/2025\/04\/ai-bots-strain-wikimedia-as-bandwidth-surges-50\/#comments\">Comments<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p class=\"wpematico_credit\"><small>Powered by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wpematico.com\" target=\"_blank\">WPeMatico<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On Tuesday, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that relentless AI scraping is putting strain on Wikipedia&#8217;s servers. Automated bots seeking AI model training data for LLMs have been vacuuming up terabytes of data, growing the foundation&#8217;s bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content by 50 percent since January 2024. It\u2019s a scenario familiar across the free and open source software (FOSS) community, as we&#8217;ve previously detailed. The Foundation hosts not only Wikipedia&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","tve_updated_post":"","tve_custom_css":"","tve_user_custom_css":"","tve_globals":{},"tcb2_ready":0,"tcb_editor_enabled":0,"tve_landing_page":"","_tve_header":"","_tve_footer":""},"categories":[241],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-107147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>AI bots strain Wikimedia as bandwidth surges 50% - UshopWell.com<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/ushopwell.com\/ublog\/ai-bots-strain-wikimedia-as-bandwidth-surges-50\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"AI bots strain Wikimedia as bandwidth surges 50% - UshopWell.com\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"On Tuesday, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that relentless AI scraping is putting strain on Wikipedia&#8217;s servers. Automated bots seeking AI model training data for LLMs have been vacuuming up terabytes of data, growing the foundation&#8217;s bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content by 50 percent since January 2024. It\u2019s a scenario familiar across the free and open source software (FOSS) community, as we&#8217;ve previously detailed. 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Automated bots seeking AI model training data for LLMs have been vacuuming up terabytes of data, growing the foundation&#8217;s bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content by 50 percent since January 2024. It\u2019s a scenario familiar across the free and open source software (FOSS) community, as we&#8217;ve previously detailed. 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