By Livemint
Publication Date: 2026-01-16 02:38:00
Wikimedia Foundation announced on 15 January that it had signed artificial intelligence deals with a number of AI companies on its 25th anniversary, as per an AP report.
The Wikimedia Foundation is the parent of the online crowdsourced encyclopedia and free internet knowledge bastion, Wikipedia. The deals signed are with leading AI firms, including Amazon, France’s Mistral AI, Meta Platforms, Microsoft and Perplexity, it added.
This comes after the non-profit first signed a deal with Google in 2022, and other smaller players such as Ecosia in 2025, the AP report noted.
Why is this significant?
Free to use, Wikipedia is the ninth most-visited website on the internet. It has over 65 million articles in 300 languages, edited by around 2,50,000 volunteers.
These deals with AI companies are significant because, in 2024, Wikipedia reported an 8% decline in human pageviews caused by increasing generative AI (gen AI) providing answers on search engines that do not direct readers to individual websites.
The Wikimedia Foundation had then noted that evolving internet trends and sophisticated bot traffic are reshaping how people access information globally.
It is also significant because, as the AP report noted, Wikipedia remains among the last standing bastions of the early internet, whose vision of a free online space has been muddied by the dominance of Big Tech, gen AI and AI chatbots trained on…
