AI crawlers cause Wikimedia Commons bandwidth demands to surge 50%

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The Wikimedia Foundation, the umbrella organization of Wikipedia and a dozen or so other crowdsourced knowledge projects, said on Wednesday that bandwidth consumption for multimedia downloads from Wikimedia Commons has surged by 50% since January 2024.

And “pragmatic engineer” Gergely Orosz also complained last week that AI scrapers from companies such as Meta have driven up bandwidth demands for his own projects.

Some tech companies are doing their bit to address the issue, too — Cloudflare, for example, recently launched AI Labyrinth, which uses AI-generated content to slow crawlers down.

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Article Details

Author / Journalist: Paul Sawers

Category: Technology

Markets: United States

Topics: AI Wikipedia Wikimedia Foundation

Source Website Secure: Yes (HTTPS)

News Sentiment: Neutral

Fact Checked: Legitimate

Article Type: News Report

Published On: 2025-04-02 @ 13:26:50 (1 days ago)

News Timezone: GMT -5:00

News Source URL: techcrunch.com

Language: English

Article Length: 592 words

Reading Time: 4 minutes read

Sentences: 18 lines

Sentence Length: 33 words per sentence (average)

Platforms: Desktop Web, Mobile Web, iOS App, Android App

Copyright Owner: © TechCrunch

News ID: 27541738

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