AI crawlers cause Wikimedia Commons bandwidth demands to surge 50%

image via TechCrunch

April 2, 2025, 1:26 PM

• •Wikimedia Commons bandwidth consumption has surged by 50% since January 2024
• •The reason is due to automated, data-hungry scrapers looking to train AI models
• •The Wikimedia Foundation is having to spend a lot of time and resources blocking crawlers to avert disruption for regular users

The Wikimedia Foundation says that bandwidth consumption for multimedia downloads from Wikimedia Commons has surged by 50% since January 2024. The reason, the outfit wrote in a blog post Tuesday, isn’t due to growing demand from knowledge-thirsty humans, but from automated, data-hungry scrapers looking to train AI models.

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