Wikimedia Enterprise signs Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Perplexity, and Mistral AI to paid high-volume API access deals

Key facts

• Wikimedia Enterprise sells high-speed API access to Wikipedia’s 65 million articles at higher speeds and volumes than the free public APIs provide.
• Bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content had grown 50 percent since January 2024, with bots accounting for 65 percent of the most expensive requests to core infrastructure.
• Human traffic to Wikipedia had fallen approximately 8 percent year over year after the organization updated its bot-detection systems and discovered that much of what appeared to be human visitors were actually automated scrapers built to evade detection.