Comment by larodi
23 days ago
after 25 years wikipedia showed what it truly was created for, by selling the content for training. otherwise - okay, this was a cool project, perhaps we need better. like federated, crypto-signed articles that once collected together, @atproto style, produce the article with notable changes to it.
Their enterprise offering is more for fresh retrieval than training. For training, you can just download the free database dump — one you would inadvertently end up recreating if you were to use their enterprise APIs in a (pre-)training pipeline.
Context: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/wikipedia-will-share-cont...
tl;dr: Wikipedia is CC and has public APIs, but AI companies have recently started paying for "enterprise" high-speed access.
Notably, the enterprise program started in 2021 and Google has been paying since 2022.
You’re saying Wikipedia was created 25 years ago to sell its content to train LLMs that didn’t even exist?! I doubt it…
I’m using a harsh allegory to express massive discontent by the fact that someone was catering to user content for 25 years only for this content to become training corpus.
It is perhaps not that Wikipedia in particular been created for this, that much we hope for, but nowadays it seems such public services are best monetised in this way. I have an actual memory from when Wikipedia started and the enthusiasm of millions of people for it.
And no, I’m not alright with the fact so many people contributed effort AND money to this project only for Jimmy to figure how to sell it better to big corpo.
Seems unfair, as it seems unfair to get these downvotes. Like nobody liked the fact MS bought and used all of GitHub to create copilot, so how is this different?
“Jimmy Wales is even more of a visionary than we thought”