AI Models Feast on Wikipedia. Will They Ever Give Back?

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Large Language Models — including those developed by OpenAI — have been trained on vast swaths of public data. And among those sources, Wikipedia stands as a foundational pillar: clean, structured, multilingual, and community-curated. It’s the closest thing we have to a digital commons of human knowledge.

Yet while AI models are monetized, scaled, and productized at levels unimaginable just five years ago, Wikipedia still begs users for donations to stay alive. It’s not just ironic — it’s structurally unsustainable and ethically troubling.

Let me ask the uncomfortable question:
Are we okay with the idea that the most powerful AI systems ever created are built on the unpaid labor of thousands of anonymous volunteers… and give nothing back?

This isn’t about charity. It’s about reciprocity, sustainability, and respect for the knowledge ecosystem we all depend on. If we let this imbalance persist, we’re setting the precedent that the future of AI is extractive, not generative — parasitic, not collaborative.

So here’s the proposal:
OpenAI should lead the way by institutionalizing a mechanism to give back to Wikipedia — whether financially, through technical support, or API-based collaboration. Not a one-time PR-friendly donation, but a continuous, transparent commitment proportional to usage and benefit.

Let’s have the courage to do the right thing before the commons dries up.

Who else here believes this matters?

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You’ll find that Wikipedia doesn’t need to beg. They have millions and millions of dollars banked.

In AI corpus training, Wikipedia is often held-out, because it could lead to overfitting on its summation of all the citations it employs. The opposite of the claim of this vapid plea.

Instead, AI is trained on telltale things like “This isn’t about xxx, it’s about xxx” that watermark its output that pretends to be human. Other things, like repetitive patterns of identical dashes, and evenly-spaced section introductions, further reinforce when language is wholly AI-generated. When used to try to represent actual human interaction, such as being posted as impersonations of people, are the real damage.

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