The Wikimedia Foundation says bandwidth consumption for multimedia downloads has surged by 50% since January, 2024.

AI bots scraping content from Wikimedia Commons have caused a 50% surge in bandwidth usage since January 2024, straining resources and raising concerns about internet accessibility.

Specifically, Wikimedia Commons, the primary go-to repository for images, videos and audio files, saw a drastic increase in bandwidth use. Since the beginning of 2024, our platform has seen a 50% ...

As a result, Wikimedia found that bots account for 65 percent of the most expensive requests to its core infrastructure ...