Collateral Damage? Human Creativity and Interaction in the AI Crawling Era
The rapid growth of AI crawlers is reshaping how human-created knowledge circulates online, often faster than communities, publishers, and platforms can adapt. Last year's Wikimania featured a session from WMF P&T outlining the problem, and one of Wikimedia's responses. This year, we have more examples of how the same trends are affecting knowledge creators beyond Wikimedia, and other response options.
This session brings together a diverse set of organizations experiencing the impacts of large-scale AI crawling from different vantage points: open knowledge platforms, news publishers, internet infrastructure providers, and other online communities either facing or responding to rising scraping demands. Participants will learn how AI crawling differs from traditional search indexing, and why existing expectations of mutual benefit are breaking down. They'll walk away with a greater understanding of how organizations are experimenting with technical, policy, and social responses to protect contributors and sustain participation. The panel explores a central question: **How can we ensure that human relationships, creativity, and shared stewardship continue to power knowledge in an agentic internet?** Attendees will gain a clearer understanding of how Wikimedia fits into a broader ecosystem confronting similar challenges, and where collaboration or collective action may be possible.
(Panel participants TBA.)
