"While Wikipedia’s licensing policy lets anyone tap its knowledge and text — to “reuse and remix” it however they might like — it does have several conditions. These include the requirements that users must “share alike,” meaning any information they do something with must subsequently be made readily available, and that users must give credit and attribution to Wikipedia contributors. Mixing Wikipedia’s corpus into a chatbot model that gives answers to queries without explaining the sourcing may thus violate Wikipedia’s terms of use, two people in the open-source software community told me. It is now a topic of conversation inside the Wikimedia community whether some legal recourse exists. Data providers may be able to exert other kinds of leverage as well. In April, Reddit announced that it would not make its corpus available for scraping by big tech companies without compensation. It seems very unlikely that the Wikimedia Foundation could issue the same dictum and close its sites off — an action that Nicholas Vincent has called a “data strike” — because its terms of service are more open. But the foundation could make arguments in the name of fairness and appeal to firms to pay for its A.P.I., just as Google does now. It could further insist that chatbots give Wikipedia prominent attribution and offer citations in their answers, something Selena Deckelmann told me the foundation is discussing with various firms. Vincent says that A.I. companies would be foolhardy to try to build a global encyclopedia themselves, with individual contractors. Instead, he told me, “there might be an intermediary stage here where Wikipedia says, ‘Hey, look at how important we’ve been to you.’”"