I would like companies to start aggressively pushing back against AI scrapers using things like Anubis[0]. If you can't be a good steward of the internet or respectful to other peoples' resources, then people have the right to deny them to you.

[0] https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis

I bet someone like Cloudflare could pull the dataset each day and serve up a plain text/Markdown version of Wikipedia for rounding error levels of spend. I just loaded a random Wikipedia page and it had a weight of 1.5MB in all for what I worked out would be about 30KB of Markdown (i.e. 50x less bandwidth).

Of course, the problem then is getting all these scrapers and bots to actually use the alternative, but Wikimedia could potentially redirect suspected clients in that direction..

I wonder if Wikipedias recent switch to client side rendering has hurt their performance too. Serving a prerendered page might have helped this situation. I don't know the details of their new system though.

Tragedy of the commons. And that’s why we can’t have nice things.

Because people are people. And will always prioritize egotism over respect for the common good.