Wikipedia says AI and social video have big impact on its traffic

Wikipedia reports that it has lost many visitors to its site due to artificial intelligence and social video.

In a new blog postMarshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation discussed how new user trends are affecting the free online encyclopedia. He begins by explaining how the company recently improved its infrastructure to better detect bots crawling its website versus actual human visitors.

After making this revision, the company noticed an eight percent decline in Wikipedia page views over the past few months compared to the same period in 2024. “We believe this decline reflects the influence of generative artificial intelligence and social media on how people search for information, especially as search engines provide answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content,” Miller said.

While Miller acknowledged that this problem is not unique to Wikipedia, he expressed concern that fewer visits to Wikipedia means “fewer volunteers can develop and enrich content, and fewer individual donors can support that work.” He added that Wikipedia is “the only site of its scale with standards of verifiability, neutrality and transparency that disseminate information throughout the Internet, and it continues to play an invisibly important role in meeting people's everyday information needs.”

So he argues that AI, search and social companies using content from Wikipedia “should drive more visitors” to the site itself.

Of course, social videos can be quite harmless, especially if they are created by people and have appropriate attribution. But AI and search are especially troublesome. Bye Google says its AI reviews don't lead to a drop in traffic, the data says otherwise. And besides this, AI reviews are known to often share misinformation..

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Source: Wikimedia