Traffic to Wikipedia, the world’s largest online encyclopedia, fluctuates in nature and ebbs and flows with the rhythms of daily life—ebb and flow with the school calendar, the news cycle or even the day of the week—making regular fluctuations invisible on a site that draws nearly 15 billion page views a month. But the ongoing decline tells a different story. Last October, the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that oversees Wikipedia, revealed that traffic to the site has dropped 8 percent in recent months as a growing number of users turn to AI search engines and chatbots for answers.
“I don’t think we’ve seen anything like this happen in the last seven to eight years,” Marshall Miller, senior product director at the Wikimedia Foundation, told the Observer.
It was launched on Jan. 15, 2001, Wikipedia turns 25 today. The milestone comes at a critical point for the online encyclopedia, which walks the fine line between protecting against the ever-present risks posed by AI and avoiding redundancy as the technology transforms the way people access and use information.
“It’s really a question of long-term sustainability,” Lane Becker, senior director of revenue at the Wikimedia Foundation, told the Observer. “We’d like to do it for another 25 years—and a lot longer.”
While it’s difficult to pinpoint the recent traffic decline to any one factor, it appears that the decline coincides with the emergence of AI search features, according to Miller. Chatbots like ChatGPT and Perplexity often cite and link to Wikipedia, but because the information is already embedded in the AI-generated response, users are less likely to click on the source, depriving the site of page views.
Yet the proliferation of AI-generated content also underscores Wikipedia’s central role in the online information landscape. Wikipedia’s vast archive—more than 65 million articles in more than 300 languages—plays a prominent role within AI tools, the site’s data has been analyzed by almost all major language types (LLMs). “Yes, there is a drop in traffic to our sites, but there may be more people accessing Wikipedia than ever before because of how widely distributed it is on those platforms above us,” Miller said.
Surviving in the age of AI
Wikipedia must find a way to stay financially and editorially viable as the Internet changes. A decrease in page views not only means that fewer visitors can contribute to the platform, threatening its main source of income, but also risks reducing the community of volunteer editors that maintain it. Fewer contributors can mean slower content growth, ultimately leaving less content for LLMs to pick up.
Metrics tracking volunteer participation have begun to slip, according to Miller. While noting that it is “difficult to pin down all the different reasons why this is happening,” he acknowledged that the Foundation “has reason to believe that a decrease in page views will lead to a decrease in volunteer activity.”
In order to maintain a stable stream of donors, users must first know about the platform and understand its participation model. That makes the right provisioning of AI tools important, Miller said. Beyond simply linking to Wikipedia, the resulting metadata—such as when a page was last updated or how many editors contributed—can spark curiosity and encourage users to engage more deeply with the platform.
Technology companies realize the importance of keeping Wikipedia relevant. Last year, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Perplexity AI, Ecosia, Pleias and ProRata joined Wikimedia Enterprise, a commercial product that allows companies to pay for greater access and distribution of Wikipedia content. Google and Amazon have been partners of the platform, which launched in 2021.
The basic premise is that Wikimedia Enterprise customers can access content from Wikipedia at high volume and speed while helping to sustain the mission of the platform. “I think there’s a growing understanding on the part of these AI companies about the importance of the Wikipedia dataset, both as it exists now and the need for it to exist in the future,” Becker said.
Wikipedia is not alone in this change. News organizations, including CNN, the Associated Press and the New York Times, have entered into licensing agreements with AI companies to provide editorial content for a fee, while infrastructure providers such as Cloudflare offer tools that allow websites to charge AI crawlers for access. Last month, the non-profit licensing organization Creative Commons announced its support for a “pay-to-crawl” approach to managing AI bots.
Preparing for an uncertain future
Wikipedia itself is also adapting to the new generation of Internet users. In an effort to make editing Wikipedia more attractive, the platform is working to improve its mobile editing features, reflecting the fact that a younger audience is much more likely to engage on smartphones than on desktop computers.
Young users’ preference for social video platforms like YouTube and TikTok also pushed Wikipedia’s Future Audiences team—a division tasked with increasing readership—to experiment with video. The effort has already paid off, generating viral clips on topics ranging from Wikipedia’s hottest programs to the courtship dance of the black-footed albatross and Sino-Roman relations. The organization is also exploring a deeper presence in sports arenas, another priority for smaller users.
Keeping up with the times also means integrating AI within the platform. Wikipedia has introduced features such as Check Edit, which provides real-time feedback on whether proposed edits are appropriate for the page, and is developing features such as tone checking to help ensure articles adhere to a neutral point of view.
AI-generated content has also started making its way onto the platform. As of August 2024, about 5 percent of newly created English articles on the site will be produced with the help of AI, according to a Princeton study. Recognizing this as a problem, Wikipedia has introduced a “rapid deletion” policy that allows editors to quickly remove content that shows clear signs of AI production. Still, the community remains divided on whether using AI to perform tasks like writing articles is inherently problematic, Miller said. “There is this active argument.”
From fine-tuning to widely distributing its content, Wikipedia is betting that AI will eventually become a friend instead of a foe. If managed carefully, the technology could help speed up the encyclopedia’s work for the next 25 years—as long as it doesn’t bring the encyclopedia down first.
“Our whole thing is to distribute information to whoever wants it, wherever they want it,” Becker said. “If this is how people are going to learn things — and people are learning things and finding value in the knowledge that our community is able to bring forward — we really want to find a way to be there and support it in ways that align with our values.”
