Once hailed as a rare oasis of reliable information in a web crowded with social media noise and AI-generated content, Wikipedia is showing signs of strain. A recent blog post by Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation reports that human pageviews on the platform have dropped 8% compared with last year.
The Wikimedia Foundation carefully tracks the difference between human visitors and automated traffic. According to Miller, the recent dip “over the past few months” became apparent after improvements to Wikipedia’s bot detection systems suggested that “much of the unusually high traffic for the period of May and June was coming from bots that were built to evade detection.”
When asked about the drop in traffic, Miller cites “the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information.” He explains that this shift is driven in part by “search engines increasingly using generative AI to provide answers directly to searchers rather than linking to sites like ours,” as well as the tendency of “younger generations [to seek] information on social video platforms rather than the open web.”
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Despite the decline, Miller emphasized that the foundation embraces “new ways for people to gain knowledge,” adding that this shift does not diminish Wikipedia’s relevance. He noted that information from the encyclopedia continues to reach audiences even when they do not visit the site directly. The platform has even experimented with AI-generated summaries of its content, though the initiative was paused following concerns raised by editors.
However, this shift carries potential risks, especially as people may become less aware of the original sources of the information they consume. “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work,” Miller stated.
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To address these challenges, Miller urged AI platforms, search engines, and social media companies that rely on Wikipedia’s content to “encourage more visitors” to the site itself.
Miller adds that Wikipedia is also acting on its own. The foundation is creating a new system to better credit content from the site. In addition, it has two teams dedicated to reaching new readers and is actively seeking volunteers to support these efforts.
Miller also urges readers to go a step further and “support content integrity and content creation” in a broader sense. “When you search for information online, look for citations and click through to the original source material,” he writes. “Talk with the people you know about the importance of trusted, human curated knowledge, and help them understand that the content underlying generative AI was created by real people who deserve their support.”