Wikipedia is often described as the last good website on an internet increasingly filled with toxic social media and AI-generated content. However, the online encyclopedia is not completely immune to broader trends. According to a new blog post from Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation, human pageviews have fallen by eight percent year-over-year.
The foundation works to distinguish between traffic from humans and bots. Miller writes that the decline over the past few months was revealed after an update to Wikipedia’s bot detection systems. This update showed that much of the unusually high traffic during May and June was actually coming from bots that were built to evade detection.
Why is human traffic falling? Miller points to the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information. He notes that search engines are increasingly using generative AI to provide answers directly to searchers rather than linking to sites like Wikipedia. Furthermore, younger generations are seeking information on social video platforms rather than the open web. Google has disputed the claim that AI summaries reduce traffic from search.
Miller says the foundation welcomes new ways for people to gain knowledge. He argues this does not make Wikipedia any less important, since knowledge sourced from the encyclopedia is still reaching people even if they do not visit the website directly. Wikipedia even experimented with AI summaries of its own, though it paused the effort after editors complained.
This shift does present risks, particularly if people are becoming less aware of where their information actually comes from. As Miller puts it, with fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work. Some of those volunteers are truly remarkable, with reports of one disarming a gunman at a Wikipedia editors’ conference on a recent Friday.
For that reason, he argues that AI, search, and social companies using content from Wikipedia must encourage more visitors to the website itself.
He says Wikipedia is taking steps of its own, for example by developing a new framework for attributing content from the encyclopedia. The organization also has two teams tasked with helping Wikipedia reach new readers, and it is looking for volunteers to help.
Miller also encourages readers to support content integrity and content creation more broadly. When you search for information online, look for citations and click through to the original source material. 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.