Wikipedia says it’s lost a lot of human traffic to its website due to AI and social video.
In a new blog post, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Marshall Miller outlined 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 that are scraping its website vs. actual human visitors.
Upon making this revision, the company noticed an eight per cent decrease in human pageviews on Wikipedia over the past few months versus the same period in 2024. “We believe that these declines reflect the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information, especially with search engines providing answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content,” said Miller.
While Miller acknowledged that this issue isn’t unique to Wikipedia, he expressed concern that fewer visits to Wikipedia means “fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.” He added that Wikipedia is “the only site of its scale with standards of verifiably, neutrality, and transparency powering information all over the internet, and it continues to be essential to people’s daily information needs in unseen ways.”
Therefore, he argues that AI, search, and social companies that use content from Wikipedia “must encourage more visitors” to the website itself.
Of course, social videos can be innocuous enough, especially if they’re made by humans and feature appropriate attribution. But AI and search are particularly troublesome. While Google claims its AI Overviews don’t lead to a drop in traffic, data suggests otherwise. And besides that, AI Overviews are known to frequently share misinformation.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
Source: Wikimedia
