Turning 25 amid an A.I. boom, Wikipedia is racing to protect traffic, volunteers and revenue without losing its mission. Photo illustration by Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Traffic to Wikipedia, the world’s largest online encyclopedia, naturally ebbs and flows with the rhythms of daily life—rising and falling with the school calendar, the news cycle or even the day of the week—making routine fluctuations unremarkable for a site that draws roughly 15 billion page views a month. But sustained declines tell a different story. Last October, the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that oversees Wikipedia, disclosed that human traffic to the site had fallen 8 percent in recent months as a growing number of users turned to A.I. search engines and chatbots for answers.
“I don’t think that we’ve seen something like this happen in the last seven to eight years or so,” Marshall Miller, senior director of product at the Wikimedia Foundation, told Observer.
Launched on Jan. 15, 2001, Wikipedia turns 25 today. This milestone comes at a pivotal point for the online encyclopedia, which is straddling a delicate line between fending off existential risks posed by A.I. and avoiding irrelevance as the technology transforms how people find and consume information.
“It’s really this question of long-term sustainability,” Lane Becker, senior director of earned revenue at the Wikimedia Foundation, told Observer. “We’d like to make it at least another 25 years—and ideally much longer.”
While it’s difficult to pinpoint Wikipedia’s recent traffic declines on any single factor, it’s evident that the drop coincides with the emergence of A.I. search features, according to Miller. Chatbots such as ChatGPT and Perplexity often cite and link to Wikipedia, but because the information is already embedded in the A.I.-generated response, users are less likely to click through to the source, depriving the site of page views.
Yet the spread of A.I.-generated content also underscores Wikipedia’s central role in the online information ecosystem. Wikipedia’s vast archive—more than 65 million articles across over 300 languages—plays a prominent role within A.I. tools, with the site’s data scraped by nearly all large language models (LLMs). “Yes, there is a decline in traffic to our sites, but there may well be more people getting Wikipedia knowledge than ever because of how much it’s being distributed through those platforms that are upstream of us,” said Miller.
Surviving in the era of A.I.
Wikipedia must find a way to stay financially and editorially viable as the internet changes. Declining page views not only mean that fewer visitors are likely to donate to the platform, threatening its main source of revenue, but also risk shrinking the community of volunteer editors who sustain it. Fewer contributors would mean slower content growth, ultimately leaving less material for LLMs to draw from.
Metrics that track volunteer participation have already begun to slip, according to Miller. While noting that “it’s hard to parse out all the different reasons that this happens,” he conceded that the Foundation has “reason to believe that declines in page views will lead to declines in volunteer activity.”
To maintain a steady pipeline of contributors, users must first become aware of the platform and understand its collaborative model. That makes proper attribution by A.I. tools essential, Miller said. Beyond simply linking to Wikipedia, surfacing metadata—such as when a page was last updated or how many editors contributed—could spur curiosity and encourage users to engage more deeply with the platform.
Tech companies are becoming aware of the value of keeping Wikipedia relevant. Over the past year, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Perplexity AI, Ecosia, Pleias and ProRata have joined Wikimedia Enterprise, a commercial product that allows corporations to pay for large-scale access and distribution of Wikipedia content. Google and Amazon have long been partners of the platform, which was launched in 2021.
The basic premise is that Wikimedia Enterprise customers can access content from Wikipedia at a higher volume and speed while helping sustain the platform’s mission. “I think there’s a growing understanding on the part of these A.I. companies about the significance of the Wikipedia dataset, both as it currently exists and also its need to exist in the future,” said Becker.
Wikipedia is hardly alone in this shift. News organizations, including CNN, the Associated Press and The New York Times, have struck licensing deals with A.I. companies to supply editorial content in exchange for payment, while infrastructure providers like Cloudflare offer tools that allow websites to charge A.I. crawlers for access. Last month, the licensing nonprofit Creative Commons announced its support of a “pay-to-crawl” approach for managing A.I. bots.
Preparing for an uncertain future
Wikipedia itself is also adapting to a younger generation of internet users. In an effort to make editing Wikipedia more appealing, the platform is working to enhance its mobile edit features, reflecting the fact that younger audiences are far more likely to engage on smartphones than desktop computers.
Younger users’ preference for social video platforms such as YouTube and TikTok has also pushed Wikipedia’s Future Audiences team—a division tasked with expanding readership—to experiment with video. The effort has already paid off, producing viral clips on topics ranging from Wikipedia’s most hotly disputed edits to the courtship dance of the black-footed albatross and Sino-Roman relations. The organization is also exploring a deeper presence on gaming platforms, another major draw for younger users.
Evolving with the times also means integrating A.I. further within the platform. Wikipedia has introduced features such as Edit Check, which offers real-time feedback on whether a proposed edit fits a page, and is developing features like Tone Check to help ensure articles adhere to a neutral point of view.
A.I.-generated content has also begun to seep onto the platform. As of August 2024, roughly 5 percent of newly created English articles on the site were produced with the help of A.I., according to a Princeton study. Seeing this as a problem, Wikipedia introduced a “speedy deletion” policy that allows editors to quickly remove content that shows clear signs of being A.I.-generated. Still, the community remains divided over whether using A.I. for tasks such as drafting articles is inherently problematic, said Miller. “There’s this active debate.”
From streamlining editing to distributing its content ever more widely, Wikipedia is betting that A.I. can ultimately be an ally rather than an adversary. If managed carefully, the technology could help accelerate the encyclopedia’s mission over the next 25 years—as long as it doesn’t bring down the encyclopedia first.
“Our whole thing is knowledge dissemination to anyone that wants it, anywhere that they want it,” said Becker. “If this is how people are going to learn things—and people are learning things and gaining value from the information that our community is able to bring forward—we absolutely want to find a way to be there and support it in ways that align with our values.”
