Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video

Wikipedia is often described as Last good website The internet is filled with increasingly toxic social media and AI slop, but it seems online encyclopedias aren’t entirely immune to the larger trend, with human pageviews down 8% year-over-year. A new blog post From Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation.

The foundation works to distinguish between traffic from humans and bots, and Miller wrote that the decline was revealed “over the past several months” after an update to Wikipedia’s bot detection systems showed that “an unusually high amount of traffic for May and June came from bots designed to avoid detection.”

Why is traffic congestion decreasing? Miller noted “the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information,” specifically “search engines are increasingly using generative AI to answer searchers directly instead of linking to sites like ours” and “younger generations are looking for information on social video platforms rather than the open web.” (There is Google The claim is disputed (That AI reduces traffic from summary searches.)

Miller says the foundation welcomes “new ways for people to acquire knowledge” and argues that it doesn’t make Wikipedia any less important, because knowledge from the encyclopedia is still reaching people even if they don’t visit the website. Wikipedia has even experimented with its own AI summary, though Editors halted the effort after complaints.

But this shift creates risks, especially if people are less aware of where their information actually comes from. As Miller says, “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers can grow and enrich the content, and individual donors can support this work.” (Some of these volunteers are truly wonderful, A gunman allegedly disarmed at a Wikipedia editors conference Friday.)

For that reason, he argues that AI, search and social organizations should “encourage more visitors” to the website using Wikipedia content.

And he says Wikipedia is taking steps of its own, for example creating a new framework for attributing content from encyclopedias. The organization has two teams tasked with helping Wikipedia reach new readers, and is looking for volunteers to help.

Miller encourages readers to “support content integrity and content creation” more broadly

“When you search for information online, look for citations and click on the original source material,” he writes “Talk to people you know about the importance of trusted, human-curated knowledge and help them understand that the content underlying generative AI is created by real people who deserve their support.”