US EditionWikimedia Says AI Bots and Summaries Are Hurting Wikipedia's Traffic
Wikipedia page views dropped 8 percent year over year as AI chatbots and summaries reduce direct user visits, raising concerns about future content reliability, Wikimedia said.
- This month, Marshall Miller, the Wikimedia Foundation's senior director of product, reported Wikipedia's human visits are down about 8% compared to the same period in 2024.
- Search engines are increasingly surfacing AI-generated answers instead of external links, the Foundation said, while AI bot crawlers and younger users turning to YouTube and TikTok reduce Wikipedia's human traffic.
- The Foundation cautioned that declines in Wikipedia traffic threaten volunteer support and funding, partly due to generative AI and social media's impact on information seeking, said Miller.
- To respond, the Foundation is enforcing policies and clearer attribution standards so third-party bots and LLMs can access and reuse Wikipedia content responsibly, and just this month launched the Wikidata Embedding Project converting roughly 120 million data points.
- Earlier this summer, Wikipedia considered AI-generated summaries but dropped the project after fierce backlash from Wikipedia's volunteer editors, Miller wrote the change was unsurprising.
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11 Articles
Human trafficking to Wikipedia pages has declined by about 8 percent in recent months in favor of bot traffic, a change that reflects the momentum of artificial generational intelligence and the changes it promotes in online search
Wikipedia losing traffic to AI
Machine learning is being used to replace search engine results with summaries, and the sites being plagiarized soon noted a decline in traffic. Now Wikipedia observes a similar loss of pageviews, with its online encyclopedia down 8% since last year. — Read the rest The post Wikipedia losing traffic to AI appeared first on Boing Boing.
Wikipedia asserts that AI causes a dangerous drop in the number of human visitors: "this could lead to a decrease in the number of contributors and donors supporting the platform"Wikipedia alerts about the impact of AI on the platform: online encyclopedia is facing a significant decrease in human trafficking. More and more internet users get the information contained in Wikipedia via general AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Gemini. Chatbots...
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