Wikimedia Foundation has recently revealed that access to Wikipedia is declining as a result of changes in the way people search information online. In his blog, the senior director of the Foundation ‘ s products, Marshall Miller, noted that the number of real-life visits to Wikipedia over the past few months had decreased by about 8 per cent compared to the same period in 2024.
This trend was discovered after the Foundation revised the criteria for distinguishing between real and robotic flows. The revision was due to the fact that the wiki media had observed a surge in “human flow” from Brazil, which had confirmed that it was primarily robotic. According to Miller: “Our current downturn reflects the impact of generated AI and social media on people’s access to information, in particular the fact that search engines provide direct answers to users based on Wikipedia content.” He was not surprised to say that. The flow of traditional encyclopedia sites has been affected as more and more search engines use AI technology to present their answers directly on the outcome page and as young users turn to platforms such as YouTube and TikTok for information. Miller warned that such a shift could trigger a ripple effect: a reduction in the number of visits could lead to a contraction in the group of volunteers preparing the editorial content, with a consequent decline in individual contributions to sustain the Foundation ‘ s operations.
Ironically, almost all training in large language models relies on Wikipedia data sets, but the development of such AI is eroding its most critical source of credible information. To this end, the Wikimedia is urging the use of large language models of its content, AI chat robots, search engines and social platforms to channel more traffic back to the site. In response to the challenge, the non-profit organization indicated that it was in the process of ensuring the responsible and large-scale access and reuse of Wikipedia content by third parties through enhanced policy implementation and production of clearer attribution criteria. New ways of reaching young audiences through video, game and chat robots are also being tested on platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, Roblox and Instagram.
Wikimedia is open to AI technology. The Foundation has just launched the WikiDembedding Project this month, which converts approximately 120 million open data points from the WikiData database into a format that is more user-friendly for large language models, with the aim of providing free, high-quality data for the AI system to improve the accuracy of its answers.