Wikipedia, long hailed as the "oasis of the internet," is facing a serious challenge from generative artificial intelligence and social media. In a new blog post, Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation revealed that the number of human page views on Wikipedia has decreased by 8%. Miller pointed out that the foundation updated its bot detection system, which found that most of the unusually high traffic during May and June was from bots trying to bypass detection, indicating a worrying trend in real traffic decline.
Miller attributes the main cause of the traffic drop to a fundamental change in how people search for information. First, search engines are increasingly using generative AI to provide answer summaries directly to users instead of linking to original websites like Wikipedia, effectively intercepting user traffic (although Google has questioned the claim that AI summaries reduce search traffic). Second, the younger generation is turning to social video platforms as their primary source of knowledge rather than the traditional open web.
Miller said that although the foundation welcomes "new ways for people to access knowledge" and believes that knowledge from encyclopedias can still reach people even if they don't visit the website, this shift carries significant risks. The most direct consequence is the ambiguity of knowledge sources and the impact on the Wikipedia ecosystem: Miller warned that as access decreases, "volunteers who contribute to and enrich Wikipedia content will also decrease, as well as individual donors supporting this work."
To address this crisis, Miller called on AI, search, and social companies that use Wikipedia content to "encourage more visitors" to access the website itself. Wikipedia itself is actively taking measures, including developing a new framework for labeling the sources of encyclopedia content and setting up two teams to attract new readers. Miller encouraged the public to "look for citations and click to view the original sources" when searching online, to support content integrity and the real human work behind content creation.