Wikipedia, long hailed as one of the internet’s last bastions of trustworthy, collaboratively curated knowledge, is facing significant challenges as the online landscape shifts. According to a recent blog post by Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia, the site has experienced an 8% year-over-year decline in human pageviews. This drop, revealed after updates to Wikipedia’s bot detection systems, points to broader changes in how people seek information online—changes driven largely by the rise of generative artificial intelligence and the growing influence of social media platforms.
**Detecting the Decline: Separating Humans from Bots**
The Wikimedia Foundation has long worked to differentiate genuine human readers from automated bot traffic. Earlier this year, the organization noticed unusually high traffic during the months of May and June. However, after improving its bot detection systems, it became clear that much of this surge was attributable to sophisticated bots built to evade detection rather than to actual human users. Once these bots were filtered out of the traffic statistics, the real picture emerged: human visits to Wikipedia were indeed falling, with an 8% decrease compared to the previous year.
**The Changing Nature of Information-Seeking**
Marshall Miller points to two main factors driving this decline. First, the rapid advancement and adoption of generative AI—technology that can create human-like text, images, and even video—has changed how people access information. Increasingly, search engines are leveraging AI to answer users’ questions directly on search results pages, offering summarized responses rather than directing users to external sources like Wikipedia. This means that while Wikipedia’s content often underpins these AI-generated answers, users may never actually visit the site itself.
Second, there’s a notable generational shift in online habits. Younger audiences are turning to social video platforms, such as TikTok and Instagram, in search of information. Rather than browsing the open web or consulting traditional websites, this group prefers short, visually engaging video explanations, further reducing direct visits to sites like Wikipedia.
While Google has disputed the idea that AI summaries are significantly reducing traffic to external websites, the trend is clear: people are not navigating to Wikipedia as frequently, even though its content remains foundational to the broader digital knowledge ecosystem.
**Risks to Wikipedia’s Model and Mission**
Miller emphasizes that the decline in direct visits presents several risks to Wikipedia’s unique model. The site’s content is created, improved, and maintained by a global community of volunteer editors. If fewer people visit the website, there is a risk that fewer new volunteers will join to contribute and maintain the quality and breadth of Wikipedia’s articles. Moreover, Wikipedia relies heavily on small donations from individual readers to fund its operations. A sustained drop in traffic could threaten this crucial source of support.
Miller also raises concerns about the potential for users to become increasingly disconnected from the original sources of the information they consume. When people receive answers from AI-powered tools or social media videos, they may not realize that much of this knowledge is drawn from