Upon investigating and updating the algorithm, they noticed that much of this unusually high traffic spanning the months of May and June was actually coming from bots that were designed to evade detection.

According to Marshall Miller, who works for the Wikimedia Foundation, human pageviews are falling eight per cent year-over-year because of “the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information.” He says that a large portion of this can be attributed to how “search engines are increasingly using generative AI to provide answers directly to searchers rather than linking to sites like ours” and “younger generations are seeking information on social video platforms rather than the open web.”

However, Wikipedia isn’t the only website affected by the rising popularity of AI chatbots and summaries. Other popular publications and content platforms have previously reported a similar shift in patterns.

Miller goes on to say that he welcomes the “new ways for people to gain knowledge” and that this won’t make Wikipedia any less important, since they are still getting knowledge from the website. To give you a quick recap, Wikipedia did offer an AI summarised version of its pages, but removed the feature after editors complained.

With people now turning to AI summaries instead of Wikipedia for getting answers, Miller says the website may be at risk as “fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.”

To combat this, Wikipedia says it is enforcing new policies and working on a framework to ensure that third parties responsibly access and use content from the website. The Wikimedia Foundation added that it is also working on bringing Wikipedia content to the younger audience using social media platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Roblox and Instagram.