{"id":60807,"date":"2025-10-04T11:16:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-04T11:16:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/60807\/"},"modified":"2025-10-04T11:16:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-04T11:16:09","slug":"wikipedia-isnt-dead-yet-but-ai-poses-major-challenges-study-finds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/60807\/","title":{"rendered":"Wikipedia isn\u2019t dead yet, but AI poses major challenges, study finds"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n         Published on<br \/>\n            04\/10\/2025 &#8211; 8:00 GMT+2\n            <\/p>\n<p>          <img decoding=\"async\" class=\"c-ad__placeholder__logo\" src=\"https:\/\/static.euronews.com\/website\/images\/logos\/logo-euronews-stacked-outlined-72x72-grey-9.svg\" width=\"72\" height=\"72\" alt=\"\" loading=\"lazy\"\/><br \/>\n          ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n<p>Wikipedia is, at least for now, surviving the artificial intelligence (AI) era, according to a new <a href=\"https:\/\/journals.sagepub.com\/doi\/10.1177\/26339137251372599\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer nofollow noopener\">study<\/a> by King\u2019s College London in the United Kingdom.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The free, internet-based encyclopedia launched in 2001 has long been the subject of doom-laden predictions, suggesting the imminent death of Wikipedia due to the rise of AI tools such as ChatGPT.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Distancing itself from these negative forecasts, the study shows that people still use Wikipedia, while noting that AI scraping\u2013the large-scale collection of data from websites\u2013and changes in how users access information pose challenges for the platform.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Wikipedia engagement continues<\/p>\n<p>Published in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Collective Intelligence, the article analysed 12 Wikipedia language editions \u2014 six with ChatGPT access and six without \u2014 from January 2021 to January 2024.<\/p>\n<p>Scientists saw no drop in Wikipedia activity during the 36 months. In fact, they found an increase in page views and visitor numbers across all language editions, although the growth was smaller in languages where ChatGPT was available.<\/p>\n<p>Despite this, the study found no evidence that ChatGPT reduced the number of edits or editors on Wikipedia.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The researchers also noted several limitations, such as the possibility that some users bypassed ChatGPT restrictions using virtual private networks (VPNs), and the study did not account for the popularity of ChatGPT in different countries.<\/p>\n<p>These findings align with previous <a href=\"https:\/\/business.columbia.edu\/research-brief\/chatgpt-wikipedia-traffic-decline?utm_source=chatgpt.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer nofollow noopener\">research<\/a> on AI and Wikipedia, showing steady traffic on the free encyclopedia, while highlighting some significant challenges for the platform\u2019s future.<\/p>\n<p>Long-term threat of AI to Wikipedia<\/p>\n<p>While the data challenge the idea of Wikipedia\u2019s death, researchers also stress that the encyclopedia is facing serious difficulties.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAI developers are letting their scrapers loose on Wikipedia to train them on high-quality data, pushing up traffic to levels where Wikipedia\u2019s servers are struggling to keep up,\u201d Elena Simperl, professor of computer science at King\u2019s and co-director of the King\u2019s Institute for Artificial Intelligence, said in a statement.<\/p>\n<p>Simperl also noted that AI-generated content often draws on Wikipedia without crediting it, diverting web traffic away from the online encyclopedia.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In this regard, Simperl\u2019s colleague and first author of the study, Neal Reeves, called for a \u2018new social contract\u2019 between AI companies and Wikipedia, one in which the platform could maintain control over its content while still allowing it to be used for AI training.<\/p>\n<p>The article was published on the same day that Wikimedia Deutschland, the German branch of the foundation that runs Wikipedia, announced the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wikidata.org\/wiki\/Wikidata:Embedding_Project\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer nofollow noopener\">Wikidata Embedding Project<\/a>\u2014a new database designed to make it easier for users, and especially AI models, to access Wikipedia\u2019s content.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>With this system AI developers will be able to use knowledge verified by Wikipedia editors, rather than relying solely on scraped pages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Published on 04\/10\/2025 &#8211; 8:00 GMT+2 ADVERTISEMENT Wikipedia is, at least for now, surviving the artificial intelligence (AI)&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":60808,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,2670,61,11545,60,80,7192],"class_list":{"0":"post-60807","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-chatgpt","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-information","14":"tag-ireland","15":"tag-technology","16":"tag-wikipedia"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}