{"id":89357,"date":"2025-10-18T20:38:06","date_gmt":"2025-10-18T20:38:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/89357\/"},"modified":"2025-10-18T20:38:06","modified_gmt":"2025-10-18T20:38:06","slug":"wikipedia-says-traffic-is-falling-due-to-ai-search-summaries-and-social-video","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/89357\/","title":{"rendered":"Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wikipedia is often described as the last good website<\/a> on an internet increasingly filled with toxic social media and AI slop. But it seems the online encyclopedia is not completely immune to broader trends, with human pageviews falling 8% year-over-year, according to a new blog post<\/a> from Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation.<\/p>\n

The foundation works to distinguish between traffic from humans and bots, and Miller writes that the decline \u201cover the past few months\u201d was revealed after an update to Wikipedia\u2019s bot detection systems appeared to show that \u201cmuch of the unusually high traffic for the period of May and June was coming from bots that were built to evade detection.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why is traffic falling? Miller points to \u201cthe impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information,\u201d particularly as \u201csearch engines are increasingly using generative AI to provide answers directly to searchers rather than linking to sites like ours\u201d and as \u201cyounger generations are seeking information on social video platforms rather than the open web.\u201d (Google has disputed the claim<\/a> that AI summaries reduce traffic from search.)<\/p>\n

Miller says the foundation welcomes \u201cnew ways for people to gain knowledge\u201d and argues this doesn\u2019t make Wikipedia any less important, since knowledge sourced from the encyclopedia is still reaching people even if they don\u2019t visit the website. Wikipedia even experimented with AI summaries of its own, though it paused the effort after editors complained<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But this shift does present risks, particularly if people are becoming less aware of where their information actually comes from. As Miller puts it, \u201cWith fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.\u201d (Some of those volunteers are truly remarkable, reportedly disarming a gunman at a Wikipedia editors\u2019 conference<\/a> on Friday.)<\/p>\n

For that reason, he argues that AI, search, and social companies using content from Wikipedia \u201cmust encourage more visitors\u201d to the website itself.<\/p>\n

And he says Wikipedia is taking steps of its own, for example by developing a new framework\u00a0for attributing content from the encyclopedia. The organization also has two teams tasked with helping Wikipedia reach new readers, and it\u2019s looking for volunteers to help.<\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 27-29, 2025\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Miller also encourages readers to \u201csupport content integrity and content creation\u201d more broadly.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you search for information online, look for citations and click through to the original source material,\u201d he writes. \u201cTalk with the people you know about the importance of trusted, human curated knowledge, and help them understand that the content underlying generative AI was created by real people who deserve their support.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wikipedia is often described as the last good website on an internet increasingly filled with toxic social media…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":89358,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80,56853,7192],"class_list":{"0":"post-89357","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-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-technology","14":"tag-wikimedia-foundation","15":"tag-wikipedia"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89357","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=89357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89357\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}