Wikipedia has recorded an 8% decrease in human visits, against the backdrop of the rise of generative AI and social platforms.

This decline became evident after the update of bot detection systems, which showed that some of the previously high traffic came from bots that avoided detection. Marshall Miller from Wikimedia links this trend to the rise of generative AI and social video platforms, with young people preferring to obtain information quickly from TikTok and YouTube. Although Wikipedia remains a crucial source of knowledge, the decline in visits may affect the number of volunteer editors and donors.

Miller emphasizes the importance of supporting clean knowledge and calls on platforms that use Wikipedia content to redirect users to original sources. Wikimedia is developing a new content attribution system and is seeking more volunteers to support the encyclopedia.