Overview
- After detecting sophisticated bot activity centered in Brazil, Wikimedia updated its filters in May and reclassified traffic, revealing about an 8% year-over-year drop in recent human pageviews.
- The foundation attributes the decline to generative AI chatbots, AI-generated search summaries, and shifting information habits on social platforms that reduce click-through to Wikipedia.
- Leaders warn that sustained erosion of visits could shrink the volunteer editor community and depress individual donations that fund the site.
- Wikimedia says it is tightening crawler enforcement, building attribution and technical safeguards, and strengthening partnerships to ensure responsible reuse that points users to sources.
- In parallel, it launched the Wikidata Embedding Project to make roughly 120 million data points easier for large language models to use while calling for better traffic referrals.