Overview
- - Launched on January 15, 2001, the volunteer‑edited encyclopedia now spans more than 65 million articles in 300+ languages, drawing roughly 15 billion pageviews per month and engaging about 250,000 active contributors.
- - Generative AI systems train extensively on Wikipedia’s freely licensed content and increasingly answer users’ queries directly, shifting attention away from the site even as it remains a core source for chatbots.
- - Visits have fallen since 2022—reported down by roughly a quarter over three years, including an 8% drop in 2025—reducing exposure to donation appeals that fund the nonprofit.
- - Wikimedia’s push to capture commercial value has seen limited traction, with Google the only publicly disclosed customer of its Wikimedia Enterprise data product as the foundation urges more tech firms to pay.
- - Editors report rising AI-generated false submissions and persistent recruitment and diversity gaps, prompting stricter guardrails and active removals of fabricated entries alongside the formal ban on AI-written articles.