{"id":37050,"date":"2025-10-30T17:01:19","date_gmt":"2025-10-30T17:01:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/wikipedia-says-ai-answers-are-starting-to-take-a-bite-there-are-reasons-to-be-worried\/"},"modified":"2025-10-30T17:01:19","modified_gmt":"2025-10-30T17:01:19","slug":"wikipedia-says-ai-answers-are-starting-to-take-a-bite-there-are-reasons-to-be-worried","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/wikipedia-says-ai-answers-are-starting-to-take-a-bite-there-are-reasons-to-be-worried\/","title":{"rendered":"Wikipedia says AI answers are starting to take a bite. There are reasons to be worried."},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/690116210be9845f2dc54370?format=jpeg\" alt=\"the wikipedia logo\"\/><figcaption>Wikipedia&#039;s traffic is down 8%, in part because of AI.<\/p>\n<p>Illustration by Avishek Das\/SOPA Images\/LightRocket via Getty Images<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>Wikipedia says its traffic is down 8% in the last few months when compared to the same time last year.<\/li>\n<li>AI summaries and chatbots are using its data, but aren&#039;t bringing tons of people to its site or app.<\/li>\n<li>So is Wikipedia in trouble? It says no \u2014 because it&#039;s making deals to get paid for its data.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Let&#039;s say you were scanning the recent headlines and wanted to know when the East Wing of the White House was constructed.<\/p>\n<p>You might ask ChatGPT. Or maybe you&#039;d just google it.<\/p>\n<p>Either way, you&#039;d get a good answer \u2014 although slightly different versions. (Google&#039;s AI answers has a snippet from Wikipedia that notes the East Wing was originally constructed in 1902; ChatGPT offers the 1942 two-story version.)<\/p>\n<p>The point is, I don&#039;t actually have to visit Wikipedia&#039;s website to find out, even if the information is sourced from Wikipedia. <br \/>That&#039;s starting to become a real concern for people who care about Wikipedia. Traffic is down 8% over the past few months when compared to the same period last year, according to Diff, the blog of Wikipedia&#039;s parent organization, the nonprofit Wikimedia. AI-driven chatbots, fed by large language models that hoover up information from sites like Wikipedia, are largely to blame for the decline, Wiki says.<\/p>\n<p>That sounds bad \u2014 <em>is it<\/em>? And what does that mean for the future of Wikipedia? It&#039;s so ingrained into the web that it feels too big to fail \u2014 but could it?<\/p>\n<p>I asked Marshall Miller, senior director of product at Wikimedia, to make sense of the data. He told me it&#039;s certainly true that AI needs Wikipedia, which is one of the most crucial datasets that make up the backbone of the LLMs&#039; knowledge.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Our mission is to spread free knowledge, and so it is a good thing when that knowledge reaches people through new platforms, whether that&#039;s AI chatbots, search engines, or social media,&quot; he said. &quot;People need access to reliable, neutral knowledge, and we are happy to see the knowledge reach more people in new ways.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>But it also puts the organization in a difficult position when LLMs are using Wikipedia&#039;s knowledge base without referring the traffic to the site that can help keep its ecosystem healthy: new contributors, new editors, and \u2014 crucially \u2014 new donors to the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation.<\/p>\n<h2>Why a drop in traffic matters to Wikipedia<\/h2>\n<p>A key difference between a news publisher like Business Insider or The Wall Street Journal seeing a drop in traffic, and Wikipedia seeing a drop, is that the business models are quite different.<\/p>\n<p>Most news outlets run ads or rely on subscriptions, or both. Wikipedia is run by a nonprofit, relying in large part on donations. So for Wikipedia, fewer people visiting it each month means fewer people prompted to donate.<\/p>\n<p>It <em>could<\/em> also mean fewer contributors and editors to add to and improve on Wikipedia&#039;s articles. I&#039;m slightly skeptical of that threat, however. I suspect the kind of person who actually edits a Wikipedia article is a specific type of power user, not a casual drop-in who just wanted one piece of information they obtained by an AI overview.<\/p>\n<p>Also, as the Diff blog post points out, the site&#039;s traffic dip isn&#039;t only because of AI. There are other trends at play, like younger people getting information from video and skipping traditional web searches altogether.<\/p>\n<p>AI eating into traffic isn&#039;t the only concern on the table at the moment for Wiki: A more potentially urgent threat is political. This summer, Republican lawmakers launched an investigation into Wikimedia&#039;s alleged left-leaning bias. And Elon Musk, who has accused Wikipedia of having a left-leaning slant, just launched his Grokipedia.<\/p>\n<p>But there are bright spots: Its site and apps still draw more than 10 billion views a month, and the Wikimedia Foundation brought in $170.5 million in donations last year.<\/p>\n<p>And there&#039;s a mechanism for the AI companies to actually pay Wikipedia for its information: Wikimedia Enterprise sells an API subscription. (There&#039;s a decent question about how much leverage Wikimedia has when a lot of AI companies have already helped themselves to a huge part of its data for free.) But it&#039;s not impossible to see a path toward deals. OpenAI, for instance, has made deals with various news publishers, including Business Insider&#039;s parent company, Axel Springer.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Generative AI depends on Wikipedia&#039;s human-created knowledge,&quot; Miller said. &quot;Wikipedia is one of the highest-quality datasets used in training LLMs, and studies have shown that the outputs from AI models are significantly lower quality when Wikipedia is not used as a dataset.&quot;<\/p>\n<h2>How you might encounter Wikipedia when using AI<\/h2>\n<p>I&#039;ve been thinking about the ways that people might encounter Wikipedia information in an AI setting, vs. actually browsing Wikipedia itself. And I think there are some big differences \u2014 which should be good news for Wikipedia.<\/p>\n<p>I can attest that a lot of the factual-type questions I might ask ChatGPT are being sourced from Wikipedia, and I bet that&#039;s also the case with a lot of the homework-type questions that younger users are using AI for. &quot;What was the cause of the 30 Years&#039; War?&quot; is a great question for ChatGPT. It&#039;ll give you a reasonable and concise answer. (Kids, please do your homework yourself.)<\/p>\n<p>But consider instead what you find on the Wikipedia page for the Thirty Years&#039; War. So many interesting blue words to click on! So many names and places and things! You could get lost there for weeks.<\/p>\n<p>We all love a good Wikipedia rabbit hole to get sucked down \u2014 that&#039;s a very different experience from wanting a quick answer. It&#039;s like sitting down to a meal at a restaurant vs. microwaving a frozen burrito. I say this as someone who eats a fair amount of frozen burritos \u2014 sometimes you just want the quick and easy thing! The two versions coexist!<\/p>\n<p>That experience \u2014 the browsing experience where you absorb information you didn&#039;t even think to ask for \u2014 is what sets Wikipedia apart from an AI answer of a simple fact. And that&#039;s what the people who donate or edit keep coming back for.<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wikipedia&#039;s traffic is down 8%, in part because of AI. Illustration by Avishek Das\/SOPA Images\/LightRocket via Getty Images Wikipedia says its traffic is down 8% in the last few months when compared to the same time last year. AI summaries and chatbots are using its data, but aren&#039;t bringing tons of people to its site [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37051,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-37050","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37050","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37050"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37050\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37050"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37050"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37050"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}