nixCraft 🐧Oct 18

AI bots and summaries are stealing Wikipedia's traffic. Wikipedia, one of the last places, started feeling the heat of Google and other search engines' AI summary recently. They have lost 8% of human traffic while AI bot activities increased which increased its bandwidth costs by 50%. The Wikipedia blog warns that the decline in human traffic poses an existential risk to the Wikipedia ecosystem especially creation of new wiki article or updating older ones.

https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wikipedia/

New User Trends on Wikipedia

An update on user trends from the Wikimedia Foundation.

Diff
Show threadnixCraft 🐧Oct 18

They want two things from likes of Google, OpenAI and others AI companies :

(a) Attribution & transparency - Wikipedia wants AI companies to provide clear source where information is sourced from

(b) Direct click through to Wikipedia - They want sending direct traffic to Wikipedia instead of stealing it without giving any credits and creating AI slop.

I doubt that these AI companies cares about that specially transparency or giving credit part.

Show threadUsagi
@nixCraft They care about not giving credit. If they did you could go to the actual source, and skip the AI next time.
Oct 18 at 7:24pmWeb