from Hacker News

Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video

by gmays on 10/21/25, 1:29 AM with 445 comments

  • by irjustin on 10/21/25, 2:34 AM

    I'll go out on a limb and say we _need_ Wikipedia and it's okay that traffic falls.

    Physical print encyclopedias got replaced by Wikipedia, but AI isn't a replacement (can't ever see how either). While AI is a method of easier access for the end user, the purpose of Wikipedia stands on its own.

    I've always scoffed at the Wikimedia Foundation's warchest and continuously increasing annual spending. I say now is the time to save money. Become self sustaining through investments so it can live for 1000 years.

    To me, it is an existence for the common good and should be governed as such.

  • by crmd on 10/21/25, 2:32 AM

    As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that is not dependent on web traffic for revenue, is a decline in traffic necessarily bad?

    I always assumed the need for metastatic growth was limited to VC-backed and ad-revenue dependent companies.

  • by crazygringo on 10/21/25, 2:49 AM

    LLM's have definitely replaced 90% of what I used to look up on a Wikipedia, simply because they integrate from so many more additional sources.

    But at the same time I continue to contribute edits to Wikipedia. Because it's the source of so much data. To me, it doesn't matter if the information I contribute gets consumed on Wikipedia or consumed via LLM. Either way, it's helping people.

    Wikipedia isn't going away, even if its website stops being the primary way most people get information from it.

  • by codinhood on 10/21/25, 3:13 AM

    AI seems obvious, but social video? Are they saying people watch TikToks instead of reading Wikipedia, or people who used to look things up don’t bother anymore because of TikTok?

  • by arjie on 10/21/25, 3:34 AM

    It's all right. Wikipedia was a magical device for its time, and it's still a great aggregator of information. It will probably last forever as such a link aggregator. Read-time curation is obviously far better than write-time curation, but the former used to be very hard. Now we have the former for cheap so it makes sense for Wikipedia to be Yet Another Source into the read-time curator. And the existence of a source database like Wikipedia makes many of these tools work a lot better.

    People rightfully get upset about individual editors having specific agendas on Wikipedia and I get it. Often that is the case. But the chat interface for LLMs allows for a back and forth where you can force them to look past some text to get closer to a truth.

    For my part, I think it's nice to be part of making that base substrate of human knowledge in an open way, and some kinds of fixes to Wikipedia articles are very easy. So what little I do, I'll keep doing. Makes me happy to help.

    Some of the fruit is really low-hanging, take a look at this garbage someone added to an article:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salvadoran_gang_c...

  • by Venn1 on 10/21/25, 2:36 AM

    This made me curious enough to check the stats for my little site. According to Cloudflare’s AI Overview, over the last 24 hours the breakdown is:

    665 ChatGPT-User

    396 Bingbot

    296 Googlebot

    037 PerplexityBot

    Fascinating.

  • by fallingfrog on 10/21/25, 8:43 PM

    You have to keep in mind that the original google search, by summarizing search results based on links between pages, essentially destroyed the web of interconnected links that existed at that time, so that the original pagerank algorithm doesn't even really work anymore. And the search results Google returns are worse than they were years ago. And you know, I use it, it is still super convenient, and the long term effects took some time to become apparent.

    Now it is again feeding on and regurgitating Wikipedia but again in a way that will end up destroying the thing it is summarizing. Aggregators are parasitic on the thing they derive information from.

  • by pm2222 on 10/21/25, 8:17 PM

    I still donate Wikipedia yearly. It's useful and I hope it stays afloat.

  • by codethief on 10/21/25, 9:21 PM

    So far the story with Wikipedia has always been that the number of contributors is declining, and I believe this will only get worse when fewer people read it (directly from the source). As much as I hate the idea, are people (in particular, Wikimedia) experimenting yet with using LLMs to contribute to/improve/check Wikipedia? Will page discussions and edit wars in the future get replaced with an arena of partially collaborating, partially competing LLM agents?

  • by Sontho on 10/22/25, 3:24 AM

    The same is happening with almost all sites since google started providing AI summaries.

  • by kalasoo on 10/22/25, 3:59 AM

    Knowledge isn’t knowledge in itself — it’s about how people organize it.

    With more AI tools mining existing knowledge and presenting it in increasingly accessible ways, I don’t think AI search fundamentally changes how information and knowledge are organized.

    Of course, AI could reshape the organization of knowledge through areas like:

    1. Fact-checking and sourcing

    2. Drafting new pages

    3. Editing and refining wording

    …and more

    ---

    Just like Wikipedia already has many bots running behind the scenes, if all these tasks were eventually handled by AI, there would still be things left for humans (or perhaps another AI) to decide:

    1. When a fact has multiple perspectives, how should it be phrased to represent different viewpoints fairly?

    > I still remember countless word battles on Wikipedia over this.

    2. In the age of smartphones and social media, historical moments are documented not only by journalists or influencers but by thousands — even millions — of ordinary people. How should Wikipedia process and summarize such vast, distributed facts?

    3. How do we properly incentivize contributors, whether human or AI?

    > Wikipedia was born in an era when the Internet lacked reliable information, and building a shared, sustainable, independent knowledge base was a mission that resonated with its early contributors — traffic rewards came later.

    4. And of course, geopolitics — Wikipedia must remain independent.

    ---

    A bit of background: I once led a Chinese wiki product, but I eventually gave up on it — because almost no one cared why a wiki should exist beyond being just another searchable content platform.

  • by dmitrygr on 10/21/25, 8:05 PM

    I stopped contributing money, and then stopped trusting and using Wikipedia after I saw how wrong they are on a subject I am well-informed on personally (ARM architecture), and how fast they revert properly-cited 100% factually correct changes (literally citing the arm architecture manual).

    How could I trust them on things I do not know, if I know for a fact they are unrepentantly wrong about things I do know?

  • by janalsncm on 10/21/25, 9:40 PM

    Here is a list of their most popular pages:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Top_25_Report

    Most of them are trending public figures and media, which lines up with what I remembered from my prior Wikipedia analysis. So LLMs are likely replacing a lot of this.

  • by sameerds on 10/22/25, 2:43 AM

    I really hope that the same thing is happening to all kinds of SEO-ridden websites out there.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44631662

  • by ChrisArchitect on 10/21/25, 3:10 AM

  • by d--b on 10/21/25, 3:27 AM

    traffic falling means wikipedia will be cheaper to run. since they don’t rely on ads, it’d likely not affecting their revenues either (assuming those who don’t use it anymore weren’5 those givîng to it)

  • by bamboozled on 10/22/25, 3:10 AM

    Little off topic but does anyone else find AI summarise really misleading, almost dangerously misleading ? In a search box you can never rally provide anywhere near enough context to get a sufficient answer on anything of even small consequence.

    Yes I do use the internet for “medical opinion” and information and seriously some of the falsehoods it’s provided…similarly anything related to construction. Steer clear.

  • by damnesian on 10/21/25, 9:44 PM

    This is really the perfect point in the timeline- "in these uncertain times-" to posit themselves as a working repository of credible information.

    Also I firmly believe the Wikipedia app is key to their sustained relevance. Users get forwarded to the app from web browsers with wiki links, this gets people in the dedicated interface.

    from a design standpoint there need to be more avenues on each page inviting people to browse and explore, spend more time there.

  • by submeta on 10/22/25, 6:21 AM

    For Wikipedia to last 1000 years, we need a publisher who sells a print of a snapshot of it every ten years or so. When the civilisation dies, and our civilisation will die eventually, sooner or later, just like any other civilisation, then there won‘t be no internet, no wikipedia foundation or anything. But printed paper might survive.

  • by fallingfrog on 10/21/25, 8:34 PM

    That little AI generated summary that seems to show up in every Google search is riddled with errors. I've learned that as often as not it's just making things up or confusing two different topics. I would not trust that thing under any circumstances. Its no better than a wild guess from a stranger on the street.

  • by hzay on 10/22/25, 1:44 PM

    We can't just look up info using an LLM. We have no clue what its weights and biases are based on, and whatever other layers control the output. Just a total black box. It would be an irreplaceable loss if we lost wikipedia to LLMs.

  • by pojzon on 10/21/25, 7:56 PM

    Looking how editors can fabricate stuff OR argue like little kids whether original source from origin country should be mistrusted vs encyclopedia britanica is enough for me to know Wikipedia is no longer what it was and lost its purpose.

    The further aways ppl stay from it the better.

  • by nadermx on 10/21/25, 7:57 PM

    So maybe they shouldn't depend on just search traffic. Their increased spend would suggest they got enough people to try and figure out alternative methods to attract editors and/or traffic.

  • by Mistletoe on 10/21/25, 3:10 AM

    Oh good, Jimmy can stop hounding me for money like a late night infomercial or televangelist.

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34106982

    >2022

    >It’s the dishonesty of Wikipedia that bothers me. The implication is that donations are urgently needed to keep the website running. In reality they have $300m in the bank and revenue is growing every year[0]. Even Wikipedia says only 43% of donations are used for site operations[1], and that includes all of their sites, not just Wikipedia. Fully 12% of the money they collect from you is. . . used to ask you for more money[1]

  • by Razengan on 10/21/25, 3:55 AM

    How is it not conflict of interest when Google's AI summary (which is sometimes hilariously wrong) takes a click away from websites that pay for ads? Specially if it was trained on those websites

  • by nottorp on 10/23/25, 6:16 AM

    Ok so is Wikipedia competing for traffic rankings?

  • by orliesaurus on 10/21/25, 9:25 PM

    that's a good thing? Wikipedia is always worrying about server costs or am I wrong?

  • by MarlonPro on 10/22/25, 8:36 PM

    Will this also affect the search engines like Google?

  • by robertwt7 on 10/22/25, 2:55 AM

    as much as I love Wikipedia and I think we need it, I just realise that I haven't opened Wikipedia in the past few months. My default workflow is now replaced to Option + Space and ask gpt questions.

  • by parpfish on 10/21/25, 11:51 PM

    i feel like there's a postivie-sum game where the AI companies should start heavily subsidizing wikipedia.

    wikipedia gets money to stay afloat, ai companies continue to get access to their huge human-curated knowledge graph.

  • by postflopclarity on 10/22/25, 1:19 PM

    editing wikipedia was close to the most aggravating experience I've ever had. and that includes suing landlords for security deposits and arguing with HOAs.

  • by intended on 10/21/25, 5:28 AM

    I’m a pro-market solution person, but markets are a tool.

    This is the kind of capitalistic behavior that is repugnant to our idea of how things should work.

    This is not what the commons is for - taking the work of creators, repackaging it, and using platform capability to re-sell it.

    At this point, I am coming around to the argument that governments should make their own local/national AI.

  • by Wistar on 10/21/25, 8:53 PM

    I do not doubt this for a second. I hope that this does not alter Wikipedia.

  • by fooker on 10/22/25, 7:40 AM

    Here's an interesting question: Wikipedia was a mind blowing improvement over a shelf full of Britannica encyclopedia, or several floppies of Encarta.

    What's the next improvement over Wikipedia that changes things to a similar extent?

  • by yobid20 on 10/22/25, 9:53 AM

    Guess that means they dont need that $1 donation anymore

  • by poppafuze on 10/21/25, 11:56 PM

    The persecutors of notability are no longer notable.

  • by loeg on 10/22/25, 2:50 AM

    So their hosting costs are going down, right?

  • by bad_username on 10/21/25, 4:55 AM

    My personal traffic to Wikipedia fell after around 2019, when activist editors took over, and the site ceased to be trustworthy for a lot of important topics.

  • by thund on 10/21/25, 9:01 PM

    openai, anthropic, gemini &co should pay wikipedia the rent.

  • by quantumcotton on 10/22/25, 6:56 AM

    Wiki has been dying such a slow painful death. I feel bad. Especially because I was the first generation to have the transition from encyclopedias to wiki. Rip wiki, it'll go down in history for sure.

  • by abtinf on 10/21/25, 8:52 PM

    Good riddance to their constant begging for money they don't need.

  • by dottjt on 10/21/25, 8:18 PM

    Isn't this better for them in a way? Won't this reduce their hosting costs, whilst still being relevant to those who actually need deeper information?

  • by I_dream_of_Geni on 10/21/25, 7:08 PM

    (looks outside at the street) I'm wondering why would traffic be less because of AI search?? SO I asked AI. Its answer? "By analyzing data and demand in real-time, AI is able to predict peak travel times and adjust train, subway, and bus routes as needed, reducing overcrowding and, in the case of buses, traffic congestion."

  • by johnnyApplePRNG on 10/21/25, 11:25 PM

    AI helped me realize why I have always read and referred to Wikipedia so little.

    Don't get me wrong. Wikipedia is a GREAT resource that the world absolutely needs.

    But it's a horribly boring "read" when it comes to human consumption.

    It's an encyclopedia. A list of facts.

    When I want to learn something about a particular topic, I rarely ever want to read a list of facts.

  • by citizenpaul on 10/21/25, 10:03 PM

    >Wikipedia is often described as the last good website on an internet

    Oh who says that? Bloomberg.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-10-24/why-wi...

    So not people just bloomberg... trash article. Probably just stealth donation marketing.

  • by Shorel on 10/22/25, 7:00 AM

    The other day I was reading the page about the Library of Alexandria.

    The Wikipedia version virtually doesn't mention the stoning of Hypatia or the burning of the library, except for a different smaller fire caused by a war during Julius Caesar.

    This page certainly reads like Christian apology, where the almost total destruction of the library by Christian fanatics didn't happen.

    For me, this heavy bias in basically every article is the reason Wikipedia traffic is falling.

  • by incomingpain on 10/21/25, 6:20 PM

    There are multiple new start ups and existing competition that's impacting them. They are facing competition.

    The curious thing is that big LLM folks put together RAG systems which act much like wikipedia. But it's more than that. They built dictionaries, book repos(borderline illegal), news repos, and data knowledge base. These are bigger than wikipedia. Better because you dont have anonymous partisans.

    Wikipedia is at a point where they have purged multiple perspectives and it has left an unreliable systemic bias in wikipedia. They are dealing with this problem and competitors are popping up because of these problems.

    Larry put out his theses on his user page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Nine_Theses

    Originally being heavily censored, vandalized, and deleted. It does seem to have been allowed, despite it being in user space.

    Every one of those theses is correct.

  • by breppp on 10/22/25, 2:23 AM

    The hard truth is that LLMs will fully replace wikipedia.

    Let's put aside wikipedia being rotten with bureaucracy and obsession-driven bias, which is similar to stackoverflow preexisting flows before LLMs streamrolled.

    Fact is, wikipedia is a human driven summarization engine of secondary sources, hopefully in a way that echos the sources consensus.

    This is exactly what LLMs are best for, summarizing huge amount of text, and training can easily focus on high quality books and thus exceed wikipedia in quality.

    It's enough to read an AI summary where the first line talks about the subject in hand, compared to wikipedia where the first line is the product of some petty argument about a political disagreement