Wikimedia says AI bots and summaries are hurting Wikipedia's traffic

Wikimedia is sounding the alarm on the impact AI is having on reliable knowledge and information on the internet. In a blog post, Wikimedia's senior director of product, Marshall Miller, lays out the impact on page views that the foundation attributes to the rise of LLM chatbots and AI-generated summaries in search results. <br /> "We believe that these declines reflect the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information, especially with search engines providing answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content," said Miller.<br /> The foundation has increasingly faced AI bot crawlers whose sophistication has made it difficult to parse human traffic from bots. After improving bot detection to yield more accurate metrics, Wik [...]