[Global Times reporter Bai Yunyi] The Wikimedia Foundation, the operator of Wikipedia, said recently that as more and more users directly obtain information through artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots or search engines trained according to Wikipedia content, the human access traffic of Wikipedia has dropped significantly. This trend has caused the foundation to worry about the sustainability of Wikipedia.

"It's hard to imagine a world without Wikipedia-this online encyclopedia has been around for a quarter of a century and has long been one of the pillars of the Internet." The British "Observer" reported that in recent months, affected by the rise of generative AI, human visits to Wikipedia have dropped by 8% compared with the same period in 2024. "These changes are not unexpected." Marshall Miller, senior director of products at the Wikimedia Foundation, wrote in a recent blog post. "Search engines are increasingly using generative AI to provide answers directly to users, rather than linking to sites like ours (Wikipedia)."

According to the analysis of the Observer, one of the reasons for this change is the AI overview function launched by Google last year, which will present an AI-generated summary above the search results and summarize the information of the entire network. A report by the Pew Research Center in the United States shows that when the AI overview summary appears, the proportion of users clicking on traditional search results links will be halved, and only 1% of the 900 American adults surveyed click on the AI summary. link inside. In addition, in Google's traditional search results and AI summary content, the content of Wikipedia, YouTube and Reddit dominates, and they contribute about 15% of AI summary content and 17% of traditional search content. It is worth mentioning that Wikipedia had previously launched the page AI summary function, but this function was later cancelled due to complaints from editors.

According to the Indian Express, Miller said he welcomed ¡°new ways of accessing knowledge¡± and stressed that this would not underestimate Wikipedia, as the source of this knowledge is still Wikipedia itself. But he also acknowledged that the current situation could put Wikipedia at risk, and they are developing and implementing new policies to ensure that third parties can access and use the content of the site in a responsible way.