AI bots and summaries are stealing Wikipedia's traffic.

[nixcraft@mastodon.social]

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/

[nixcraft@mastodon.social]

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.