At 25, Wikipedia Navigates a Quarter-Life Crisis in the Age of A.I.

Turning 25 amid an A.I. boom, Wikipedia is racing to protect traffic, volunteers and revenue without losing its mission. Photo illustration by Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Traffic to Wikipedia, the world’s largest online encyclopedia, naturally ebbs and flows with the rhythms of daily life—rising and falling with the school calendar, the news cycle or even the day of the week—making routine fluctuations unremarkable for a site that draws roughly 15 billion page views a month. But sustained declines tell a different story. Last October, the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that oversees Wikipedia, disclosed that human traffic to the site had fallen 8 percent in recent months as a growing number of users turned to A.I. search engines and chatbots for answers.

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“I don’t think that we’ve seen something like this happen in the last seven to eight years or so,” Marshall Miller, senior director of product at the Wikimedia Foundation, told Observer.

Launched on Jan. 15, 2001, Wikipedia turns 25 today. This milestone comes at a pivotal point for the online encyclopedia, which is straddling a delicate line between fending off existential risks posed by A.I. and avoiding irrelevance as the technology transforms how people find and consume information.

“It’s really this question of long-term sustainability,” Lane Becker, senior director of earned revenue at the Wikimedia Foundation,........

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