"This [rise] led us to investigate and update our bot detection systems. We then used the new logic to reclassify our traffic data for March-August 2025, and found that much of the unusually high traffic for the period of May and June was coming from bots that were built to evade detection ... after making this revision, we are seeing declines in human pageviews on Wikipedia over the past few months, amounting to a decrease of roughly 8% as compared to the same months in 2024."
"These bots aren't just vaguely inauthentic users or some incidental side effect of the general spamminess of the internet. In many cases, they're bots working on behalf of AI firms, going undercover as humans to scrape Wikipedia for training or summarization. Miller got right to the point. "We welcome new ways for people to gain knowledge," he wrote. "However, LLMs, AI chatbots, search engines, and social platforms that use Wikipedia content must encourage more visitors to Wikipedia.""
"Fewer real visits means fewer contributors and donors, and it's easy to see how such a situation could send one of the great experiments of the web into a death spiral. Arguments like this are intuitive and easy to make, and you'll hear them beyond the ecosystem of the web: AI models ingest a lot of material, often without clear permission, and then offer it back to consumers in a form that's often directly competitive"
During March–August 2025, Wikipedia updated bot detection and reclassified traffic, finding much of the May–June spike came from bots designed to evade detection. After reclassification, human pageviews declined roughly 8% compared to the same months in 2024. Many detected bots impersonated humans and scraped Wikipedia for AI training and summarization. Wikipedia urged platforms that use its content—LLMs, AI chatbots, search engines, and social platforms—to encourage more visitors to Wikipedia. Declining human visits threaten contributor and donor bases and could trigger a negative feedback loop. AI models often ingest material without clear permission and compete with original sources.
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