Wikipedia is often described as the last good website on an internet increasingly filled with toxic social media and AI slop, but it seems the online encyclopedia is not completely immune to broader trends, with human pageviews falling 8% year-over-year, according to a new blog post from Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation.

The foundation works to distinguish between traffic from humans and bots, and Miller writes that the decline “over the past few months” was revealed after an update to Wikipedia’s bot detection systems appeared to show that “much of the unusually high traffic for the period of May and June was coming from bots that were built to evade detection.”

Why is traffic falling? Miller points to “the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek infor

See Full Page