New User Trends on Wikipedia

Source: Wikimedia Foundation · 2025-10-17

Every month, Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects receive billions of pageviews from around the world. As this traffic comes in, the Wikimedia Foundation’s algorithms classify it as coming from either humans or bots. This allows us to have an accurate understanding of the level of human traffic, and helps us enforce restrictions on how third-party bots pull in data to power commercial search and AI experiences. Many bots that scrape websites like ours are continually getting more sophisticated, and trying to appear human. To keep our metrics as accurate as possible, we continually update the ways we classify traffic.

Around May 2025, we began observing unusually high amounts of apparently human traffic, mostly originating from Brazil. This 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.

Revising our data in this way means we have to interpret it with care, as our bot detection systems apply different rules at different points in time. But 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. We believe that these declines reflect the impact of generative AI and social media on how people seek information, especially with search engines providing answers directly to searchers, often based on Wikipedia content.

These declines are not unexpected. Search engines are increasingly using generative AI to provide answers directly to searchers rather than linking to sites like ours. And younger generations are seeking information on social video platforms rather than the open web. This gradual shift is not unique to Wikipedia. Many other publishers and content platforms are reporting similar shifts as users spend more time on search engines, AI chatbots, and social media to find information. They are also experiencing the strain that these companies are putting on their infrastructure.

While this means that some users don’t directly visit Wikipedia to get information, it is still among the most valuable datasets that these new formats of knowledge dissemination rely on. Almost all large language models (LLMs) train on Wikipedia datasets, and search engines and social media platforms prioritize its information to respond to questions from their users. That means that people are reading the knowledge created by Wikimedia volunteers all over the internet, even if they don’t visit wikipedia.org— this human-created knowledge has become even more important to the spread of reliable information online. And, in fact, Wikipedia continues to remain highly trusted and valued as a neutral, accurate source of information globally, as measured by large-scale surveys run regularly by the Wikimedia Foundation.

We welcome new ways for people to gain knowledge. However, LLMs, AI chatbots, search engines, and social platforms that use Wikipedia content must encourage more visitors to Wikipedia, so that the free knowledge that so many people and platforms depend on can continue to flow sustainably. With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work. Wikipedia is the only site of its scale with standards of verifiability, neutrality, and transparency powering information all over the internet, and it continues to be essential to people’s daily information needs in unseen ways. For people to trust information shared on the internet, platforms should make it clear where the information is sourced from and elevate opportunities to visit and participate in those sources.

To make sure third-parties responsibly access and reuse Wikipedia content at scale, we are enforcing policies, developing a framework for attribution, and developing new technical capabilities, including through Wikimedia Enterprise. We appreciate the collaboration of those platforms and members of the ecosystem that have been constructively working with us to carve a sustainable path forward for a healthy, open web.

Our two new readers teams (Reader Growth and Reader Experience) are bringing fresh thinking and an experimental approach to how people find and read Wikipedia.

Building on direct feedback from our volunteers, we have increased our focus on how people can edit Wikipedia from their mobile devices, how new volunteers can have more joyful and productive first editing experiences, and how we can grow the next generation of advanced volunteers who do the heavy-lifting of building Wikipedia.

The Future Audiences project is experimenting with new ways to bring free knowledge from Wikipedia to younger audiences who spend time on other platforms– such as YouTube, TikTok, Roblox, and Instagram– including via videos, games, and chatbots.

First, everyone can choose online behaviors that support content integrity and content creation. When you search for information online, look for citations and click through to the original source material. Talk with the people you know about the importance of trusted, human curated knowledge, and help them understand that the content underlying generative AI was created by real people who deserve their support.

25 years since its creation, Wikipedia’s human knowledge is more valuable to the world than ever before. Our vision is for a future where everyone can participate in knowledge creation and sharing – a future that is possible when everyone uses the free knowledge ecosystem responsibly. As we call upon everyone to support our knowledge platforms in old and new ways, we are optimistic that Wikipedia will be here, ensuring the internet provides free, accurate, human knowledge, for generations to come.