08:58Machine-translated from Azerbaijani by AIRead in Azerbaijani
Wikipedia Chief Warns: Artificial Intelligence Threatens the Online Encyclopedia’s Future
As artificial intelligence changes how people search for information online, Wikipedia is increasingly feeling the effects. Over the past year, page views on the platform have fallen by 8 percent, and the decline is reportedly continuing. One of the main problems is that although Wikipedia is an important source of information for artificial intelligence models, these systems provide information directly to users rather than directing them to the encyclopedia itself.
Wikimedia Foundation CEO Bernadette Meehan has expressed concern about Wikipedia’s future. According to her, artificial intelligence systems use vast amounts of Wikipedia data created by people, but some technology companies do not want to pay for using this data on a large scale.
Wikimedia has a paid program that provides large commercial companies with reliable, large-scale access to data. The source reports that companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Perplexity are among the publicly disclosed customers of this service. Their payments reportedly cover about 10 percent of Wikimedia’s operating costs. OpenAI and Anthropic are not listed among its publicly disclosed corporate customers.
According to Meehan, technology companies have different attitudes toward the issue. Some companies acknowledge that commercial organizations benefiting from Wikipedia should contribute to funding the platform. Others acknowledge that they use data in volumes Wikimedia considers excessive, but do not want to pay for corporate data access.
The issue is particularly important for Wikipedia because the platform does not plan to abandon its principle of providing content free of charge. About 80 percent of Wikimedia’s operating budget comes from small donations. A significant share of these donations is collected through donation appeals seen by users who visit the Wikipedia website.
The decline in traffic is not only a financial issue. Wikipedia’s readers are also one of the main sources of future editors. As fewer people visit the site, the growth of the volunteer editor community may also be affected. As a result, this could pose a risk to the sustainability of the human-created content from which artificial intelligence systems obtain information.
Meehan draws a distinction between the use of artificial intelligence within Wikipedia and having articles created by artificial intelligence. In her view, the technology should assist human editors, not replace them. She believes that even five years from now, Wikipedia articles will continue to be written “by people, for people.”
Artificial intelligence is already used on Wikipedia for some supporting tasks. These include translation, detecting broken links and helping identify problems in edits made by new editors.
Another issue highlighted by the Wikimedia chief is the potential for inequality in access to information. Wikipedia currently operates in 349 languages, and many of these languages may not be commercially attractive markets for major artificial intelligence companies. If artificial intelligence services become the primary means of accessing information online, this could limit opportunities for users of some languages.
In addition, keeping the highest-quality artificial intelligence services behind paid subscriptions also increases the risk of “information inequality.” In this case, people who use free sources of information may have to pay to access more advanced systems that process that information.
In the early stages of generative artificial intelligence’s development, Wikipedia became one of the main sources of information for these technologies. The platform now faces a new challenge: preventing artificial intelligence from weakening the human and financial ecosystem that makes Wikipedia possible.