Wikimedia's CEO on the AI traffic armageddon

Wikipedia is starting to feel the effects of the AI-driven shift in how people find information, with page views falling 8 percent in the latest year, said new Wikimedia Foundation CEO Bernadette Meehan. Wikipedia is a crucial source of information for AI models, but those same models increasingly allow people to get Wikipedia-derived information without ever visiting the site—potentially threatening the ecosystem that keeps the online encyclopedia running. While the drop wasn't unexpected, "that doesn't mean that we're sort of starry-eyed about it and not concerned about it," Meehan said. The problem is that even though generative AI systems rely heavily on Wikipedia's vast trove of human-created information, some companies won't pay for it, she said.