Wikimedia CEO calls out AI for unpaid data use as page views fall 8%

Wikipedia has spent years as the internet’s default answer key. Now the AI tools trained on it are answering for it, and fewer people are showing up to read the original. Page views on the online encyclopedia fell 8% in the latest year, according to Bernadette Meehan, the new CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, who spoke with Axios. She is pointing at AI companies that use Wikipedia content without proper credit or payment. The stakes go beyond a traffic chart. Wikipedia runs on donations and volunteer labor, and both depend on people actually visiting the site. The numbers behind the dip The decline first surfaced publicly in an October 17, 2025 blog post from Marshall Miller, a senior product director at the foundation. He reported that human pageviews across various language editions were down approximately 8% year-over-year. The comparison window covered March through August 2025, measured against the same months in 2024. The discovery came with a twist. The drop only became visible after the foundation upgraded its bot-detection systems. Automated traffic had grown better at disguising itself as human, which inflated the numbers and masked the real trend. Once the filters improve...