Bernadette Meehan, CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, said that with the rapid development of generative artificial intelligence, the future of Wikipedia faces serious threats. Page views have dropped 8% over the past year as neural networks increasingly provide users with ready-made answers directly from the search interface, depriving direct traffic of resources.
Meanwhile, giants like OpenAI and Anthropic remain outside of the organization’s paying enterprise customers, even as they actively tap into vast troves of human knowledge.
Meehan said the decline in attendance not only affects the operating budget, which is largely funded by donations, but also weakens the flow of new volunteer editors. In addition, over-reliance on AI intermediaries may lead to information inequality and the forgetting of rare languages that have no commercial benefit to the enterprise. Still, the foundation is confident that in five years, articles will still be produced by people for people.
