In Other News · United States · Business

Source: Axios

Wikipedia is starting to feel the effects of the AI-driven shift in how people find information, with page views falling 8% in the latest year, new Wikimedia Foundation CEO Bernadette Meehan tells Axios.Why it matters: 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.Driving the news: Wikipedia page views declined 8% in 2025, and 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.Follow the money: 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.Wikimedia has a program that charges large-scale commercial users for reliable, high-volume access to its data. Publicly disclosed enterprise customers, whose payments make up 10% of the organization's operating expenses, include Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Perplexity and others.OpenAI and Anthropic, two of the largest makers of generative AI models, aren't among Wikimedia's publicly disclosed enterprise customers. Meehan noted that Wikimedia has other agreements that aren't publicly disclosed and declined...