Wikipedia is facing what might be described as a “methane fire”: though you can’t see the flames, it doesn’t mean it’s not burning. There’s the recent headline-making critique by co-founder, Larry Sanger, which came only months after the launch of a congressional investigation into foreign influence on Wikipedia, triggered by my report on a pro-Hamas editing gang active on the site. The site has recently faced broadsides from Elon Musk, the ire of American conservatives, scrutiny by the Indian government, and devastating regulation from the UK.

In response to these crises, Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), which owns the site, has deployed its most effective tool: world-class messaging backed by high-powered PR. But there’s one crisis that cannot be messaged away, and that is a marked decline in traffic to Wikipedia.org. If sustained, this will mark the site’s demise.

In a blog post last week, WMF admitted that it found human traffic to the site had decreased by 8% over the past few months. That is a staggering number. What’s even more remarkable is that WMF — which employs more than 400 engineering and product specialists — had no idea that this was happening until a surge in bot traffic from Brazil prompted a closer look.

WMF chalks this up to shifts in user habits driven by AI adoption and social media. That’s no doubt part of the problem. But in its rush to roll out its time-tested narrative about trust, WMF is obscuring what’s really going on. In its blog post, the Foundation argues that it remains “highly trusted and valued as a neutral, accurate source of information globally”. That phrase links to a “Brand Health Tracker”, a report Wikipedia produced in 2022, with each quarterly report labelled — in keeping with the site’s love of odd jargon — a “Wave.”

In its most recent “Wave 7” report, the WMF notes that “across all [global] regions in Wave 7, every key reason for using Wikipedia, from fact-checking and following current events to academic research and sharing knowledge, has dipped compared to earlier waves.”

According to the report, in the span of little more than two years, the percentage of survey respondents who use Wikipedia to fact-check something dropped from around 55% to less than 40%. The number of people who use the site to keep themselves informed dropped from over 50% to around 35%; those using the site to learn about current events went from more than 30% to less than 20%.

The WMF views major global information platforms such as Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Quora, and ChatGPT as competitors. Yet Wikipedia also now has direct competition in the form of online encyclopedias including Justapedia, Conservapedia and —probably most unnervingly for WMF — Musk’s forthcoming Grokipedia.

According to Justapedia founder Betty Wills, the site’s traffic has surged in recent months, with the site’s page views increasing by 19% last month alone; she tells me that Justapedia detects and blocks bots. One of the driving factors here is the platform that has powered virtually all of Wikipedia’s growth — Google, which began including Justapedia’s entries in search results for the first time this spring. Justapedia’s homepage saw a 502% increase in traffic over the past month, according to screenshots provided by the organisation.

Like social media, the “encyclosphere” is fracturing. From an idea market dominated by a single giant player, new sources of topic-based information are emerging online. As Wikipedia continues to dig into its “trust” narrative, what it doesn’t realise is that so much of that trust has already been eroded. And new players are ready to scoop it up, right when it matters most.

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Ashley Rindsberg is author of The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’ Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History

AshleyRindsberg

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