MC EXCLUSIVE India AI Impact Summit: Not sure what’s going to happen, says Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales as traffic dips

Jimmy Wales, Co-Founder, The Wikimedia Foundation

• Wikipedia traffic fell 8% due to AI and social media growth
• Jimmy Wales stresses need for proper attribution to Wikipedia
• AI tools at Wikipedia help update sources and support editors

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An 8 percent drop in human traffic to Wikipedia is not a "disaster” but is not great either, co-founder Jimmy Wales told Moneycontrol in an interview on February 18, as AI changes the way information is searched and shared.

“We have seen 8 percent drop in human traffic. Eight percent isn’t a disaster, it isn’t great, it is what it is. We are not sure what’s going to happen," Wales said on the sidelines of the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi. He was responding to a query on how he expects AI to impact the US-based platform.

In October, the Wikimedia Foundation, which supports Wikipedia, said human traffic to the website fell by 8 percent over the past year.

It attributed the decline in traffic to the rise of AI-driven search results and the growing dominance of social media as an information source.

Watch the full interview here.

Wales said the information on Google search engine or any AI platform comes largely from Wikipedia but often there is not attribution. "As long as there is attribution to Wikipedia, we are okay with that," Wales said.

Although people want quick answers to their queries, they also want clear and fact-based information. "Both those processes are important," Wales said.

At the Foundation, there is a machine learning group, which is focusing primarily on tools that can help the Wikipedia "community", the co-founder said.

"Let’s say, there is a link that used to support some statement on Wikipedia went dead, an AI can help in finding a new link to support the same statement," he said.

"This is one small example. There are some other areas, where there is a possibility of AI to support human work."

Wales said that although AI can help with accuracy, it can be misused to spread misinformation as well. "It’s the same that has always been with humanity. We have low quality information, alongside high quality," he said.

"In an earlier era, it might have been extremely biased tabloid newspaper…which produced biased information. Today, it might be social-media posts. We always have to grapple with this, and we always have to say that let’s be serious about knowledge, and getting to the facts," Wales said.