Leftist Wikipedia Bemoans Traffic Lost to Chatbots, Labels Itself 'Backbone' of AI

Web traffic to left-wing Wikipedia have dropped as AI replaces the organization’s page visits, according to Wikimedia Foundation chief Bernadette Meehan. The CEO called the woke encyclopedia “the backbone” of AI systems.

Wikipedia is beginning to feel the impact of AI changing how people look up information, with page views down eight percent in the latest year, Bernadette Meehan — the CEO of The Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia — told Axios. Breitbart News previously documented Meehan’s deep connections to the Obama and Biden administrations.

Meehan added that while the decline in Wikipedia views didn’t come as a surprise, it “doesn’t mean that we’re sort of starry-eyed about it and not concerned.”

AI models depend heavily on leftist Wikipedia, but those models now often deliver Wikipedia-based answers without sending users to the site — putting the system that sustains the community-driven encyclopedia at risk according to Meehan.

One issue, the Wikimedia CEO said, is that generative AI systems depend heavily on Wikipedia’s large collection of human-written content, yet some companies are reusing to pay for it. Wikimedia charges major commercial users for dependable, high-volume access to its data.

Payments from publicly disclosed enterprise customers — including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Perplexity, among others — account for 10 percent of Wikimedia’s operating expenses.

Interestingly, two of the largest generative AI companies — OpenAI and Anthropic — do not appear on Wikimedia’s public list of enterprise customers.

However, Meehan noted to Axios that not all of the organization’s agreements have been publicly disclosed, declining to name those companies.

Traffic matters to Wikimedia, as 80 percent of its operating budget reportedly comes from small donations — many of which are collected through solicitations shown to people visiting the site.

Moreover, fewer people visiting the site as readers inevitably means the website will have less editors, since readers are often the ones who become Wikipedia editors, the CEO pointed out.

Wikipedia is notorious for its extreme left-wing bias. In one recent example, it smeared feminists like J.K. Rowling who believe that men cannot become women as “exclusionary.”

Alana Mastrangelo-Wrask is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.