en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_of_the_end_of_Wikipedia
1 correction found
Overall human pageviews reportedly fell by about 8% between 2024 and 2025
The 8% figure is overstated here. Wikimedia said the roughly 8% decline applied only to revised March–August 2025 human pageviews versus the same months in 2024, while Columbia’s summary says overall Wikipedia traffic remained steady.
Full reasoning
This sentence compresses two different claims into one and ends up misstating both.
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Wikimedia did not report an 8% drop for all of 2024–2025 overall. In its October 17, 2025 traffic update, the Wikimedia Foundation said it reclassified March–August 2025 traffic after detecting sophisticated bots, and that "over the past few months" human pageviews were down by roughly 8% compared with the same months in 2024. That is a narrower comparison than "between 2024 and 2025" generally.
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The Columbia Business School article cited on this page does not say overall Wikipedia traffic fell 8%. Its own summary says overall Wikipedia traffic remains steady, while certain article types that are more similar to ChatGPT responses saw lower readership.
So the article's wording turns a limited, month-matched comparison into a blanket 2024-to-2025 claim about overall human pageviews, which is not what the cited evidence says.
2 sources
- New User Trends on Wikipedia - Diff
We then used the new logic to reclassify our traffic data for March-August 2025... after making this revision, we are seeing declines in human pageviews on Wikipedia over the past few months, amounting to a decrease of roughly 8% as compared to the same months in 2024.
- ChatGPT Is Stealing Readers From Wikipedia | Columbia Business School
While overall Wikipedia traffic remains steady, the researchers find that specific types of articles—those whose content closely resembles what ChatGPT would generate—have seen a noticeable drop in readership since ChatGPT’s launch.