Wikipedia is hemorrhaging traffic as the artificial intelligence revolution increasingly makes the left-wing online encyclopedia redundant.
Wikimedia Foundation CEO Bernadette Meehan told Axios this week that Wikipedia page views fell eight percent in 2025 as users increasingly turn to AI tools rather than visiting the website directly.
While Meehan said the decline was anticipated, she acknowledged that Wikimedia remains concerned.
The problem is particularly severe because AI companies have relied heavily on Wikipedia’s enormous database to train and power their models.
“We’re not asking for charity”: Wikimedia CEO calls out AI for unpaid data use https://t.co/RG0hwixIiZ
— Axios (@axios) October 2, 2026
This allows users to obtain information derived from the encyclopedia without ever visiting it, threatening its entire financial model.
Around 80 percent of Wikimedia’s operating budget comes from small donations, many generated through fundraising banners shown directly to readers.
“If less readers are coming, that’s less conversion to editors,” Meehan also warned.
While the website once had a reputation as a useful for resource for people around the world, it has become notorious for its aggressive left-wing bias on a wide variety of issues.
A 2024 Manhattan Institute study examining thousands of political articles found Wikipedia was more likely to associate right-leaning public figures with negative sentiment than their left-leaning counterparts.
The treatment of conservative media outlets is similarly revealing.
Wikipedia currently describes The Gateway Pundit in the opening sentence of its article as an “American far-right fake news website.”
Despite the website’s declining direct readership, Meehan insisted that Wikipedia remains the “backbone” of online information.
Wikimedia is now attempting to extract revenue from the technology companies using its material at enormous scale.
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Perplexity are among those paying for enterprise access to Wikipedia’s data.
OpenAI and Anthropic are not among Wikimedia’s publicly disclosed enterprise customers.
“We’re not asking for charity,” Meehan said, although the website consistently begs its readers for donations.
The website’s co-founder, Larry Sanger, has previously explained that the once trusted encyclopedia was taken over by far-left activists.
“Wikipedia made a real effort at neutrality for, I would say, its first five years or so. And then it began a long, slow slide into what I would call leftist propaganda,” he said in an interview last year.
”I mean, that’s a harsh description to put on Wikipedia, but at least a lot of the political articles read that way now.”
Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger on how his site went woke pic.twitter.com/vGTp97OIRm
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) December 31, 2024
Ben Kew is a writer and editor. Originally from the UK, he moved to the U.S. to cover Congress for Breitbart News and has since gone on to editorial roles at Human Events, Townhall Media, and Americano Media. He has also written for The Epoch Times, The Western Journal, and The Spectator.
You can email Ben Kew here, and read more of Ben Kew’s articles here.
Ad block users: Some site features may not work correctly while an ad blocker is enabled, because they break scripts and content this website depends on. If you can’t see comments below, for example, please disable your ad blocker.
