Wikipedia is often described as the ultimate good website on an Internet increasingly filled with toxic social media and artificial intelligence. But it appears the online encyclopedia isn’t entirely immune to broader trends, with human page views down 8% year-over-year, according to a new blog post by Marshall Miller of the Wikimedia Foundation.

The foundation works to distinguish between traffic coming from humans and bots, and Miller writes that the decline “in recent months” was revealed after an update to Wikipedia’s bot detection systems appeared to show that “much of the unusually high traffic for the May and June period came from bots created to evade detection.”

Why is traffic decreasing? Miller highlights “the impact of generative AI and social media on how people search for information,” particularly as “search engines increasingly use generative AI to provide answers directly to users rather than linking to sites like ours” and as “younger generations search for information on social video platforms rather than the open web.” (Google has contested the request that AI summaries reduce search traffic.)

Miller says the foundation welcomes “new ways for people to gain knowledge” and argues that this doesn’t make Wikipedia any less important, since knowledge from the encyclopedia continues to reach people even if they don’t visit the website. Wikipedia has also been experimenting with its own AI summaries, though it suspended the effort after publishers complained.

But this shift presents risks, especially if people become less aware of where their information actually comes from. As Miller says, “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers can grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors can support this work.” (Some of these volunteers are truly extraordinary, he reportedly disarmed a gunman during a Wikipedia editors’ conference on Friday.)

For this reason, he argues that artificial intelligence, search and social companies using Wikipedia’s content “need to encourage more visitors” to the site itself.

And he says Wikipedia is taking measures of its own, for example by developing a new framework for attributing encyclopedia content. The organization also has two teams tasked with helping Wikipedia reach new readers and is looking for volunteers to help.

Miller also encourages readers to “support integrity and content creation” more broadly.

“When looking for information online, look for quotes and click on the source material,” he writes. “Talk to people you know about the importance of trusted, human-curated knowledge, and help them understand that the content behind generative AI was created by real people who deserve their support.”