Wikipedia sees 8% drop in human visits after bot-detection revision

The Wikimedia Foundation said human visits to Wikipedia fell about 8 percent year over year between March and August after the nonprofit revised how it distinguishes human traffic from automated scraping. Marshall Miller, the foundation's senior director of product, said the update to bot detection revealed that much of an apparent surge in traffic earlier this year was driven by bots, not people, and that corrected metrics show a sustained decline in real readership over the past few months.

Miller attributed the drop primarily to changes in how people seek information online. He said search engines are increasingly surfacing answers directly on results pages, often drawing on Wikipedia content instead of linking to the site, and that younger users are turning to social video platforms for information. The foundation also said the volume of data-scraping bots has strained resources and raised hosting costs, complicating efforts to maintain the site and its infrastructure.

The foundation warned the decline could have practical consequences for the encyclopedia. Miller wrote, "With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual...