Christophe Henner warns Wikipedia lost 1.1 billion visits per month

Wikipedia's troubles did not begin with AI. As far back as 2018, Google was training AI to write "Wikipedia-like articles," and by October 2024 a Princeton University study found that about 5 percent of nearly 3,000 newly created articles on English Wikipedia in a single month (August 2024) contained a substantial amount of AI-generated content. Wikipedians first tried to shape and control that output, but by March 2026 AI content was found to violate the project's core principles so often that writing with large language models was banned outright, with their role restricted to translation and minor proofreading.

The audience decline sits inside a broader shift that Henner argued AI alone cannot explain. Younger users don't search, they scroll; they don't read articles, they consume fragments. He called AI "an accelerant, not the fire" and pointed to a generational change in how people relate to knowledge itself. The stakes are structural: Wikipedia's model depends on readers becoming editors, and a shrinking, harder-working editor pool threatens the encyclopedia's ability to correct weak or inaccurate articles — a problem that matters more if AI systems trained on Wikipedia are themselves often wrong.

Wikipedia's own history offers a counterweight. In the decade between 2015 and 2025, Wikipedia was viewed 1.9 trillion times, an average of 508 million views per day. And its 25th-anniversary celebrations in January 2026 carried an elegiac note, covered by both Nature and WIRED, even as the numbers pointed to decline. Henner's warning that Wikipedia could become a "temple" maintained by a dwindling priest class of superannuated Wikipedians echoes the project's long-standing tension between scale and human care.