Wikipedia is loosing Traffic

As a person who pays quite a bit of attention to web technologies, runs multiple websites and develops web applications, I knew AI would impact on the web traffic of certain websites directly and indirectly from the get-go. Specially websites that provides information on wide range of topics in large volume are more like gold mine for the AI engines. Not so surprisingly, encyclopedia, public forums would be the go to destinations for web bots and web crawlers to scrape websites and feed those information to the AI engines to learn from.

Since these public facing sites has lots of pages, bots would generate lots of non-human traffic directly affecting the overall web traffic of any particular site and their server resources. This is particularly true for the broader internet regardless of their geographical location. As more and more large language models appears into the scene, things are bound to get worse. I personally believe that we are at the critical point of time when strict measures should be taken in consideration and enforced.