Wikipedia at 25: Navigating the AI Era and the Decline of Volunteerism

On January 15, 2026, the globally recognized online encyclopedia Wikipedia celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary, marking a quarter-century since its initial launch on January 15, 2001. While the milestone served as a moment for celebration, it also brought into sharp focus several critical structural challenges. The platform currently faces a complex landscape defined by the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) systems and a concerning, steady decline in its core base of active volunteer contributors.

To commemorate this landmark, Wikimedia France organized a press conference on January 13, 2026, held within the historic halls of the National Archives (Archives nationales) at the Hôtel de Soubise in Paris. During the event, officials highlighted that more than 13,000 digitized archival documents have been integrated into Wikimedia projects, attracting approximately 10 million views every month. Rémi Gerbet, the Executive Director of Wikimedia France, emphasized that nearly all major Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained using Wikipedia’s high-quality, verified data. To manage these relationships, Wikimedia Enterprise has established partnerships with tech leaders such as Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Mistral AI, and Perplexity, aiming to support the project's growth without funding its core operations directly.

Despite maintaining a high level of public confidence—with 85% of the French population utilizing the encyclopedia and 75% viewing it as the "undisputed champion of digital trust"—the project is grappling with a sustainability crisis. Adélaïde Calais, the online community manager for Wikimedia France, noted that the primary objective for the next 25 years is to convert this widespread trust into active civic participation. She described volunteerism as a "powerful democratic shield," yet statistics show that only 11% of French users have ever created an account to contribute. Furthermore, the number of active patrollers—those responsible for monitoring edits—has dropped by a third over the last six years, falling from 300 to just 200 per month, even as the total number of active participants stands at 41,200.

A significant threat to the platform's ecosystem is the diversion of human traffic caused by AI-driven data consumption. The Wikimedia Foundation has reported a loss of roughly 8% in human traffic during specific intervals, a trend attributed to the rise of generative AI tools that provide immediate answers, thereby bypassing the need for users to visit the site directly. This shift poses a threat to long-term stability because the project’s primary revenue comes from individual donations. Meanwhile, industrial-scale content usage by companies like Google, Ecosia, Pleias, and ProRata continues to grow. This technological pressure is compounded by the risk of losing editorial diversity, a danger exemplified by the situation in the Croatian Wikipedia, where a small group seized administrative control due to a lack of active oversight.

In response to these evolving dynamics, the Wikimedia Foundation has leaned into its commercial arm, Wikimedia Enterprise, which was launched in March 2021 to facilitate paid licensing agreements with technology giants. These arrangements allow corporations to access data through an official API, replacing traditional web scraping and ensuring a reliable data stream for training AI models. Lane Becker, President of Wikimedia Enterprise, stated that these companies recognize the necessity of financial contributions, as Wikipedia’s content is a vital component of their infrastructure. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has expressed support for AI training on human-curated data but remains firm on maintaining the boundaries of free access.

As it enters its second quarter-century, Wikipedia must balance its mission as a pillar of open knowledge with the need to adapt to a digital age where the human effort behind 65 million articles requires protection from uncompensated exploitation. The future of the encyclopedia depends on its ability to remain relevant in a world where information is increasingly mediated by machines rather than humans. By fostering a new generation of editors and securing fair compensation from the tech industry, the platform aims to preserve the integrity of its massive repository of knowledge for decades to come.