The Wikipedia movement celebrated its 25th anniversary with the annual Wikimania conference from July 21 to 25, 2026. Wikipedia is a success story, but dark clouds are gathering on the horizon: AI could soon challenge the online encyclopedia’s dominance.
There are likely very few places in any city where 1,200 conference attendees can comfortably gather and discuss current issues every day in sessions both large and small. The Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie in Paris is one such place. It’s a sort of science center and museum with a massive entertainment complex, and since it can accommodate around 15,000 people, the Wikipedia gathering didn’t even stand out particularly. The annual Wikimania is more than just a conference; it’s more like a family reunion, reserved for the most dedicated Wikipedians, since those who couldn’t travel with a national chapter had to apply. Quite a few of the participants had already attended previous meetings, dating back to the first one in Frankfurt in 2005. In recent years, the event has been held in Nairobi (2025), Katowice (2024), and Singapore (2023). Wikipedia is a global movement, and the participants were correspondingly diverse. Apparently, however, not all interested individuals had received a visa, for whatever reason. This is an indication that there are significant regional disparities within this movement—or, simply put, a North-South divide.
Few global projects can boast similarly impressive statistics: Wikipedia exists in more than 300 different language editions with over 65 million articles. With 3.15 million articles, the German-language Wikipedia ranks among the largest Wikipedia editions, alongside the English-language version (7.2 million articles). Wikimedia Switzerland (WMCH) was founded in 2006 and will celebrate its twentieth anniversary in 2026. Contributors in Switzerland write in no fewer than four different Wikipedia editions: German, French, Italian, and Romansh.
The Wikipedia movement now encompasses a whole range of global projects: The most important of these is Wikimedia Commons—a massive collection of media files containing around 145 million freely usable media files. These are either in the public domain or available under a free license. A more recent project is Wikidata, which originated as an initiative in Germany: a collection of over 120 million structured data items that are particularly useful for database queries. Other projects include Wikisource, Wikiquote, and Wikivoyage.
The history of the Wikimedia movement has been a unique success story so far—but AI could put an end to this meteoric rise, which is why the topic is now being addressed with such importance at all events related to Wikipedia. But first: What is the reason for Wikipedia’s enduring success? Simply put: It was the right project at the right time and, as the Americans say, “a powerful idea”—a compelling idea. The criteria for a Wikipedia entry are transparent and easy to understand: Entries must be written from a neutral perspective, the topic or person must be relevant, and every statement must be supported by credible sources. Wikipedia’s rise has paralleled Google’s triumphant advance. In fact, Google began indexing Wikipedia articles early on. And because they also perfectly met Google’s criteria, Google displayed Wikipedia articles at the top of its search results. Were there agreements and possibly financial flows between Google and the Wikimedia Foundation? Yes, there were both collaboration agreements and financial contributions from Google. There is also a section within Wikipedia dedicated to commercial offerings: Wikipedia Enterprise. Visually, however, Google has no presence in the Wikipedia universe. The collaboration is documented on a separate page on what is known as Meta Wiki.
For several years now, AI has been revolutionizing the world of online knowledge. Google, for example, no longer primarily provides links as answers, but rather complete, fully formulated answers. Chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot draw their knowledge from Wikipedia’s vast repository and answer search queries directly. In many cases, users no longer need to click on Wikipedia sources. This has led to a decline in direct queries to Wikipedia: Last year alone, Wikipedia recorded an 8 percent drop in search queries from humans (human pageviews). It cites generative AI and changing information-seeking behavior as possible reasons in particular. In contrast, automated queries by robots (bots) on Wikipedia’s pages have increased. In fact, Wikipedia is one of the most important data sources for training large language models (LLMs). For Wikipedia, not all of these queries are easily identifiable, as some of them masquerade as human users.
This trend is a cause for concern for Wikipedia: Specifically, there are fears of a decline in the volume of donations, even though that has not yet occurred. Fundraising appeals are displayed as banners on Wikipedia search results every December. If fewer human users see these banners, fewer are likely to donate money. There is no end in sight to this trend—quite the contrary. Interestingly, Elon Musk’s fundamental criticism of Wikipedia and the launch of his own project, Grokipedia, have led to an increase in donations to Wikipedia.
What can be done? There is still no clear answer: A series of workshops, some of which were initiated by Wikimedia Switzerland, are currently seeking to clarify the situation. One possible approach is to collaborate with AI experts. Whether this is a promising approach remains to be seen. As one IT specialist noted at the Wikimania conference: While AI developers certainly have sympathy for the project, they ultimately have other priorities.
It’s clear that these developments could affect the Wikipedia movement’s financial situation. So here’s a look at the numbers: Wikipedia is funded by donations—the parent organization, the “Wikimedia Foundation,” has an annual budget of around 180 million U.S. dollars. Wikimedia Germany has 32 million Swiss francs, and Wikimedia Switzerland has 4.2 million Swiss francs. Wikimedia Switzerland and Wikimedia Germany enjoy a special privilege: they raise the funds themselves and then contribute a portion to the Wikimedia Foundation, which maintains the entire technical infrastructure. For all others, the process works the other way around: the money is raised by the U.S. foundation in the respective country, and the local chapter receives a portion back from the foundation.
The Wikimedia Foundation supports a large number of initiatives and groups organized by topic, country, or language group. Today, there are 40 so-called chapters, which generally represent a single country, as well as 156 user groups covering all kinds of topics, such as women, LGBTQ+, photography, and various groups for specific languages and regions, etc.
The Foundation, under the leadership of its new Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Bernadette M. Meehan, is now in the process of reorganizing this support, which is likely to result in certain groups receiving less funding or none at all. This is currently causing unrest within the Wikipedia community. However, it highlights an uncomfortable reality: Virtually all of these groups are 100 percent dependent on grants from the Foundation. A complex ecosystem has grown out of this. This ecosystem is now to be made fit for the future.
Dominik Landwehr
The author has been an active Wikipedia contributor since 2018 and has served as president of Wikimedia Switzerland (WMCH) since the summer of 2026
Translation with DeepL
Note
Wikipedia and Google
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Google
The Wikipedia movement celebrated its 25th anniversary with the annual Wikimania conference from July 21 to 25, 2026. Wikipedia is a success story, but dark clouds are gathering on the horizon: AI could soon challenge the online encyclopedia’s dominance.
There are likely very few places in any city where 1,200 conference attendees can comfortably gather and discuss current issues every day in sessions both large and small. The Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie in Paris is one such place. It’s a sort of science center and museum with a massive entertainment complex, and since it can accommodate around 15,000 people, the Wikipedia gathering didn’t even stand out particularly. The annual Wikimania is more than just a conference; it’s more like a family reunion, reserved for the most dedicated Wikipedians, since those who couldn’t travel with a national chapter had to apply. Quite a few of the participants had already attended previous meetings, dating back to the first one in Frankfurt in 2005. In recent years, the event has been held in Nairobi (2025), Katowice (2024), and Singapore (2023). Wikipedia is a global movement, and the participants were correspondingly diverse. Apparently, however, not all interested individuals had received a visa, for whatever reason. This is an indication that there are significant regional disparities within this movement—or, simply put, a North-South divide.
Few global projects can boast similarly impressive statistics: Wikipedia exists in more than 300 different language editions with over 65 million articles. With 3.15 million articles, the German-language Wikipedia ranks among the largest Wikipedia editions, alongside the English-language version (7.2 million articles). Wikimedia Switzerland (WMCH) was founded in 2006 and will celebrate its twentieth anniversary in 2026. Contributors in Switzerland write in no fewer than four different Wikipedia editions: German, French, Italian, and Romansh.
The Wikipedia movement now encompasses a whole range of global projects: The most important of these is Wikimedia Commons—a massive collection of media files containing around 145 million freely usable media files. These are either in the public domain or available under a free license. A more recent project is Wikidata, which originated as an initiative in Germany: a collection of over 120 million structured data items that are particularly useful for database queries. Other projects include Wikisource, Wikiquote, and Wikivoyage.
The history of the Wikimedia movement has been a unique success story so far—but AI could put an end to this meteoric rise, which is why the topic is now being addressed with such importance at all events related to Wikipedia. But first: What is the reason for Wikipedia’s enduring success? Simply put: It was the right project at the right time and, as the Americans say, “a powerful idea”—a compelling idea. The criteria for a Wikipedia entry are transparent and easy to understand: Entries must be written from a neutral perspective, the topic or person must be relevant, and every statement must be supported by credible sources. Wikipedia’s rise has paralleled Google’s triumphant advance. In fact, Google began indexing Wikipedia articles early on. And because they also perfectly met Google’s criteria, Google displayed Wikipedia articles at the top of its search results. Were there agreements and possibly financial flows between Google and the Wikimedia Foundation? Yes, there were both collaboration agreements and financial contributions from Google. There is also a section within Wikipedia dedicated to commercial offerings: Wikipedia Enterprise. Visually, however, Google has no presence in the Wikipedia universe. The collaboration is documented on a separate page on what is known as Meta Wiki.
For several years now, AI has been revolutionizing the world of online knowledge. Google, for example, no longer primarily provides links as answers, but rather complete, fully formulated answers. Chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot draw their knowledge from Wikipedia’s vast repository and answer search queries directly. In many cases, users no longer need to click on Wikipedia sources. This has led to a decline in direct queries to Wikipedia: Last year alone, Wikipedia recorded an 8 percent drop in search queries from humans (human pageviews). It cites generative AI and changing information-seeking behavior as possible reasons in particular. In contrast, automated queries by robots (bots) on Wikipedia’s pages have increased. In fact, Wikipedia is one of the most important data sources for training large language models (LLMs). For Wikipedia, not all of these queries are easily identifiable, as some of them masquerade as human users.
This trend is a cause for concern for Wikipedia: Specifically, there are fears of a decline in the volume of donations, even though that has not yet occurred. Fundraising appeals are displayed as banners on Wikipedia search results every December. If fewer human users see these banners, fewer are likely to donate money. There is no end in sight to this trend—quite the contrary. Interestingly, Elon Musk’s fundamental criticism of Wikipedia and the launch of his own project, Grokipedia, have led to an increase in donations to Wikipedia.
What can be done? There is still no clear answer: A series of workshops, some of which were initiated by Wikimedia Switzerland, are currently seeking to clarify the situation. One possible approach is to collaborate with AI experts. Whether this is a promising approach remains to be seen. As one IT specialist noted at the Wikimania conference: While AI developers certainly have sympathy for the project, they ultimately have other priorities.
It’s clear that these developments could affect the Wikipedia movement’s financial situation. So here’s a look at the numbers: Wikipedia is funded by donations—the parent organization, the “Wikimedia Foundation,” has an annual budget of around 180 million U.S. dollars. Wikimedia Germany has 32 million Swiss francs, and Wikimedia Switzerland has 4.2 million Swiss francs. Wikimedia Switzerland and Wikimedia Germany enjoy a special privilege: they raise the funds themselves and then contribute a portion to the Wikimedia Foundation, which maintains the entire technical infrastructure. For all others, the process works the other way around: the money is raised by the U.S. foundation in the respective country, and the local chapter receives a portion back from the foundation.
The Wikimedia Foundation supports a large number of initiatives and groups organized by topic, country, or language group. Today, there are 40 so-called chapters, which generally represent a single country, as well as 156 user groups covering all kinds of topics, such as women, LGBTQ+, photography, and various groups for specific languages and regions, etc.
The Foundation, under the leadership of its new Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Bernadette M. Meehan, is now in the process of reorganizing this support, which is likely to result in certain groups receiving less funding or none at all. This is currently causing unrest within the Wikipedia community. However, it highlights an uncomfortable reality: Virtually all of these groups are 100 percent dependent on grants from the Foundation. A complex ecosystem has grown out of this. This ecosystem is now to be made fit for the future.
Dominik Landwehr
The author has been an active Wikipedia contributor since 2018 and has served as president of Wikimedia Switzerland (WMCH) since the summer of 2026
Note
Wikipedia and Google
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Google