Wikipedia traffic fell 9.3% in a year while the archive kept growing

Richard Cooke published «The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia» through Norton on 13 October, and Wired ran an excerpt the same day. His argument puts Wikipedia in an odd position: the reference everybody checks, written by volunteers, under pressure from bots, political fights and AI.

“A human history of Wikipedia”

— Richard Cooke, Subtitle of the book, Norton, 13 October 2026

What the traffic shows

Those pressures have numbers in the Wikimedia API. English Wikipedia served 6.271bn human pageviews in September 2026 against 6.916bn in September 2025 and 7.168bn in September 2024. The year took 9.3% off, two years took 12.5%, and last month ran 645 million human visits short of the same month in 2025.

Bot traffic fell further, from 2.125bn to 1.561bn, down 26.5%. Crawlers come back less because they need the page less: the models trained on this text already carry it, and the assistant answers out of its model weights instead of fetching anything. An LLM that read the encyclopedia in training has no reason to open it again at question time.

What the archive shows

English Wikipedia holds 7,252,414 articles built from 1.375 billion edits, which works out at 190 edits per article, and 271,829 accounts were active on it in the past 30 days. Editors who touch content fell from 282,636 in September 2024 to 264,595 a year later, a 6.4% decline that runs slower than the traffic.

The volunteers are still there and the visits are going. Visits bring the next volunteer, because nobody edits an encyclopedia they never read, and that is the mechanism a traffic chart cannot show until it has already worked. Three years of this arithmetic would take the pageview line under 5 billion a month.

Who pays for the text

Every chatbot answer about a token, a protocol or a founder sits on this layer, and the people maintaining it work for nothing. Our own AI glossary runs on the same assumption: somebody maintains the definition before anyone quotes it. The services in our AI catalogue train or retrieve against text of exactly this kind, and none of them pays the people who wrote it.

Three things settle on their own. The pageview series updates monthly and will show whether 9.3% is a step or a slope. The article count has never fallen in Wikipedia's history. The editor count is the one to watch through 2027, because it decides whether the text everybody quotes still gets corrected.

Informational material, not investment advice. The pageview and editor figures come from the public Wikimedia metrics API, read on 13 October 2026, and the series updates every month.