Exploring the Impact of ChatGPT on Wikipedia Engagement
Neal Reeves, Wenjie Yin, Elena Simperl
TL;DR
This study investigates whether the public release of ChatGPT affected Wikipedia engagement across 12 language editions by analyzing page views, unique visitors, edits, and editors from 2021 to 2024. It combines pairwise pre/post comparisons with a panel regression incorporating language fixed effects and seasonal controls to quantify short- and longer-term effects. The findings indicate that engagement generally did not fall after ChatGPT's launch; page views and visitors increased in many languages, with some language- and availability-dependent differences, while edits and editors showed more limited and inconsistent changes. The results suggest that emergent AI tools modestly influence Web-scale collaborative platforms, with effects shaped by language resources, availability, and community dynamics, highlighting nuanced interactions between ChatGPT and Wikipedia's ecosystem.
Abstract
Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites in the world, serving as a major source of information and learning resource for millions of users worldwide. While motivations for its usage vary, prior research suggests shallow information gathering -- looking up facts and information or answering questions -- dominates over more in-depth usage. On the 22nd of November 2022, ChatGPT was released to the public and has quickly become a popular source of information, serving as an effective question-answering and knowledge gathering resource. Early indications have suggested that it may be drawing users away from traditional question answering services such as Stack Overflow, raising the question of how it may have impacted Wikipedia. In this paper, we explore Wikipedia user metrics across four areas: page views, unique visitor numbers, edit counts and editor numbers within twelve language instances of Wikipedia. We perform pairwise comparisons of these metrics before and after the release of ChatGPT and implement a panel regression model to observe and quantify longer-term trends. We find no evidence of a fall in engagement across any of the four metrics, instead observing that page views and visitor numbers increased in the period following ChatGPT's launch. However, we observe a lower increase in languages where ChatGPT was available than in languages where it was not, which may suggest ChatGPT's availability limited growth in those languages. Our results contribute to the understanding of how emerging generative AI tools are disrupting the Web ecosystem.