Page views are the lifeblood of Wikipedia. Content generation and revenue derive from this important source. When search summaries or AI chatbots insert themselves between readers and Wikipedia, they cut the project off from that content source and revenue.
My friend @luis_in_brief has written a couple of good articles about Wikipedia's collapsing web traffic:
https://lu.is/2026/04/wikipedia-decline-by-topic/
https://lu.is/2026/04/wikipedia-career-cliff/
I especially appreciate this article about how Wikipedia's "flat" traffic growth over the last decade masks a precipitous decline in relative Web traffic:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now
My former colleague Marshall Miller at WMF wrote about a vertiginous 8% quarterly drop in Wikipedia page views at the end of 2025:
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wikipedia/
Wikipedia is in a similar bind -- although from the comments, I think it's only obvious to Wikimedia insiders right now. Wikipedia has fallen from a peak of about 5th-biggest web site to about 12th today. Still huge, but trending in the wrong direction.
For those of us who depended on Mozilla as a standard bearer for open source and the open web, it's disheartening to see that ember dying. We needed a Mozilla that launched new products, not one that shut them down without moving forward.
@evan @pizaaman I dont google, I search ;) In fact I do not use google search much at all these days. I am going on international friends/colleagues who train wikipedians, and/ or use WP in their teaching. I am going on the resources it offers and not headline news. I think the AI deals are a massive ethical problem but we soldier on. All this applies to IA as well.
I don't know if Mozilla is definitively boxed in at this point. Maybe there's an act 3 for them somewhere. I use their VPN and it's fine. They have a few other paid products.
They've repeatedly failed to leverage their Firefox userbase to build other products -- the mobile OS, of course, but also Mozilla Social, which they shut down without ever really launching it.
Eventually, that userbase is going to be too small to launch anything off of.
Mozilla is so dependent on Google today that they begged US courts not to enforce antitrust laws against Google, because it would hurt their only source of revenue. So much for the champions of the open web!
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/internet-policy/google-search-deals-and-browser-choice/
But Mozilla hasn't been able to use Firefox to level up. It tried a lot of things -- Firefox OS being the biggest bet -- that for one reason or another didn't pan out. Meanwhile, their resource base was eroding from 30% of all Web users to about 2% today. Their biggest customer, Google, which paid them for access to browser users, built their own Open Source and open standards browser, which became much more popular.
Technology is not a game, but it kind of also is. Mozilla had a great product, Firefox, which ran on Open Source and open standards. At its peak, in the late 2000s, it had about 30% of the global browser market. That gave Mozilla a lot of optionality for generating resources -- resources it could invest in other projects that reflected its values.
It'd be nice to play games where you can have a little barley field and a little wood lot and a little university and you just chill and eat mushroom barley soup and write poetry by your wood fire. But usually in these games, if you don't grow, others will. The world changes around you. And they will overlook you for a while if you keep a low profile, but eventually they'll come take what little you have.