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AI-generated summary
Have you opened Wikipedia recently? Genuine question. Before, you’d go there to check a date, a movie title, the spelling of a name. Now you type your question into Claude or ChatGPT and get the answer directly.
The problem: Wikipedia is still behind the answer. But it no longer gets the click, and therefore no longer gets the donation.
AI eats Wikipedia but doesn’t feed it back
LLMs were trained on Wikipedia — that’s public and well-documented. And even when they answer in real time via a web search (like QuickTube summarising YouTube videos or Perplexity on any question), they often pull the information from Wikipedia. Except they serve it up in their own interface, not on the source website.
You, as a user, no longer see the “Wikipedia needs you” banner. You don’t see the contributors’ work, you don’t see the list of sources. You see an answer, full stop.
Wikipedia doesn’t live on clicks — it lives on donations
The Wikimedia Foundation runs on around $180 million a year. Roughly 90% comes from small individual donations, the rest from grants. No ads, no tracking, no paywall. It’s one of the last major encyclopedias on the web that isn’t selling you anything.
But that model depends on people visiting the site and seeing the donation appeal. If traffic drops because AI intercepts the question upstream, the tap slowly closes.
AI needs Wikipedia, not the other way around
Without Wikipedia, LLMs would lose a huge chunk of their verifiable knowledge base. It’s one of the only structured, multilingual, sourced, and bulk-accessible sources for training.
So we have a system where AI companies (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google) benefit for free from volunteers’ work, sell that as a €20-a-month subscription, and the original source struggles to balance its budget. That imbalance bothers me.
It’s a bit like the same logic I apply to open-source tools I’d rather support directly instead of going with a SaaS equivalent from a big company.
How much to give
I send €50 a year. That’s nothing compared to a Spotify or Netflix subscription. You can give once or on a recurring basis via the official form .
If you use an LLM every day, you’re using Wikipedia every day, indirectly. €50 a year is well justified given the service it provides.
Don’t want to chip in €10? Contribute instead
You can also fix a typo, add a source, translate an article. Wikipedia holds together because people put in time, not just money.
If you work in a niche field, have a job, a passion, or a connection to a particular region, you almost certainly have things to correct or add. And it’s genuinely rewarding to do.
What there is to lose
Wikipedia is probably the most beautiful collective project on the web. And it’s also the one we take for granted. The day it shuts down or shifts to a paid model, we’ll all look foolish — starting with the AI companies that use it as their foundation.
With AI inserting itself between us and the source, now is the time to make a move 🙏. Donation or contribution, take your pick.
Feel free to reach out if you’d like to react to this article.
