Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2026-2027/Global Trends
Each year, the Wikimedia Foundation begins annual planning with a list of trends most relevant to our mission, such as changes in how and where people search for and contribute information, the role of AI in reshaping the information landscape, and evolving regulation of online platforms. This helps us begin our planning with the guiding question: "What does the world need from Wikimedia now?"
This year's update arrives at a moment of significant disruption. The trends we identified in 2025 have continued, but the impact of AI is now not only reshaping the world in which the Wikimedia movement operates, but also having a direct impact on the movement itself.
- CONSUMERS: People increasingly get information from AI summaries, and website traffic is declining. Websites (including Wikipedia) are seeing substantial declines in traffic due to AI features in search. Platforms are addressing this loss of search traffic by investing in apps that provide a compelling destination to their users, as well as using social media to reach new audiences. For example, the New York Times launched a short video feed in their app and are syndicating more of their content to TikTok, and the Financial Times has made its mobile app a central retention tool, with subscriber-only features like personalized topic feeds and audio articles.
- CONTRIBUTORS: People are using AI in content creation and getting paid to make AI models smarter. AI tools have become more deeply embedded in how people research, write, and create content. Most students globally now report using AI for schoolwork, and an estimated 4% of GitHub software commits are authored by Claude Code and growing. At the same time, a new labor market is emerging around paying domain experts to train AI models, creating incentives to contribute to commercial AI systems rather than to open knowledge-sharing platforms.
- CONTENT: AI continues to harvest and mimic human-created information. Platforms that share information online continue to struggle with the negative impacts of mass scraping by bots harvesting data for AI use-cases, including to create AI-generated forks of human-created content.
- GLOBAL AFFAIRS: Online platforms are increasingly being drawn into politics, and new policies are challenging free knowledge-sharing. Online outlets covering socio-political topics continue to be targeted by political and special interest groups. AI companies and content owners are advocating for policies that serve their interests, as they negotiate policies and agreements to handle the recent dramatic rise in automated web traffic. A growing global concern about online harms and child safety is driving new policies that could have profound consequences for the open Internet, including normalizing mass surveillance of Internet users.