This month’s Chaos Index is at 60, a 15% decrease from April. However, that number is a bit deceptive; activity on Wikipedia remained fairly steady, though a few important factors played into May’s decrease.

Most of this month’s decrease is attributable to a noticeable decline in new pages created and pages submitted through AfC; this is most likely due to Wikipedia already having a long queue for AfC submissions, discouraging editors from submitting new pages until there are less pending submissions.

Along with slower AfC responses, the queue for requested edits is incredibly long – and increased in May, due to a higher level of COI posts. Wikipedia editors and admins are not responding to Talk page edit requests with their usual brevity; with over 130 pages in the queue dating back to February, this is a trend we are watching closely.

Recently, Google updated Chrome to include an opt-in for AI-powered results to search queries – and in our first tests with the product, one thing that’s abundantly clear is Google’s AI tools are operating much like its bots and crawlers, and using Wikipedia as a basis for much of the information being generated by its AI search summaries. As with knowledge panels, Google’s AI is prominently using information from Wikipedia – as well as company websites, prominent news organizations, and other ranking websites.

As always, context remains incredibly important with this nascent technology; different prompts will pull different keywords from a Wikipedia entry as it builds the result it presents to users. Which means having a clear, accurate Wikipedia page is as imperative as ever in 2024; letting a page sit outdated or inaccurate can always have incredibly negative effects on online reputation – an issue that only compounds as more large language models populate responses using the contents of the world’s largest digital encyclopedia as one of its primary sources.

(The Chaos Index is a proprietary metric for measuring turbulence throughout Wikipedia and tracking the community’s current sentiment towards corporate-related pages. The index measures community actions such as editing frequency, content deletion, message board posts, and many other activities that contribute to unstable corporate page environments.)

The Mather Group is a Capitol Communicator sponsor.