Wikipedia Contributions in the Wake of ChatGPT

Author(s)
Lyu, Liang; Siderius, James; Li, Hannah; Acemoglu, Daron; Huttenlocher, Daniel; ... Show more
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Abstract
How has Wikipedia activity changed for articles with content similar to ChatGPT following its introduction? We estimate the impact using differences-in-differences models, with dissimilar Wikipedia articles as a baseline for comparison, to examine how changes in voluntary knowledge contributions and information-seeking behavior differ by article content. Our analysis reveals that newly created, popular articles whose content overlaps with ChatGPT 3.5 saw a greater decline in editing and viewership after the November 2022 launch of ChatGPT than dissimilar articles did. These findings indicate heterogeneous substitution effects, where users selectively engage less with existing platforms when AI provides comparable content. This points to potential uneven impacts on the future of human-driven online knowledge contributions.
Description
WWW Companion ’25, Sydney, NSW, Australia
Date issued
2025-05-23
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/162580
Department
MIT Schwarzmann College of Computing; Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics
Publisher
ACM|Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2025
Citation
Liang Lyu, James Siderius, Hannah Li, Daron Acemoglu, Daniel Huttenlocher, and Asuman Ozdaglar. 2025. Wikipedia Contributions in the Wake of ChatGPT. In Companion Proceedings of the ACM on Web Conference 2025 (WWW '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1176–1179.
Version: Final published version
ISBN
979-8-4007-1331-6
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