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Wikipedia Contributions in the Wake of ChatGPT

Liang Lyu, James Siderius, Hannah Li, Daron Acemoglu, Daniel Huttenlocher, Asuman Ozdaglar

arXiv 2 Mar 2025 · cs.HC · 2 citations (OpenAlex)

arXiv:2503.00757 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

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.

Citation extraction

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appendix boundary found by appendix_command · 51% of the source is main text. Read the extracted text to check this.

Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Philipp Singer, Florian Lemmerich, Robert West, Leila Zia, Ellery Wu… (2017) Why we read Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 26th international conference on world wide web. 1591–16000.64422100%
2Bo Xu and Dahui Li (2015) An empirical study of the motivations for content contribution and community participation in Wikipedia0.64422100%
3Heng-Li Yang and Cheng-Yu Lai (2010) Motivations of Wikipedia content contributors0.64422100%
4Gordon Burtch, Dokyun Lee, and Zhichen Chen (2024) The consequences of generative AI for online knowledge communities0.51121100%
5Neal Reeves, Wenjie Yin, and Elena Simperl (2024) Exploring the Impact of ChatGPT on Wikipedia Engagement0.51121100%
6Maria del Rio-Chanona, Nadzeya Laurentsyeva, and Johannes Wachs (2023) Are Large Language Models a Threat to Digital Public Goods? Evidence from Activity on Stack Overflow0.51121100%
7Guohou Shan and Liangfei Qiu (2023) Examining the impact of generative AI on users’ voluntary knowledge contribution: Evidence from a natural experiment on Stack Ov…0.51121100%
8Sumit Kumar Dam, Choong Seon Hong, Yu Qiao, and Chaoning Zhang (2024) A complete survey on llm-based ai chatbots0.40511100%
9Mark Glickman and Yi Zhang (2024) AI and generative AI for research discovery and summarization0.40511100%
10OpenAI (2024) New embedding models and API updates0.40511100%

Showing the top 10 of 14 scored citations.