When this article was first published back in 2015, Wikipedia and the internet were a much different place. At that time, college and university students around the world were evolving from going to the library to find citations and references to finding all their resources online. That has since changed due to ChatGPT’s launch in November of 2025.
During the early days of Wikipedia, college and university professors were adamant about students going to the University library and finding actual sources that were not on the Internet. This continued to evolve from 2005-2015. By 2015, Wikipedia has evolved into the encyclopedia. So much so that Encyclopedia Britannica stopped printing in 2012. For 244 years, Encyclopedia Britannica published yearly encyclopedias. That all stopped because of Wikipedia.
From 2015-2022 the Internet was at its peak. Users could find all the information they wanted at no cost. That changed in November 2022 with ChatGPT. Online publishers started to lose significant amounts of traffic and had to decide how to progress. Some completely pulled the plug on the website while others put up a paywall to try to foot the bill from the loss of search traffic that was providing ad revenue. In essence, there was no longer a monetization model for most websites that were simply producing content.
Why is this the case? Many journalistic style websites paid journalists to write content with sources and citations. Many of these sources and citations came from Wikipedia. The cost of employing these journalist was very high. To have journalistic integrity, you cannot publish the words you put on a page without validating and confirming the truth through sources. Once again, this takes time and costs money. With website traffic plummeting, these website owners have no choice but to change their strategy. The content marketing monetization strategy prior to ChatGPT is very different than the strategy post ChatGPT.
Users are simply not leaving ChatGPT or Google Search to get answers anymore. They used to have to surf to a website on the world wide web. That website could then display ads and make money. That money was earned through impressions and/or ad clicks. With users staying in a chatbot or on Google Search, there is no way for the owner of the website to get the user to their property to receive the ad impressions. If you once had an Invisalign website that explained all the frequently asked questions related to Invisalign, prior to ChatGPT, much of traffic related to these keyword phrases would have arrived at your website. Today, they will get all the answers they need through a Chatbot or on the Google Search page.
This is also the reason college and university research completely changed. College students could complete an entire course without ever leaving ChatGPT. This was the case from 2022 through 2025. College professors now have tools to attempt to stop this type of behavior, but there will always be work arounds.