By Mark Stenberg --> This story was originally published in On Background with Mark Stenberg, a free, weekly newsletter that explores the key themes shaping the media industry. You can sign up for it here .
Wikipedia has spent 25 years building a reputation as one of the most trusted sources on the web.
Now, as answer engines rewrite how people find information online, that reputation faces a threat familiar to many publishers: ubiquity without credit.
According to the search engine measurement Ahrefs , ChatGPT cites Wikipedia more than almost any other single source, second only to Reddit. And yet, fewer humans are visiting the site itself to read, and more importantly, to edit.
As a nonprofit with a minimal reliance on advertising, Wikipedia is somewhat insulated from the traffic erosion crushing other publishers. That makes it a revealing case study in how institutions are rethinking relevance in the AI era.
At Brandweek, I asked Zach McCune, the global head of brand marketing at the Wikimedia Foundation, how the organization is responding.
Mark: Wikipedia just launched a brand campaign , created by the agency Kin, to celebrate its 25th anniversary. What prompted the campaign?
Zach: Wikipedia is 25 years old, which is quite a milestone. But we hit 25 at the exact time our relationship to knowledge is changing, and Wikipedia is at risk of becoming invisible—invisible to us and invisible to our awareness. When you search for something today, your voice assistant is giving you the answer, or your AI agent is giving you the answer, hiding the fact that, more often than not, the answer is coming from Wikipedia. For an organization that relies on hundreds of thousands of volunteers and hundreds of millions of donors, it was crucial to generate a whole new wave of support and create not only awareness but connection and engagement.
Mark: Why did you feel this was necessary, and what sort of goals were you hoping to accomplish?
Zach: Wikipedia is the backbone of knowledge on the internet, the backbone of its most trusted elements. And yet what we’re noticing on a brand health level is decline: decline in stability, a decline even in awareness or likability. It’s strange, because a lot of brands are thinking, “How do I get my content into the AI platforms?” I don’t have that problem. My content is everywhere, and yet the brand problem remains. We’re more visible than ever, and yet less known. Part of why we came to Kin, wanting to make our 25th birthday a big, splashy, emotionally driven project, was trying to get people to feel something for the knowledge they rely on. We do brand work globally all the time, but this was actually one of the first, one of the biggest campaigns done domestically in the U.S.
Mark: That was a bit of a canary in the coal mine, because brand awareness in the U.S. is usually not a problem for an institution like Wikipedia.
Zach: I’ve been with the Foundation leading brand for almost 11 years, and in that time I mostly worked on projects in Nigeria, India, Iraq, South Africa—places where we wanted to grow awareness. For us, brand awareness isn’t a metric by itself. Brand awareness becomes usage, and usage becomes editing. So the more people who know our platform and use it, the more complete our knowledge record is. It’s a public library where sooner or later we say, “We’d like you to write a book—could you do that on something you love?…