Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites in the world, serving as a major source of information and learning resource for millions of users worldwide. While motivations for its usage vary, prior research suggests shallow information gathering -- looking up facts and information or answering questions -- dominates over more in-depth usage. On the 22nd of November 2022, ChatGPT was released to the public and has quickly become a popular source of information, serving as an effective question-answering and knowledge gathering resource. Early indications have suggested that it may be drawing users away from traditional question answering services such as Stack Overflow, raising the question of how it may have impacted Wikipedia. In this paper, we explore Wikipedia user metrics across four areas: page views, unique visitor numbers, edit counts and editor numbers within twelve language instances of Wikipedia. We perform pairwise comparisons of these metrics before and after the release of ChatGPT and implement a panel regression model to observe and quantify longer-term trends. We find no evidence of a fall in engagement across any of the four metrics, instead observing that page views and visitor numbers increased in the period following ChatGPT's launch. However, we observe a lower increase in languages where ChatGPT was available than in languages where it was not, which may suggest ChatGPT's availability limited growth in those languages. Our results contribute to the understanding of how emerging generative AI tools are disrupting the Web ecosystem.

翻译：维基百科是全球最受欢迎的网站之一，为世界各地数百万用户提供主要的信息来源和学习资源。尽管用户使用动机各异，先前研究表明浅层信息收集——即查找事实信息或回答问题——相较于深度使用占据主导地位。2022年11月22日，ChatGPT向公众发布并迅速成为流行的信息源，成为有效的问题解答与知识收集工具。早期迹象表明它可能正在分流传统问答服务（如Stack Overflow）的用户，这引发了关于其对维基百科潜在影响的思考。本文通过维基百科十二种语言版本的四类用户指标展开研究：页面浏览量、独立访客数、编辑次数及编辑者数量。我们对ChatGPT发布前后的指标进行配对比较，并建立面板回归模型以观测和量化长期趋势。研究发现四项指标均未出现参与度下降的证据，反而观察到ChatGPT发布后页面浏览量和访客数有所增长。然而，在ChatGPT可用的语言版本中，增长幅度低于其不可用的语言版本，这可能表明ChatGPT的可及性限制了这些语言的增长潜力。本研究为理解新兴生成式AI工具如何重构网络生态系统提供了实证依据。