Positioning a knowledge institution for the AI answer-layer era.

For 25 years, Wikipedia has been where the internet sends you to learn something. Most of that traffic has come through Google, and that flow is in structural decline. AI-generated answers, algorithmic feeds, and creator-driven content now sit between Wikipedia and the people who would have arrived directly. Wikipedia’s content is reaching more people than ever, but increasingly without Wikipedia in view. The reader who used to land on the page gets Wikipedia’s answer somewhere else.

The Wikimedia Foundation brought me in to figure out what Wikipedia’s role should be across the ecosystem it no longer controls but still shapes.

The work needed coherent answers to four questions in sequence: what’s actually true about how the modern information ecosystem operates, what role Wikipedia can and should play inside it, which audiences and ecosystem actors matter most to that role, and where and how Wikipedia should show up to be useful. Each question fed the next, and each answer had to come from evidence rather than intuition.

The work pulled across WMF’s own strategy and audience research, an external read of the AI ecosystem and how knowledge moves through it, and a lot of back-and-forth with the Communications team to pressure-test what was holding up. The strategic frameworks that came out of it shaped WMF’s planning on its off-platform presence for the 2026–27 cycle.