- The decline appears to have happened following Wikipedia's switch from delivering its pages in HTTP format to HTTPS, Similar Web and Wikipedia both say. HTTPS is a more secure, encrypted website publishing format, and it prevents bots from crawling Wikipedia and creating fake pageviews.
I have noticed lately that when using a tablet or phone, Wikipedia tries to shunt me to the download of an app. It's possible that lots of people, just trying to quickly look something up, are saying "screw it", rather than jump through the hoops.
Same reason I gave up on Ultimate Guitar. Used to be the best site for guitar tableture, now you can't load tabs on mobile without having their app forced down your throat.
UG is a steaming pile of garbage. If they focused on making a clean and easy to use site instead of a purposefully convulated mess they'd probably be in better shape than the whole they've dug themselves into.
Why does this matter? They don't advertise so page views don't count for revenue. They're primarily kept up by a small group so they aren't missing contributors. They pretty much just have to dish out less bandwidth which means lower overhead and fewer fundraisers. Wikipedia having less traffic sounds like the best possible outcome for wikipedia.
It should. HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It a series of rules that govern how information is moved on the internet. Every time you load a web page, information (hypertext) for the page is transfered from the server to you computer by these protocols. HTTPS is HTTP Secure, and when it is used, the information is encrypted. Bots do not do well with the encrypted information, and so their page views never happen. I get shakey here, and my Google-fu isn't helping, but I believe bots have difficulties with encrypted information because they operate similarly to the third-parties encryption protects against. So, this isn't a Wikipedia thing, but instead an internet wide thing.