I remember when Fox News was considered irrelevant compared to mainstream news outlets. Don’t underestimate the reach of billionaires with an ideological agenda.
Fox News has been the #1 rated cable news network for over two decades. They've had more viewers than CNN and MSNBC for most of their existence. Calling them anything other than "mainstream" is just supporting their propaganda. They've always branded themselves as the scrappy outsider because it plays well with their audience, not because it reflects reality.
It would arguably be a benefit to Wikipedia to be pulled from Google search results, since Google prominence is the root of a huge fraction of all the misbehavior on the site.
Nah. Wikipedia is popular because it is the #1 search result for a lot of stuff. Most of people going there just want to look up something for a homework assignment, online argument, or whatever. If Grokipedia has an error rate 5%, compared to 1% for Wikipedia, it's probably still fine.
If Wikipedia traffic shrinks down just to the true "encyclopedia reader" crowd, they will be in trouble, because I suspect that's less than 10% of their current donations. And Grokipedia is already starting to crop up in search results.
Wikipedia has an endowment big enough to sustain the site's basic maintenance, essentially forever. If donations disappeared then they would have to severely cut spending, however, I don't think it would be an existential threat.
Additionally, an encyclopedia reader likely cares about accuracy significantly more than average.