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Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video
- yobid20 1y agoGuess that means they dont need that $1 donation anymore
- crmd 1y agoAs a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that is not dependent on web traffic for revenue, is a decline in traffic necessarily bad? I always assumed the need for metastatic growth was limited to VC-backed and ad-revenue dependent companies.
- sublinear 1y ago> As Miller puts it, “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.”
- lwansbrough 1y agoContributors are a tiny % of users. I'm sure they've got some room for improvement on incentivizing new contributors. But Wikipedia is a gift to humanity and I hope we find new ways for them to be paid for their contributions to AI.
- undeveloper 1y ago> Contributors are a tiny % of users most of them were wikipedia users in some form before they were contributors I imagine
- KPGv2 1y ago1/3 of all donations are from the banner. I just went and looked at their annual report, which disclosed this.
- qingcharles 1y agoThey are highly dependent on web traffic for revenue. And their costs are even increasing because while human viewers are decreasing they are getting hugged to death by AI scrapes.
- johnnyanmac 1y agoscraping Wikipedia feels like the stupidest possible move. You can in fact download the entire encyclopedia at any time and take all the time in the world parsing offline. For such purposes, I'd naively just setup some weekly job to download Wikipedia and then run a "scrape" on that. Even weekly may be overkill; a monthly snapshot may do more than enough.
- yorwba 1y agoYou can download twice-monthly database dumps, but they consist of the raw wikitext, so you need to do a bunch of extra work to render templates and stuff. Meanwhile, if you write a generic scraper, it can connect to Wikipedia like it connects to any other website and get the correctly-rendered HTML. People who aren't interested in Wikipedia specifically but want to download pretty much the entire internet unsurprisingly choose the latter option.
- parpfish 1y agoas somebody that has wrassled with the wikipedia dumps a number of times, i don't understand why wiki doesn't release some sort of sdk that gives you the 'official' parse
- skywal_l 1y agoThis. I tried that a few years ago and fell off my chair when I started to realized how DYI the thing is. It's a bunch of unofficial scripts and half-assed out of date help pages. At the time I though, well it's a bunch of hippies with a small budget, who can blame them? Now I learn that there is 600 of them with a budget in the hundreds of millions?? This is becoming another Mozilla foundation...
- intended 1y agoThe warning sign is not traffic for ads, although this will result in a drop in donations eventually. It means that now, people are paying for their AI subscriptions, while they don’t see Wikipedia at all. The primary source is being intermediated - which is the opposite of what the net was supposed to achieve. This is the piracy argument, except this time its not little old ladies doing it, but massive for profit firms.
- rkomorn 1y agoWait, when were little old ladies the perpetrators of piracy?
- busymom0 1y agoI believe that comment is referencing this recent news: > Sony tells SCOTUS that people accused of piracy aren’t “innocent grandmothers” https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/sony-tells-scotus-that-people-accused-of-piracy-arent-innocent-grandmothers/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/sony-tells-scotu...
- rkomorn 1y agoThank you!
- crazygringo 1y ago> It means that now, people are paying for their AI subscriptions Most people are not paying a cent. And the people that are, are paying for stuff like coding assistance or classification, not the kind of info you get on Wikipedia. Looking up Wikipedia-style information on LLM's is not a driving factor in paid subscriptions to ChatGPT etc.
- thehappypm 1y agoWikipedia was never a primary source to begin with
- IshKebab 1y agoIf nobody uses Wikipedia they won't get any donations, and unfortunately they wasted the last two decades blowing literally hundreds of millions of dollars on random community and outreach programs instead of building an endowment in case something exactly like this happened. No really, it was in the news a few years ago but nothing changed as far as I know.
- irjustin 1y agoI'll go out on a limb and say we _need_ Wikipedia and it's okay that traffic falls. Physical print encyclopedias got replaced by Wikipedia, but AI isn't a replacement (can't ever see how either). While AI is a method of easier access for the end user, the purpose of Wikipedia stands on its own. I've always scoffed at the Wikimedia Foundation's warchest and continuously increasing annual spending. I say now is the time to save money. Become self sustaining through investments so it can live for 1000 years. To me, it is an existence for the common good and should be governed as such.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago>I've always scoffed at the Wikimedia Foundation's warchest and continuously increasing annual spending. what are they increasing spending on? Are they still trying to branch out to other initiatives? I understand, even with static pages, that hosting one of the largest websites in the world won't be cheap, but it can't be rising that much, right?
- adventured 1y agoFor 2023-2024, their budget was ~$177 million. Travel & events was 7.4% of their expenses. Processing fees on donations was 6.4%. Grants & movement support was 25%. Hosting was 3.4%. Facilities was 1.4%. The Wikimedia Foundation is another Komen Foundation.
- mrcwinn 1y agoWhy are they paying 6.4% on processing fees? What is "movement support" and where is the travel to? Do they have to publicly disclose these disbursements anywhere? This seems sketchy at best.
- Kye 1y agoWikipedia is full of the kind of stuff mainstream payment processors balk at, so they might have to use a higher risk processor with higher fees.
- Venn1 1y agoThis made me curious enough to check the stats for my little site. According to Cloudflare’s AI Overview, over the last 24 hours the breakdown is: 665 ChatGPT-User 396 Bingbot 296 Googlebot 037 PerplexityBot Fascinating.
- loloquwowndueo 1y agoOut of how many visits total? About 80% of traffic to my sites (a few personal blogs and a community site) is from ai bots, search engine spiders or seo scrapers.
- crazygringo 1y agoLLM's have definitely replaced 90% of what I used to look up on a Wikipedia, simply because they integrate from so many more additional sources. But at the same time I continue to contribute edits to Wikipedia. Because it's the source of so much data. To me, it doesn't matter if the information I contribute gets consumed on Wikipedia or consumed via LLM. Either way, it's helping people. Wikipedia isn't going away, even if its website stops being the primary way most people get information from it.
- themafia 1y ago> Either way, it's helping people. Wikipedia gives away your creation for free. The LLM companies do not. Google is operating a loss leader and not "helping people." In fact, quite the opposite.
- IAmNotACellist 1y agoThere are dozens of top-quality models with FOSS licenses you can download and run right now
- cheeze 1y agoCounterpoint: I'm fine paying for convenience. Wikipedia should still exist, but I'm fine giving OpenAI 20 bucks a month to make my life easier.
- crazygringo 1y ago> Wikipedia gives away your creation for free. The LLM companies do not. They LLM companies are so far. Just like Google has given search results away for free for decades now.
- strogonoff 1y agoSearch results do not have as chilling an effect as LLM-generated text, because search results are in essence links back to content (meaning human authors benefit from knowing who reads them, people discover who those human authors are, etc.), whereas it is not a thing in LLM-generated text (which may have occasional links back, but they are not complete nor always correct).
- ChrisArchitect 1y agoSource: https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wikipedia/ https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wik...
- Mistletoe 1y agoOh good, Jimmy can stop hounding me for money like a late night infomercial or televangelist. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34106982 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34106982 >2022 >It’s the dishonesty of Wikipedia that bothers me. The implication is that donations are urgently needed to keep the website running. In reality they have $300m in the bank and revenue is growing every year[0]. Even Wikipedia says only 43% of donations are used for site operations[1], and that includes all of their sites, not just Wikipedia. Fully 12% of the money they collect from you is. . . used to ask you for more money[1]
- tombert 1y agoI find it a little annoying for a variety of reasons when universities I've been to ask me for money, but one of the main reason that I don't donate to universities is that I don't want the money I donate to be used for advertising, and especially advertising to solicit more donations instead of actually improving the school.
- 8bitsrule 1y agoYeah ... Some days it feels as though 98% of the net has turned into a giant begging-bowl. Long-time major sites are now saying stuff like "You're reading your last free article." Yeah? Don't count on that. Many of them are sites that have built themselves without any original reporting. Where will they scrape the content they've used to grow if their sources take the same attitude?
- 8bitsrule 1y agoHere's looking at you, Wired
- codinhood 1y agoAI seems obvious, but social video? Are they saying people watch TikToks instead of reading Wikipedia, or people who used to look things up don’t bother anymore because of TikTok?
- byzantinegene 1y agotiktok seems to be the primary medium by which Gen Alpha obtain their news and knowledge
- undeveloper 1y agoGen Z as well. Many well into their 20s heavily consume tiktok.
- crazygringo 1y agoNo it's not. It's the primary medium by which they get their entertainment. TikTok replaces YouTube and Tumblr before that. It's not like people are watching it instead of reading history books or the New Yorker. And just because you use TikTok doesn't mean you don't check actual news headlines or listen to two-hour-long podcasts.
- d--b 1y agotraffic falling means wikipedia will be cheaper to run. since they don’t rely on ads, it’d likely not affecting their revenues either (assuming those who don’t use it anymore weren’5 those givîng to it)
- Gigachad 1y agoIt’s probably not good long term for donations or attracting future editors. Possibly less people interested in editing when it becomes more unpaid work for AI companies than actually serving real viewers.
- croon 1y agoIf I may speculate I would assume that the Venn diagram between people moving from wikipedia consumer to tiktok and AI generally don't overlap much with people prone to contribute or donate to wikipedia, so I'm not certain it's a net loss in that regard.
- arjie 1y agoIt's all right. Wikipedia was a magical device for its time, and it's still a great aggregator of information. It will probably last forever as such a link aggregator. Read-time curation is obviously far better than write-time curation, but the former used to be very hard. Now we have the former for cheap so it makes sense for Wikipedia to be Yet Another Source into the read-time curator. And the existence of a source database like Wikipedia makes many of these tools work a lot better. People rightfully get upset about individual editors having specific agendas on Wikipedia and I get it. Often that is the case. But the chat interface for LLMs allows for a back and forth where you can force them to look past some text to get closer to a truth. For my part, I think it's nice to be part of making that base substrate of human knowledge in an open way, and some kinds of fixes to Wikipedia articles are very easy. So what little I do, I'll keep doing. Makes me happy to help. Some of the fruit is really low-hanging, take a look at this garbage someone added to an article: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salvadoran_gang_crackdown&oldid=prev&diff=1274052602 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salvadoran_gang_c...
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago> Read-time curation is obviously far better than write-time curation, but the former used to be very hard. Now we have the former for cheap It's _kinda_ cheap. Wikipedia is so cheap you can fit it all on a phone and search it instantly. I agree overall but LLMs are just so heavy. I don't know if most people can afford to run one locally, and they're lossy. Both on a phone would be great. I fret a lot about data ownership, you know
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Razengan 1y agoHow is it not conflict of interest when Google's AI summary (which is sometimes hilariously wrong) takes a click away from websites that pay for ads? Specially if it was trained on those websites
- SchemaLoad 1y agoThe sites paying for ads are usually offering products and services, not information. If you search "Plumbers near me", there will be no reason to have an AI summary, so they can show the ads. If you are searching "what temperature does copper melt", no one was buying ads on that anyway.
- g-b-r 1y agoThe point is that the sites from which the AI summary sourced its information might have ads, and if Google only linked to them they'd get ads impressions
- bad_username 1y agoMy personal traffic to Wikipedia fell after around 2019, when activist editors took over, and the site ceased to be trustworthy for a lot of important topics.
- zerd 1y ago[citation needed]
- 36280132928226 1y ago[flagged]
- Shocka1 1y agoI was curious too and found these pretty quickly - I dunno if this applies to all topics, but at least the political ones: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5022797 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5022797 https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/is-wikipedia-politically-biased.pdf https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/is... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241750096_Is_Wikipedia_Biased https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241750096_Is_Wikipe...
- intended 1y agoI’m a pro-market solution person, but markets are a tool. This is the kind of capitalistic behavior that is repugnant to our idea of how things should work. This is not what the commons is for - taking the work of creators, repackaging it, and using platform capability to re-sell it. At this point, I am coming around to the argument that governments should make their own local/national AI.
- babelfish 1y ago> At this point, I am coming around to the argument that governments should make their own local/national AI. I think this is a terrible idea. How do current Chinese-built LLMs respond when asked about Tianamen Square? How would American-built LLMs response when asked about Israel/Palestine?
- myth_drannon 1y agoIf Wikipedia was the source for training data of the LLM then the answer would be quite horrible. There was a ring of Pro-Palestinian editors (possibly state sponsored) that were writing a lot of misinformation on that topic.
- g-b-r 1y agoCheck the pro-Israel ones too
- myth_drannon 1y agoIs there any? I thought Paliz/Woke actors were in complete control over wikipedia. That's why the talk about the alternatives.
- g-b-r 1y agoI'm not surprised you thought that.
- 1y ago
- incomingpain 1y agoThere are multiple new start ups and existing competition that's impacting them. They are facing competition. The curious thing is that big LLM folks put together RAG systems which act much like wikipedia. But it's more than that. They built dictionaries, book repos(borderline illegal), news repos, and data knowledge base. These are bigger than wikipedia. Better because you dont have anonymous partisans. Wikipedia is at a point where they have purged multiple perspectives and it has left an unreliable systemic bias in wikipedia. They are dealing with this problem and competitors are popping up because of these problems. Larry put out his theses on his user page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Nine_Theses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Nine_Theses Originally being heavily censored, vandalized, and deleted. It does seem to have been allowed, despite it being in user space. Every one of those theses is correct.
- I_dream_of_Geni 1y ago(looks outside at the street) I'm wondering why would traffic be less because of AI search?? SO I asked AI. Its answer? "By analyzing data and demand in real-time, AI is able to predict peak travel times and adjust train, subway, and bus routes as needed, reducing overcrowding and, in the case of buses, traffic congestion."
- maltelandwehr 1y agoIn the past, you would type a question into Google. To get the full, detailed answer you had to click on the Wikipedia search result. With ChatGPT or Google AI Mode, you get all answers directly in the chat. And you can even ask follow-up questions. There is no need to click on a link. From the data I have seen, 40% of searches on Google used to lead to a click to another website. In ChatGPT and Google AI Mode, this number is lower than 5%. One study (with a small N) even came to the conclusion that the number is 0%.
- I_dream_of_Geni 1y agowow, bunches of downvotes? Because of a little humor? My god people, what is it with you?
- pojzon 1y agoLooking how editors can fabricate stuff OR argue like little kids whether original source from origin country should be mistrusted vs encyclopedia britanica is enough for me to know Wikipedia is no longer what it was and lost its purpose. The further aways ppl stay from it the better.
- nadermx 1y agoSo maybe they shouldn't depend on just search traffic. Their increased spend would suggest they got enough people to try and figure out alternative methods to attract editors and/or traffic.
- dmitrygr 1y agoI stopped contributing money, and then stopped trusting and using Wikipedia after I saw how wrong they are on a subject I am well-informed on personally (ARM architecture), and how fast they revert properly-cited 100% factually correct changes (literally citing the arm architecture manual). How could I trust them on things I do not know, if I know for a fact they are unrepentantly wrong about things I do know?
- g-b-r 1y agoIn my experience it's always better to only leave comments on the talk page and at most add template comments to the article, for a couple weeks; after that time passed you can go ahead with editing the page, and there's a better chance of the edits not getting reverted. But I've always hated the way Wikipedia works.
- dmitrygr 1y agoI refuse to pay for the privilege of doing free work for someone else’s benefit. Pay — in time or in effort. Let it rot.
- pm2222 1y agoI still donate Wikipedia yearly. It's useful and I hope it stays afloat.
- simonmales 1y agoThat and the Internet Archive.
- Shorel 1y agoThe Internet Archive deserve it more. And they actually need it.
- abtinf 1y agoWhy? They have hundreds of millions in assets to operate a relatively simple site.
- Sohcahtoa82 1y agoI considered donating to Wikipedia until I read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... The TL;DR is that Wikipedia has a massive spending problem, and if they brought it back to something reasonable, their existing war chest would last them for at least a decade, even with no additional funding.
- bawolff 1y agoRemember that time in feb 2005 when Wikipedia went down for several days and lost about a week of data because there was a power failure and they were too shoe strings to have proper back ups, and also had disabled a bunch of ACID features in mysql to get the last bit of performance out of mysql causing the power failure to corrupt the db, because they didn't have enough money for more servers and were desperate to try anything to get the last bit of performance out of their servers? No? That's because it doesn't happen anymore now that WMF has a reasonable budget.
- 1y ago
- dottjt 1y agoIsn't this better for them in a way? Won't this reduce their hosting costs, whilst still being relevant to those who actually need deeper information?
- layer8 1y agoReduced traffic means less contributors and less donations.
- fallingfrog 1y agoThat little AI generated summary that seems to show up in every Google search is riddled with errors. I've learned that as often as not it's just making things up or confusing two different topics. I would not trust that thing under any circumstances. Its no better than a wild guess from a stranger on the street.
- fallingfrog 1y agoYou have to keep in mind that the original google search, by summarizing search results based on links between pages, essentially destroyed the web of interconnected links that existed at that time, so that the original pagerank algorithm doesn't even really work anymore. And the search results Google returns are worse than they were years ago. And you know, I use it, it is still super convenient, and the long term effects took some time to become apparent. Now it is again feeding on and regurgitating Wikipedia but again in a way that will end up destroying the thing it is summarizing. Aggregators are parasitic on the thing they derive information from.
- abtinf 1y agoGood riddance to their constant begging for money they don't need.
- tech234a 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Suppress_display_of_the_fundraising_banner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Suppress_display_of_...
- contravariant 1y agoI don't even begrudge them the money but I'm not giving them reasonable cause to bombard me with emails again.
- Wistar 1y agoI do not doubt this for a second. I hope that this does not alter Wikipedia.
- thund 1y agoopenai, anthropic, gemini &co should pay wikipedia the rent.
- tonymet 1y agoWikipedia offers paid services , like realtime and incremental update feeds . I know a few of the big companies do pay .
- codethief 1y agoSo far the story with Wikipedia has always been that the number of contributors is declining, and I believe this will only get worse when fewer people read it (directly from the source). As much as I hate the idea, are people (in particular, Wikimedia) experimenting yet with using LLMs to contribute to/improve/check Wikipedia? Will page discussions and edit wars in the future get replaced with an arena of partially collaborating, partially competing LLM agents?
- dzink 1y agoThe system is off. Contributor would write a new piece. Spammers would go in and remove legitimate articles it links to and replace with spam links. Wikipedia bots go through and purge the new contributions. Contributors stop caring.
- maltelandwehr 1y agoMany things contributors are doing could be handled by AI agents. We would just need a good system to a) keep humans in the loop and b) sort out bad actors.
- orliesaurus 1y agothat's a good thing? Wikipedia is always worrying about server costs or am I wrong?
- janalsncm 1y agoHere is a list of their most popular pages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Top_25_Report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Top_25_Report Most of them are trending public figures and media, which lines up with what I remembered from my prior Wikipedia analysis. So LLMs are likely replacing a lot of this.
- damnesian 1y agoThis is really the perfect point in the timeline- "in these uncertain times-" to posit themselves as a working repository of credible information. Also I firmly believe the Wikipedia app is key to their sustained relevance. Users get forwarded to the app from web browsers with wiki links, this gets people in the dedicated interface. from a design standpoint there need to be more avenues on each page inviting people to browse and explore, spend more time there.
- citizenpaul 1y ago>Wikipedia is often described as the last good website on an internet Oh who says that? Bloomberg. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-10-24/why-wikipedia-is-more-trustworthy-than-social-media https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-10-24/why-wi... So not people just bloomberg... trash article. Probably just stealth donation marketing.
- johnnyApplePRNG 1y agoAI helped me realize why I have always read and referred to Wikipedia so little. Don't get me wrong. Wikipedia is a GREAT resource that the world absolutely needs. But it's a horribly boring "read" when it comes to human consumption. It's an encyclopedia. A list of facts. When I want to learn something about a particular topic, I rarely ever want to read a list of facts.
- delta_p_delta_x 1y ago> But it's a horribly boring "read" when it comes to human consumption. I couldn't possibly disagree more. The website I visit most often after Reddit and HN is Wikipedia, and I often spend hours just diving through article after article. Learning facts is fun.
- johnnyApplePRNG 1y agoLearning facts is extremely fun. It's just not fun reading them as a list of facts. I am not a computer. I enjoy reading prose.
- delta_p_delta_x 1y ago> prose I must be reading a different Wikipedia, then, because all the articles I read are prose, rather than a bulleted list of facts as you claim.
- parpfish 1y agoi feel like there's a postivie-sum game where the AI companies should start heavily subsidizing wikipedia. wikipedia gets money to stay afloat, ai companies continue to get access to their huge human-curated knowledge graph.
- dlubarov 1y agoWMF only spends a couple million on essentials like hosting though. They have over 700 employees, and their budget is pretty bloated with thing that aren't really related to running Wikipedia, including sizeable grants to other organizations. See their org chart [1] or this classic essay [2]. [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation/Organizational_chart https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation/Organiz... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
- poppafuze 1y agoThe persecutors of notability are no longer notable.
- breppp 1y agoThe hard truth is that LLMs will fully replace wikipedia. Let's put aside wikipedia being rotten with bureaucracy and obsession-driven bias, which is similar to stackoverflow preexisting flows before LLMs streamrolled. Fact is, wikipedia is a human driven summarization engine of secondary sources, hopefully in a way that echos the sources consensus. This is exactly what LLMs are best for, summarizing huge amount of text, and training can easily focus on high quality books and thus exceed wikipedia in quality. It's enough to read an AI summary where the first line talks about the subject in hand, compared to wikipedia where the first line is the product of some petty argument about a political disagreement
- viccis 1y agoThis is the kind of attitude that I hope Wikipedia continues to exist and educate people away from falling for.
- breppp 1y agoBeing condescending is unwarranted really. Is your argument that Wikipedia rules are not highly tailored to suppress original research and rely on secondary sources For the latter LLMs are better than wikipedia today, the former arguably current alignment is better at suppressing bias than current editors
- croes 1y agoLLMs nowadays are like search engines before SEO. They will habe there own kind of spam problem. And wait what happens to their quality as soon as the AI companies habe to generate profit. I doubt you can collect second source references at the same price Wikipedia does. People aren’t as eager to help a billion dollar company for free to make profit.
- croes 1y ago> and training can easily focus on high quality books and thus exceed wikipedia in quality. Then it will never exceed Wikipedia. There are no high quality books to many of Wikipedia‘s articles and even if who qualifies those books as as high quality. And less traffic is not only a problem of Wikipedia but also other websites. So AI is killing the source it feeds on. This is the golden age of AI. The next age will be filled with less good sources, more AI generated content and sites that actively try to poison LLMs https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45529587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45529587
- sameerds 1y agoI really hope that the same thing is happening to all kinds of SEO-ridden websites out there. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44631662 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44631662
- croes 1y agoIt happens to all, means the good sites to that need add money and the AI crawlers add traffic to all so that even those without adds may get a cost problem. Not to mention all the sites that will pop up to poison the LLMs in their favor. On top of that LLMs will either cost more or will get adds too.
- loeg 1y agoSo their hosting costs are going down, right?
- robertwt7 1y agoas much as I love Wikipedia and I think we need it, I just realise that I haven't opened Wikipedia in the past few months. My default workflow is now replaced to Option + Space and ask gpt questions.
- bamboozled 1y agoLittle off topic but does anyone else find AI summarise really misleading, almost dangerously misleading ? In a search box you can never rally provide anywhere near enough context to get a sufficient answer on anything of even small consequence. Yes I do use the internet for “medical opinion” and information and seriously some of the falsehoods it’s provided…similarly anything related to construction. Steer clear.
- Sontho 1y agoThe same is happening with almost all sites since google started providing AI summaries.
- kalasoo 1y agoKnowledge isn’t knowledge in itself — it’s about how people organize it. With more AI tools mining existing knowledge and presenting it in increasingly accessible ways, I don’t think AI search fundamentally changes how information and knowledge are organized. Of course, AI could reshape the organization of knowledge through areas like: 1. Fact-checking and sourcing 2. Drafting new pages 3. Editing and refining wording …and more --- Just like Wikipedia already has many bots running behind the scenes, if all these tasks were eventually handled by AI, there would still be things left for humans (or perhaps another AI) to decide: 1. When a fact has multiple perspectives, how should it be phrased to represent different viewpoints fairly? > I still remember countless word battles on Wikipedia over this. 2. In the age of smartphones and social media, historical moments are documented not only by journalists or influencers but by thousands — even millions — of ordinary people. How should Wikipedia process and summarize such vast, distributed facts? 3. How do we properly incentivize contributors, whether human or AI? > Wikipedia was born in an era when the Internet lacked reliable information, and building a shared, sustainable, independent knowledge base was a mission that resonated with its early contributors — traffic rewards came later. 4. And of course, geopolitics — Wikipedia must remain independent. --- A bit of background: I once led a Chinese wiki product, but I eventually gave up on it — because almost no one cared why a wiki should exist beyond being just another searchable content platform.
- maltelandwehr 1y agoI like to idea of using AI to make Wikipedia better. There are many small tasks simple AI agents could handle. For example: Go to every article in the English Wikipedia of a Spanish city. Check data like inhabitants, major, etc. and compare them to the Spanish Wikipedia article. (The assumption here is that the Spanish Wikipedia will be more up-to-date for Spanish cities than the English Wikipedia.) Double-check what is written in the Spanish article. Update the English article accordingly. If such an agents is only allowed to create drafts, human editors could review them and we would get a lot of small updates in.
- kalasoo 1y agoDefinitely, this kind of processes will be AI-driven completely
- 0xedd 1y ago[dead]
- submeta 1y agoFor Wikipedia to last 1000 years, we need a publisher who sells a print of a snapshot of it every ten years or so. When the civilisation dies, and our civilisation will die eventually, sooner or later, just like any other civilisation, then there won‘t be no internet, no wikipedia foundation or anything. But printed paper might survive.
- quantumcotton 1y agoWiki has been dying such a slow painful death. I feel bad. Especially because I was the first generation to have the transition from encyclopedias to wiki. Rip wiki, it'll go down in history for sure.
- Shorel 1y agoThe other day I was reading the page about the Library of Alexandria. The Wikipedia version virtually doesn't mention the stoning of Hypatia or the burning of the library, except for a different smaller fire caused by a war during Julius Caesar. This page certainly reads like Christian apology, where the almost total destruction of the library by Christian fanatics didn't happen. For me, this heavy bias in basically every article is the reason Wikipedia traffic is falling.
- buovjaga 1y agoWhat you say sounds influenced by the movie Agora: https://bookhaven.stanford.edu/2016/03/the-library-of-alexandria-destroyed-by-an-angry-mob-with-torches-not-very-likely/ https://bookhaven.stanford.edu/2016/03/the-library-of-alexan...
- Shorel 1y agoI haven't fully watched that film. It is definitely influenced by the book Cosmos by Carl Sagan. I feel I read it a hundred times.
- buovjaga 1y agoOk, the errors in Cosmos are covered here: https://sciencemeetsfiction.com/2014/06/15/cosmos-follow-up-hypatia-and-the-library-of-alexandria/ https://sciencemeetsfiction.com/2014/06/15/cosmos-follow-up-... Quote: Cosmos does not make Hypatia’s death so much a religious issue as an anti-intellectual on, but the truth is that it was actually a political one. A second problem comes when Dr. Sagan links her death to the destruction of the Great Library. In fact, in the final episode of the original Cosmos, “Who Speaks for Earth”, Carl Sagan says, “The last remains of the library were destroyed within a year of Hypatia’s death.” The problem with this is that the last remnant of the Library of Alexandria were almost certainly destroyed in 391, 24 years before Hypatia’s death, and most of the library was likely destroyed, by accident, centuries earlier. It sounds strange, but we actually don’t have a very good idea of when the Library of Alexandria was destroyed. As best we can tell, much of it was burned unintentionally when a fire spread through the city during Julius Caesar’s invasion in 48 BC. While the majority of the library may have survived that war, it was almost certainly destroyed in the war between Emperor Aurelian and Queen Zenobia of Palmyra in the 270s AD. This also appears to have been unintentional, as a large part of the city was burned. What little was left of the library was deliberately destroyed in 391, when Emperor Theodosius I banned Paganism. The remaining repository of books in Alexandria was destroyed along with the Pagan temple it was stored in. [Even this has no evidence as pointed out by Tim O'Neill in the blog comments] I admire most of Dr. Sagan’s and Dr. Tyson work, but when they characterize Hypatia’s death and the burning of the Great Library as the deliberate (and linked) actions of an anti-intellectual mob, they are simply misrepresenting the history.
- fooker 1y agoHere's an interesting question: Wikipedia was a mind blowing improvement over a shelf full of Britannica encyclopedia, or several floppies of Encarta. What's the next improvement over Wikipedia that changes things to a similar extent?
- postflopclarity 1y agoediting wikipedia was close to the most aggravating experience I've ever had. and that includes suing landlords for security deposits and arguing with HOAs.
- hzay 1y agoWe can't just look up info using an LLM. We have no clue what its weights and biases are based on, and whatever other layers control the output. Just a total black box. It would be an irreplaceable loss if we lost wikipedia to LLMs.
- MarlonPro 1y agoWill this also affect the search engines like Google?
- nottorp 1y agoOk so is Wikipedia competing for traffic rankings?
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