5 ms·

As 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 gr

by crmd 1y ago

As 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 ago
  Contributors 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 ago
    1/3 of all donations are from the banner. I just went and looked at their annual report, which disclosed this.
qingcharles 1y ago
They 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 ago
  scraping 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 ago
    You 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 ago
      as 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 ago
        This. 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...
      - philipkglass 1y ago
        I have wrestled with it too. I believe it's because wikitext is an ad-hoc format that evolved so that the only 100% correct parser/renderer is the MediaWiki implementation. It's like asking for an SDK that correctly parses Perl. Only Perl can do that. There are a bunch of mainly-compatible third party parsers in various languages. The best one I've found so far is Sweble but even it mishandles a small percentage of rare cases.
intended 1y ago
The 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 ago
  Wait, when were little old ladies the perpetrators of piracy?
  - busymom0 1y ago
    I 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 ago
      Thank 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 ago
  Wikipedia was never a primary source to begin with
IshKebab 1y ago
If 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.

by crmd 1y ago

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 ago
Contributors 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 ago
  1/3 of all donations are from the banner. I just went and looked at their annual report, which disclosed this.

qingcharles 1y ago

They 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 ago
scraping 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 ago
  You 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 ago
    as 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 ago
      This. 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...
    - philipkglass 1y ago
      I have wrestled with it too. I believe it's because wikitext is an ad-hoc format that evolved so that the only 100% correct parser/renderer is the MediaWiki implementation. It's like asking for an SDK that correctly parses Perl. Only Perl can do that. There are a bunch of mainly-compatible third party parsers in various languages. The best one I've found so far is Sweble but even it mishandles a small percentage of rare cases.

intended 1y ago

The 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 ago
Wait, when were little old ladies the perpetrators of piracy?
- busymom0 1y ago
  I 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 ago
    Thank 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 ago
Wikipedia was never a primary source to begin with

IshKebab 1y ago

If 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.