15 ms·
25 Years of Wikipedia
- poly2it 9mo ago[flagged]
- bakugo 9mo agoThank god HN still isn't quite at the point where the "most" drowns out every dissenting opinion until every discussion is an echo chamber.
- mmooss 9mo ago> Most would agree Apparently more people disagree with you than you thought. Calling them bots is empty criticism and I think against HN guidelines.
- vovavili 9mo agoYou misspelled "vital for manufacturing consent".
- didntcheck 9mo agoOn the contrary, this thread seems to have a large number of users who can't handle criticism of Wikipedia without responding with unfounded assumptions and insinuations about the critic
- cm2012 9mo agoThis is cute, but kind of an example of Wikipedia's off-mission bloat. It irks me that they constantly fundraise when most of it is not needed for Wikipedia proper, but rather used for initiatives people know less about and may not fund if they knew.
- physicsguy 9mo agoAnd they have a huge endowment fund now too that more than covers the cost of Wikipedia...
- altilunium 9mo agoI wonder whether the emergence of a single, true Wikipedia competitor would actually put an end to this never-ending fundraising criticism (since people could simply donate to the competitor as a form of protest)
- p-e-w 9mo agoProjects like Wikipedia never have meaningful competition, because the social dynamics invariably converge to a single platform eating everything else.
- adventured 9mo agoWikipedia is already dead, they just don't know it yet. They'll get Stackoverflowed. The LLMs have already guaranteed their zombie end. The HN crowd will be comically delusional about it right up to the point where Wikimedia struggles to keep the lights on and has to fire 90% of its staff. There is no scenario where that outcome is avoided (some prominent billionaire will step in with a check as they get really desperate, but it won't change anything fundamental, likely a Sergey Brin type figure). The LLMs will do to Wikipedia, what Wikipedia & Co. did to the physical encyclopedia business. You don't have to entirely wipe out Wikipedia's traffic base to collapse Wikimedia. They have no financial strength what-so-ever, they burn everything they intake. Their de facto collapse will be extremely rapid and is coming soon. Watch for the rumbles in 2026-2027.
- threetonesun 9mo agoIf we kill all the platforms where content for training LLMs comes from, what do LLMs train on?
- rvnx 9mo agoNewspapers, scientific papers and soon, real-world interactions. News is the main feed of new data and that can be an infinite incremental source of new information
- throawayonthe 9mo agoi feel like that's a bit silly, the other projects are listed on the donation page (https://donate.wikimedia.org/wiki/FAQ https://donate.wikimedia.org/wiki/FAQ) and tbh you are unlikely to be donating to the wikimedia foundation without being aware of (at least some of?) the rest
- arrowsmith 9mo agoI promise you that 99% of normal people have no idea what the Wikimedia foundation is and think that they're just donating to "fund Wikipedia".
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- throawayonthe 9mo agoare normal people donating to wikipedia tho
- cm2012 9mo agoYes, the ads are essentially a guilt tax on normies who remember Wikipedia helped them in high school
- bawolff 9mo agoHonestly, most of the other projects get almost none of the resources (other then maybe wikidata and commons, but both of those are directly used by wikipedia)
- amiga386 9mo agoI don't begrudge them the odd party, anniversary, meetup. And some of their subprojects are a great idea and could go much further -- it'd be fantastic to have a Wikipedia atlas, for example. The WikiMiniAtlas on geolocated articles is nice but it could be so much better. But as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CANCER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CANCER it's a huge concern that they're blowing money pretty much at the rate they get it, when they should be saving it for the future, and be pickier and choosier about what they're funding at any given time.
- altilunium 9mo agoI made “Wikidata Atlas” several weeks ago. [1] [2] [1] : https://wd-nearbyitem.toolforge.org/ https://wd-nearbyitem.toolforge.org/ [2] : https://rtnf.substack.com/p/wd-nearbyitem https://rtnf.substack.com/p/wd-nearbyitem
- amiga386 9mo agoThat is a nice start, a rendering of GIS wikidata. Perhaps ask Wikimedia Foundation for funding :) What I'd like to see is a more intimate marrying of OSM data and Wikipedia data. For example, if I go to zoom level 12 centred on London, UK on your page, there are about 80 text labels on the OSM layer itself. At minimum this is going to need OSM vector tiles. I'd expect to be able to click any of the OSM labels for the corresponding Wikipedia article, as well as adding in POIs for articles that don't have corresponding OSM links. And then you need OSM rendering style rules about which POIs you show at each zoom level, based on whether labels will run into each other or not. The problem right now is that the WikiMiniAtlas treats all things, whether large areas or individual POIs, as POIs.
- cm2012 9mo agoThank you for this link, I was looking for something with that data in a clean format for some time!
- hulitu 9mo agoThey, just like some newspapers, try to present themselves as neutral, not tied to any interest.
- rvnx 9mo agoLike Hackernews, supposedly neutral. The main issue with neutral people is that we do not know in which camp they are.
- TuringTest 9mo ago> The main issue with neutral people is that we do not know in which camp they are. And that's a good thing, 'cause it means they're living to their standards.
- toinewx 9mo agoshould have a fate similar to stackoverflow: less contributors, worse (or stale) content, less visits
- altilunium 9mo ago[dead]
- jader201 9mo agoI’ll be curious to see how true this turns out to be. I stopped visiting SO frequently years ago, even before LLMs. But I still visit Wikipedia. I often just want to read about X, vs. asking AI questions about X.
- thmsths 9mo agoThis. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, while some of the content needs to be updated periodically, it also has A LOT of content that will stay relevant pretty much forever.
- fragebogen 9mo agoAccording to their own stats (visible in the graph some folds down), it seems to have a fairly steady rate of edits. As for visits, it looks quite constant as well https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wikipedia/ https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wik...
- lysace 9mo agoSo activity is plateauing.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- mezod 9mo agoSince we as a culture will be forgotten, a reminder that the catalan wikipedia was the 2nd one to have an article after the english version :)
- dreslan 9mo agoWikipedia is and continues to be the best thing that happened to the internet. A shining example of an open platform that works.
- jader201 9mo agoExcept for their unnecessarily incessant fund raising. There’s zero reason it should happen that often, and that intrusively.
- moffkalast 9mo agoEh out of all the nonprofits that incessantly fundraise, Wikipedia gets a pass the most. Nobody else can compete with their vast utility to just about everyone.
- rkozik1989 9mo agoThere's a reason why nonprofits have fundraising events throughout the year instead once. Keep engagement going with donors is important.
- lgl 9mo agoExcept for their unnecessarily incessant fund raising. [citation needed] Fixed.
- daedrdev 9mo agoIts a widely known controversy https://www.dailydot.com/news/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraising/ https://www.dailydot.com/news/wikipedia-endownemnt-fundraisi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2021-06-27/Forum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
- lgl 9mo agoSure I'm very familiar with the donation banners etc but still, how unnecessary are they really? They have no actual "product" to sell and no ads. At the same time I imagine a huge amount of traffic, that has surely gotten much much worse with the AI "renaissance" we're going through. They have staff, etc.. So what's the deal with all the wikipedia hate lately?
- dpark 9mo agoMaybe I can prompt an LLM to translate this flying div monstrosity into a flat page I can read.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- emsign 9mo ago[flagged]
- steve1977 9mo agoHow would they go about that?
- onraglanroad 9mo agoWell, wiki is a Hawaiian word, so let's start with tariffs on Hawaii and then move to invade.
- fragebogen 9mo agoSlightly off topic, but now that long context machine translation is roughly on-par with humans: are there any official efforts from Wikipedia, to translate the "best" or "most complete" language version of each article to all other languages? I'd imagine that the effort of getting all languages up to the same standards are just an impossible one and people from "lower-resource" languages would benefit a lot.
- another-dave 9mo agoAt least using Irish as an example, the state of machine translation is still far far behind proper translation unfortunately and wouldn't be up to scratch
- alansaber 9mo agoYep exactly this, and some languages still haven't been fully digitised https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/a3369c56-abaa-4b67-a1e7-f80953caf850 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/a3369c56-abaa-4b67-a1...
- zozbot234 9mo agoNot quite, the official in-development project wrt. this area is Abstract Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia which plans to develop a human-editable structural interlanguage for encyclopedic content that can then be automatically "rendered" to existing natural languages, as opposed to just starting from an existing "best or most complete" natural-language text. This avoids the unreliability of existing "neural/ML" approaches, replacing them with something that might see contributions from bots as part of developing the support for specific content or languages (similar to what happens with Wikidata today) but can always be comprehensively understood by humans if need be.
- rfv6723 9mo ago> human-editable structural interlanguage This won't work, and it would fail the same way as Semantic Web. Too much human labor needed.
- amiga386 9mo agohttps://wikipedia25.org/en/the-first-day https://wikipedia25.org/en/the-first-day > Founder Jimbo Wales on a challenge overcome Aren't you forgetting someone, Jimmy? Your co-founder Larry Sanger, perhaps? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger Let's check one of the citations from the History of Wikipedia page: https://www.mid-day.com/lifestyle/health-and-fitness/article/tech-rewind--how-wikipedia--the-free-encyclopedia-came-to-be-15915177 https://www.mid-day.com/lifestyle/health-and-fitness/article... > It was Larry Sanger who chanced upon the critical concept of combining the three fundamental elements of Wikipedia, namely an encyclopedia, a wiki, and essentially unrestricted editorial access to the public during a dinner meeting with an old friend Ben Kovitz in January 2, 2001. Kovitz a computer programmer and introduced Sanger to Ward Cunningham's wiki, a web application which allows collaborative modification, extension or deletion of its content and structure. The name wiki has been derived from the Hawaiian term which meant quick. Sanger feeling that the wiki software would facilitate a good platform for an online encyclopedia web portal, proposed the concept to Wales to be applied to Nupedia. Wales intially skeptic about the idea decided to give it a try later. > The credit for coining the term Wikipedia goes to Larry Sanger. He initially conceived the concept of a wiki-based encyclopedia project only as a means to accelerate Nupedia's slow growth. Larry Sanger served as the "chief organiser" of Wikipedia during its critical first year of growth and created and enforced many of the policies and strategy that made Wikipedia possible during its first formative year. Wikipedia turned out to contain 15,000 articles and upwards to 350 Wikipedians contributing on several topics by the end of 2001. He may not be with the project now, but don't airbrush him out of history.
- FiveOhThree 9mo agoI can't be the only one who feels that Wikipedia's quality has really started to go downhill over the past 5 or so years. I've noticed more and more articles which read as ridiculously partisan, usually around subjects with any link to politics or current events. That's probably linked to the increasing polarisation in the US, but I get the impression that the sites neutrality policies have gradually been chipped away by introducing concepts like "false balance" as an excuse to pick a side on an issue. I could easily see that causing the site to slowly decline like StackOverflow did, most people don't want to deal with agenda pushing. Fortunately articles related to topics like science and history haven't been significantly damaged by this yet. Something to watch carefully.
- amrocha 9mo agoIt’s more likely that you became more radicalized so what used to read as neutral seems partisan now.
- zxcvasd 9mo ago[dead]
- FiveOhThree 9mo agoIs it radicalised to want even a basic premise of neutrality in an encyclopedia? Despite not being particularly political, even I raise an eyebrow when an article opens with "____ is a <negative label>, <negative label>, <negative label> known for <controversial statement>"
- InsideOutSanta 9mo agoI've never seen an article like that, other than for people like Epstein, who are primarily famous for their crimes. I just went and checked the pages of some famous people where you might expect this kind of treatment if Wikipedia were indeed biased in the way people seem to think (like Donald Trump or Ted Cruz), and they're not like that. There are a lot of comments in this thread talking about a strong bias in Wikipedia, but I don't see any examples. I have no doubt that there are some articles that are biased, particularly in less popular areas that get less attention, but overall, Wikipedia does a great job maintaining a neutral point of view in its articles. I do get the impression that what people perceive as bias is often simply neutrality. If you think yourself the victim of an evil cabal of your political opponents, then a neutral description of the facts might seem like an attack.
- jyscao 9mo agoWikipedia is overall excellent, and it has certainly brought enormous value to me throughout the years. But it is noticeably biased on any topic that has political implications.
- tonymet 9mo agoHistory and many fields of science also have political implications, and you’ll find just as much editorial slant there, too
- thiht 9mo agoCan't wait for the specific examples
- jyscao 9mo agoWhat for? To start a flame war? No one is going to get convinced one way or the other. Which was why I just wanted to point out that while I think Wikipedia is a net good overall, it is not without blemishes.
- chairhairair 9mo ago> Makes claim. > Is asked for evidence. > Refuses. Brilliant work. These kinds of posts should be bannable.
- 9mo ago
- chaostheory 9mo agoAside from AI, Wikipedia’s greatest upcoming challenge will be censorship as Western governments start to adopt various traits of Eastern dictatorships.
- lambdaone 9mo agoFor all of its ubiquity, Wikipedia is a single fragile organization in an increasingly unstable political landscape. I hope that efforts are being made to make sure that its content is not only being archived in many places, but also that the know-how to reboot Wikipedia's hosting from its dumps (software, infrastructure deployment and all) is being actively preserved by people independent of the organization.
- observationist 9mo ago[flagged]
- gjm11 9mo agoWhat does "challenged Wikipedia so thoroughly" mean? (My impression is that Grokipedia was announced, everyone looked it and laughed because it was so obviously basically taking content from Wikipedia and making it worse, and since then it's largely been forgotten. But I haven't followed it closely and maybe that's all wrong.)
- thiht 9mo ago> It's remarkable that Grokipedia has challenged Wikipedia so thoroughly, at only 80 days old with 25 years of Wikipedia. No?? In what world do you live? Using Grokipedia would literally be asking for partisan propaganda, Musk doesn't even hide it
- dgrin91 9mo agoHas it? I think to challenge you have to show some comparable usage numbers. Its certainly an impressive technical feat to have this AI-based wiki project, but does anyone actually use it? I mean that genuinely. I don't know any usage numbers for Grok. Is it even 1% of Wiki? Is it 50%? Is it more?
- observationist 9mo agoIt's consistently better in content quality, for everything that I've used it for. I've seen conversations complaining about it that effectively reek of either anti-Musk or anti-AI bias, and when I dig in, I haven't found any legitimate bad information or arbitrary bias in the articles themselves. It's not yet as comprehensive, with ~6 million articles compared to Wikipedia's ~7 million, and the UI isn't as good, with a lot of polish and convenience and fun features in Wikipedia that are noticeably absent. It's qualitatively better in significant ways, and when you compare and contrast articles for which there's a difference, you start to get a feel for the ways in which Wikipedia has failed. Being anti-Musk is a shibboleth and article of faith for a lot of people, so they can't engage with anything he's involved in on an objective level. Grokipedia isn't used by as many people for that and other reasons. From the last couple months of using it, I've found it to be an objectively better tool. I've gone in and made corrections in places I have knowledge of, and the process and transparency of those types of edits are awesome. It just works, no drama, no dealing with digital tinpot tyrants, and if there's evidence you're wrong about a thing, the bot will actually counter your suggestion and stick to its parameters and standards. It's not perfect by any means, but it's a damn sight better than Wikipedia.
- fleroviumna 9mo ago[dead]
- ChrisArchitect 9mo agoBuried in this mix of 25-year commemoration pages, the release they put out today: https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2026/01/15/wikipedia-celebrates-25years/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2026/01/15/wikipedia-ce... Which includes a section about Wikipedia in the age of AI: New partnerships with tech companies support Wikipedia’s sustainability > several companies — including Ecosia, Microsoft, Mistral AI, Perplexity, Pleias, and ProRata — became new Wikimedia Enterprise partners, joining existing partners such as Amazon, Google, and Meta.
- squigz 9mo agoIt's really remarkable how, every single time Wikipedia comes up on HN, there's a bunch of comments about bias and such... and yet never a single example is ever linked.
- mmooss 9mo agoThere are examples listed on this page and in many discussions.
- windowpains 9mo agoDespite everything we now know about Wikipedia, I still think it’s one of the better websites of the early 00s.
- yeah879846 9mo ago[dead]
- EcommerceFlow 9mo agoThe Wikipedia "reliability" list shows wild, almost laughable biases. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per... Surely people don't think sources such as Mother Jones are more 'reliable' than The New York Post, Fox News, or The Heritage Foundation? Not a coincidence there. Having such obvious biases does nothing but damage the Wikipedia brand, and at this point has me anticipating Ai replacements.
- LasEspuelas 9mo agoThis is the comment on the Mother Jones entry: "There is consensus that Mother Jones is generally reliable. Almost all editors consider Mother Jones a biased source, so its statements (particularly on political topics) may need to be attributed. Consider whether content from this publication constitutes due weight before citing it in an article." They acknowledge it is a biased source and they make a distinction between reliability and bias. Not familiar with the publication.
- kemayo 9mo agoTo elaborate slightly, note that "reliable" is sort of Wikipedia jargon. When it applies to a news organization, it means that statements of fact are likely to be correct... or at least, not intentionally incorrect, because errors do happen. So a source can be reliable and biased at the same time, which means that if it says a thing happened you can largely trust that it really did happen... but any interpretation of that might be slanted, and so shouldn't be trusted. The New York Post isn't "reliable" because it's a tabloid that doesn't care overmuch about fact-checking what it publishes (and, worse, has a history of just making stuff up sometimes). So the Wikipedia position is that you can't trust a citation to the NY Post without finding something else to corroborate it -- at which point you might as well just cite the corroborating reliable source instead. Whereas Mother Jones will absolutely mostly publish articles which say good things about progressives and bad things about conservatives, but those things will all be true. Their bias comes in the form of selectively presenting these things -- they're unlikely to bother posting a "Ted Cruz just did a good thing" article -- and in their color commentary / opinion pieces, not in the form of just making things up. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources
- konne88 9mo agoI do believe that Wikipedia is one of the least biased sources out there, but there is definitely bias. Here is a concrete example. Compare the introduction paragraph of the English circumcision article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcision) with the German one (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zirkumzision https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zirkumzision). The English intro talks a lot about medical advantages of the procedure: "reduced rates of sexually transmitted infections and urinary tract infections. This includes reducing the incidence of cancer-causing forms of human papillomavirus (HPV) and reducing HIV transmission among heterosexual men in high-risk populations by up to 60%; ... Neonatal circumcision decreases the risk of penile cancer.[14] ... Some medical organizations take the position that it carries prophylactic health benefits that outweigh the risks," and has one sentence of it being controversial worldwide "others hold that its medical benefits are not sufficient to justify it." The German one has not a single sentence in the intro about advantages, but a whole paragraph on how it's controversial. "Die Zirkumzision als Routineeingriff ist besonders bei Minderjährigen umstritten, ... Von vielen Kinderschutzverbänden und einem Teil der Ärzteorganisationen wird die nicht medizinisch begründete Beschneidung abgelehnt, da sie den Körper irreversibel verändere und bei nicht einwilligungsfähigen Jungen nicht im Einklang mit Gesundheitsschutz und Kindeswohl stehe.[6] Im angelsächsischen Bereich gibt es schon länger eine gesellschaftliche Debatte zwischen Gruppen von Gegnern der Beschneidung („Intaktivisten“-Bewegung) und Befürwortern. Umstritten sind insbesondere medizinischer Nutzen und Risiken, bei Kindern auch ethische und rechtliche Aspekte sowie die Beurteilung im Hinblick auf die Menschenrechte, vor allem das Recht auf körperliche Unversehrtheit." I'm not sure who's right, but it's hard to not see some bias here.
- dieggsy 9mo agoI love Wikipedia and think it's one of the greatest resources on the Internet, but there's absolutely a lot of bias in Wikipedia. Even within the same language, I think a lot of it has to do with how many people have or are contributing to a page, whether there's a recent event affecting it, how polarizing or political the subject, etc. But it's not hard to find examples of straight up opinions or very incomplete narratives. I've also noticed huge differences between two different language versions of the same articles. (English/Spanish specifically). Sometimes they even feel independently written. Of course, we should all do our part to improve these things when we spot them, if we're able.
- thunderbong 9mo agoIn the 2000s, in the tech world, the open source successes that were being talked about was always Apache and Linux. When Wikipedia started gaining a bit of traction, everyone made fun of it. It was the butt of jokes in all the prime time comedy shows. And I always felt like telling the critics - "Don't you see what is happening? People all over the world are adding their own bits of knowledge and creating this huge thing way beyond what we've seen till now. It's cooperation on an international scale! By regular people! This is what the internet is all about. People, by the thousands, are contributing without asking for anything else in return. This is incredible! " A few years later, Encyclopedia Britannica, stopped their print edition. A few years after that I read that Wikipedia had surpassed even that. The amount of value Wikipedia brings to the world is incalculable. And I'm very fortunate to be alive at a time where I can witness something at this scale. Something that transcends borders and boundaries. Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion. Something that tries to bring a lot of balance and objectivity in today's polarized world. Thank you, Wikipedia.
- duozerk 9mo ago> Something that goes beyond our daily vices of politics and religion Religion maybe, and Wikipedia is indeed pretty awesome for many topics, but politics is THE bad example here. Much of the political - especially geopolitical - content on Wikipedia has a tremendous atlanticist bias.
- wwweston 9mo ago“atlanticist” - the culture of the enlightenment and the good that’s come from it. Wikipedia does hold ideals, that access to knowledge is a net good, that people can cooperate both in contribution and review without a dominating magisterial authority. That rational dialogue and qualification and refinement is possible, and that it’s possible to correct for bias, and see the difference between bias and agenda. Like those whose anti-enlightenment agenda is revealed when they use “atlanticist” as a slur.
- sophacles 9mo ago
- l7l 9mo agoEvery time I try to contribute, I get censored by some gatekeeper. It feels as open and inviting nowadays as StackOverflow.
- qingcharles 9mo agoIt's getting really hard now. I've been editing since day one. Recently I had awful trouble getting a new article accepted. I gave up for some months and came back and it was accepted first time. Apparently you can pay a high-ranking Wikipedia editor to massage your article into the site. I know a Hollywood producer who paid to get himself listed. What amazes me most, though, is that I still find new subjects to write about that don't exist yet on Wikipedia.
- could-of 9mo agoPaying to create an article is a scam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Scam_warning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Scam_warning
- qingcharles 9mo agoIt's more nuanced than that. Wikipedia allows payments in some situations as long as they are public: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Connected_contributor_(paid)#:~:text=TemplateData%20for%20Connected%20contributor%20(paid,Template%20parameters%5BEdit%20template%20data%5D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Connected_contributor... The editor who massaged the article in question has it somewhere on his profile that he accepts payments and has a list of articles he has taken payment for.
- Gander5739 9mo agoCould you provide their username, please? I'd ba interested.
- trashburger 9mo agoI'm noticing a distinct lack of Guy Standing sitting in the "Weird and wonderful Wikipedia" section.
- shevy-java 9mo agoIn the last 2 years, Wikipdia's quality declined. For me this was evident when they suddenly changed the UI. The new UI is more annoying. Perhaps it is nicer for Average Joe people, but for powerusers it is just annoying to use now. But this is not the only problem: many articles have a low quality, or they are so complicated that Average Joe doesn't understand them, which is ironic considering the UI was most likely changed to appease Average Joe. I am also displeased with the constant pop-up or slide-in widgets. This is a general curse for browsers that ublock origin prevented. I hate this. My browser should not allow for any such slide-in banner. I am never interested in anything written there - usually it is a "gimme more money", but even if it is not, I simply don't CARE what is written on it. Even python used this, on their homepage, where they are even so cheeky that you can not fully disable this thing, unless you block it with ublock origin. I feel that too many websites fail the user now. Wikipedia does too. The intrinsic quality is still better than the AI slop spam that Google amplified world wide, while also ruining Google search, but the quality used to be better in the past, on Wikipedia.
- DamnInteresting 9mo ago> For me this was evident when they suddenly changed the UI. The new UI is more annoying. In case you are unaware, if you're logged in, you can go into the user preferences and change the Appearance to one of the older themes, such as Vector Legacy (2010).
- pndy 9mo ago> For me this was evident when they suddenly changed the UI. That reminds me of this thread, where clearly new interface wasn't fondly received: https://old.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/10fdfal/wikipedias_new_look_makes_it_easier_to_use_for/ https://old.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/comments/10fdfal/wikipedi...
- kuharich 9mo agoThe people who built Wikipedia, technically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2021-01-31/Technology_report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...
- mahirsaid 9mo agoi remember using wiki for the first time. I can't imagine the internet without it.
- DamnInteresting 9mo agoI have been a fan of Wikipedia since I first learned about it, about six months after it launched. What a concept! Anyone can edit, citations are required, revisions are kept indefinitely. That's a recipe for building a clearinghouse of human knowledge with the power of iteration. But I am also a non-fiction researcher/writer, and I experience some problems caused by Wikipedia: 1) I like to dig deep into historical stories--newspapers, archives, court records, FOIA requests--and I try to produce high quality, well-sourced articles about historic events. Inevitably, someone updates the Wikipedia article(s) to include new information I have surfaced, which exiles my article to the digital dustbin in favor of Wikipedia. Occasionally the Wikipedia editors cite my article in their updates, but much more often they just cite the sources that I cited, and skip over my contribution. It can be painful for my hard work to become irrelevant so rapidly. 2) Multiple of my writings have been plagiarized on Wikipedia by careless editors over the years, and I have been subsequently accused of plagiarizing from Wikipedia. That is unpleasant. For a recent example, in 2006 I wrote an article about Doble Steam Cars[1]. A few months ago I had reason to visit the Doble steam car Wikipedia entry[2], and as I was reading, I realized that a large portion of the text was an uncanny, nearly verbatim copy of my article. I looked at the revision history, and found that a wiki editor had copied my text to revamp the article just a few months after I wrote mine in 2006. I visited /r/wikipedia and asked how to best handle this, and the Wikipedia editors there determined that it was indeed a violation, and they decided to revdelete almost 20 years of edits to purge the violation. It was quite something to behold. To be clear, I am not happy that the huge revdelete resulted in so many lost subsequent good faith edits. But it's impressive that it was possible to roll it back so quickly and cleanly. [1] https://www.damninteresting.com/the-last-great-steam-car/ https://www.damninteresting.com/the-last-great-steam-car/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doble_steam_car https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doble_steam_car
- MattGrommes 9mo agoI always like to point people to Simple Wikipedia - https://simple.wikipedia.org/ https://simple.wikipedia.org/. You can also change the (lang).wikipedia.org URL to simple.wikipedia.org and a lot of the time you get a great, simple language explanation that's better for a quick overview of a topic than the regular page.
- 7e 9mo ago25 years of ranking in the cash and yet constantly begging for money. It's a cushy gig for the employees.
- xvilka 9mo agoThe biggest complaint about Wikipedia I have is that they do not allow edits via VPNs, even for the registered users. These days VPN is a necessity in many places, thus it limits a big amount of potential contributors.
- Gander5739 9mo agoIf a VPN is necessary, you can ask for an exemption.
- miduil 9mo agoMy first "contributions" were 2004, I was 10 years old and supposed to write a text about Mozart. Somehow I noticed the edit button and started vandalizing the page, as I didn't understood what Wikipedia was meant to be. Some patient wikipedian kept reverting and reporting my IP addresses during that day. It's both incredible to see how old and young Wikipedia is, if we'd say there was a "World Wide Web Heritage" project, Wikipedia and the contributors are truly the first thing that comes to mind. Wonderful website!
- notepad0x90 9mo agoIf you use wikipedia as a starting point, and actually check reference material critically, it's invaluable in my opinion. We used to have to pay lots of money for encyclopedias for less quality. My hope is that while I think the website/webapp itself doesn't need much change, if they moved the back-end to a distributed system, like ipfs perhaps? that would be amazing. Even if wikipedia is blocked, or tampered with, arbitrary people around the world would have mirrors of pages here and there. They could store it just as it is now, and simply expose the data via ipfs and change the webapp to use their own ipfs http gateway. The unthinkable can happen. I wondered if the burning of the library of alexandria was something people thought was in the realm of practical possibility back then?
- pflenker 9mo agoI was close to finishing school when Wikipedia came up. A lot of complaints and concerns about LLMs today echo remarks about Wikipedia back then. Kids won’t learn anything, they will just copy and paste! The information is unreliable, our kids will stop thinking critically or learning how to research! While I don’t mean to equate both, I find the resemblance in this case striking.
- anon3242 9mo agoThey are not necessarily complaints about wikipedia, more about internet in general. Also, the young wikipedia was very different from what it is today.
- concats 9mo ago> A lot of complaints and concerns about LLMs today echo remarks about Wikipedia back then. I have also noticed this. How LLMs can never be trusted because they are stochastic sounds very similar to how Wikipedia can never be trusted because it sometimes has a bad-faith edit. Or how the people that don't believe information should be free are very active in both the anti-Wikipedia and anti-llm crowds. And use much of the same talking points. Have publishers have sued Wikipedia too?
- oxag3n 9mo agoIt's a miracle that in a world where everything becomes a service, proprietary and cloud based, you can download a collective human knowledge (while some argue it's biased, not truth-based and consensus ran - yes, but I think it's one of the best outcome for a socially constructed knowledge).
- hit8run 9mo agohttps://grokipedia.com https://grokipedia.com
- nailer 9mo agoStill in beta. It's apparently going to be called 'Encyclopedia Galactica' when released.
- LightBug1 9mo agoWouldn't touch that piece of shit if you paid me. It's not that it doesn't have potential. But I hope the other players take up the mantle and auto-generate alternatives. The stench of Mr Elon Musk is just too strong with Grokipedia (scrape that, bitch)
- Anthony-G 9mo agoI hadn’t heard of Grokipedia so based on the positive comments in this thread, I thought I’d try it out – only to discover that its search feature sucks. I’ve just finished watching a HBO TV show on Blu-Ray called “The Night of” so I tried searching for it on Grokipedia. It failed to find an article about the TV series in the first 60 search results (regardless of whether I used double quotes or appended the words “TV” or “series”). After multiple attempts, I gave up. On the other hand, when I typed the three words into Wikipedia’s search, the TV show was the second search result.
- faebi 9mo agoIt's so much better and worse than Wikipedia at the same time.
- erickhill 9mo agoI've often found it's bare bone utilitarian and efficient design a breath of fresh air compared to most of what's online today. That, and their philosophy of being donation based to keep the lights on.
- nailer 9mo agoWikipedia could do a lot by reminding people of their own rule: that Wikipedia is not a source to be cited - more often.
- thordenmark 9mo agoWhile Wikipedia is terribly inaccurate and heavily biased, it can be a useful starting point for information on a topic. You have to take advantage of the links to other sources on the page, which often have a different conclusion than what is presented in the article!
- nephihaha 9mo agoThe key point to remember about Wikipedia is that it was mostly built using unpaid labour, but is used to create paid content elsewhere.
- DefundPortland 9mo ago[flagged]
- kwar13 9mo agoI really dislike this "scrolling" type of websites. I find them overlapping with other texts and quite difficult to navigate.