[HN Gopher] Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search s...
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Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and
social video
Author : gmays
Score : 212 points
Date : 2025-10-21 01:29 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| crmd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > Contributors are a tiny % of users most of them were
| wikipedia users in some form before they were contributors
| I imagine
| KPGv2 wrote:
| 1/3 of all donations are from the banner. I just went and
| looked at their annual report, which disclosed this.
| qingcharles wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| cm2012 wrote:
| Isn't it true that only around 10% of Wikipedia massive
| budget is used to actually run the core website? The rest
| goes to bloated initiatives in the Wikimedia foundations
| orbit.
| vrindavan1 wrote:
| lmao
| ethmarks wrote:
| Page 21 of their 2024 annual report[1] has expenses listed.
| About $3,000,000 for web hosting, about $100,000,000 for
| salaries and benefits out of $178,000,000 total.
|
| [1]: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2025/04/W...
| cm2012 wrote:
| That includes all of the Wikimedia websites and non-
| profit activities though, not just the functioning of
| Wikipedia.org proper. That is a much lower percentage of
| the total.
| bawolff wrote:
| A web server is useless if you aren't paying someone to
| plug it in.
|
| There is probably a lot to criticize, but you need to go
| deeper than "salaries" are bad. You need some of those to
| actually run the website.
| crmd wrote:
| How is their revenue traffic-dependent?
| AstroBen wrote:
| Their traffic is potential donations
|
| Something tells me a person is way less likely to donate if
| they're consuming the content through an LLM middleman
| crazygringo wrote:
| I don't know -- as I said in another comment, my
| Wikipedia usage has gone down 90% thanks to LLMs.
|
| But that means I'm still using it. Especially for more
| reference stuff like lists of episodes, filmographies,
| etc. As well as equations, math techniques, etc.
|
| If you're the kind of person who donates to Wikipedia,
| you're probably still using it _some_ even if less, and
| continue to recognize its importance. Possibly even more,
| as a kind of collaboratively-edited authority like
| Wikipedia only becomes _more_ important as AI "slop"
| becomes more prevalent across blogs etc.
| arbol wrote:
| But were you originally convinced to donate by one of
| those giant Jimmy Wales banners that come up once a year?
| People won't see them anymore if they're using AI
| summaries.
| crazygringo wrote:
| My point is, using Wikipedia 10% as much is still using
| Wikipedia.
|
| Does it matter if you see the banner 10 times or 100
| times in a month?
| khamidou wrote:
| If you look up their latest annual report
| (https://wikimediafoundation.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2025/04/W...) you can see that they're
| allocating ~1.7% of their expenses towards hosting.
|
| I doubt that they're getting "hugged to death" by AI
| scrapers.
| Liquix wrote:
| this is a very eye-opening read on their financials: https:
| //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
| skeaker wrote:
| The easy counters to this article are:
|
| 1. I think their spending is a good thing. Charitable
| scholarships for kids and initiatives to have a more
| educated populous in general are things that I am happy
| to donate to.
|
| 2. As stated in the article, hosting is still a
| relatively simple expenditure compared to the rest of
| their operation. If Wikipedia really eats a huge loss,
| falling back to just hosting wouldn't be unrealistic,
| especially since the actual operations of Wikipedia are
| mostly volunteer run anyways. In the absolute worst case,
| their free data exports would lead to someone making a
| successor that can be moved to more or less seamlessly.
|
| The only real argument in my eyes is that their donation
| campaigns can seem manipulative. I still think it's fine
| at the end of the day given that Wikipedia is a free
| service and donating at all is entirely optional.
| mminer237 wrote:
| AFAIK, they don't do any scholarships or really do any
| educational activities. By far their biggest spending
| item is just $105 million for salaries, mainly for all of
| its leadership, which is a majority of its expenses.
|
| The second biggest line item is grants at $25 million,
| primarily for users to travel to meet up.
|
| Then $10 million for legal fees, $7 million for
| Wikipedia-hosted travel.
|
| I think it's pretty unethical to say you have to donate
| to keep Wikipedia running when you're practically paying
| for C-suite raises and politically-aligned contributors'
| vacations.
| bawolff wrote:
| In person meetings move things forward.
|
| Paying the travel for a bunch of highly active volunteer
| contributors to meet up ocassionally and hash out complex
| community issues pays massive dividends. It keeps the
| site moving forward. Its also pretty cheap when you
| consider how much free labour those volunteers provide.
|
| Whenever people criticize wikimedia finances, i think
| they miss the forest for the trees. I actually think
| there is a lot to potentially crticize, but in my opinion
| everyone goes for the wrong things.
| bawolff wrote:
| People cite this figure a lot, but its a little misleading
| because when you own your own servers a lot of the expenses
| that are typically hosting actually fall under a different
| category.
|
| If you use AWS, the people hired to manage the servers is
| part of the price tag. When you own your own you have to
| actually hire those people.
| fart-fart-FART wrote:
| how much money do you people think it costs to serve a few
| kilobytes of text? come on now - this is the _orange_ reddit,
| not the _regular_ one.
| 113 wrote:
| They also serve images.
| fart-fart-FART wrote:
| most crawlers are either simple HTTP clients or JS-
| executing headless browsers. they don't fetch multimedia
| indiscriminately/repeatedly. why would they? only a few
| FAGMANs can afford to hoard all the jeepegs on the
| Internet.
|
| the outlandish claims of chaotically evil AI crawlers
| DDoSing web properties to death are rooted in ideology
| and not objective reality. here's an example of what a
| fairly modest modern server can handle: https://www.teche
| mpower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r23&tes...
| lxgr wrote:
| Some of them even fairly often:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26072025
| bawolff wrote:
| Bandwidth costs aren't the dominating cost.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Bandwidth is a ridiculously tiny portion of Wiki foundation's
| spending
| intended wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Wait, when were little old ladies the perpetrators of piracy?
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| Wikipedia was never a primary source to begin with
| irjustin wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| For 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 wrote:
| Why 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 wrote:
| Wikipedia 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.
| AstroBen wrote:
| Don't you think their brand recognition would be an easy
| way around that?
| Kye wrote:
| No. Why would a payment processor make an exception to
| its risk-based rules for an organization that increases
| exposure to that risk? Brand recognition is a liability
| in this case.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Easily Checked:
|
| Wikimedia accepts Paypal, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Visa,
| Mastercard, Amex, Check, ACH and Money Order.
|
| Pretty hard to argue that mainstream processors don't
| like them.
|
| Processors charge higher fees to merchants that are in
| lines of business with high fraud and chargeback risk,
| has nothing to do with whether they agree with them
| morally.
|
| They refuse merchants with business they don't like.
|
| If it were the case that processors didn't like what
| wikipedia publishes, they would not be able to accept
| payment, not have high fees.
|
| I can't imagine that wikipedia has high chargeback rates,
| and clearly the processors don't mind doing business with
| them.
|
| The processing line item probably includes not just the
| fees that they have to pay to processors, but FX fees,
| the cost of banking, the cost of paying people to open
| envelopes, the cost of accounting, etc.
| Kye wrote:
| Check the source on the donation page. It looks like they
| actually use something called Gr4vy above all that to
| handle payments.
|
| https://gr4vy.com
|
| Using a platform with its own fee on top of payment
| processor fees would explain the 6.4%.
| anthonyeden wrote:
| 'Processing fees' likely includes the cost of
| administering the CRM, creating tax receipts and reports,
| donor support, and all the other 'processing' tasks that
| come with running a large fundraising effort. It wouldn't
| just be the credit card fees.
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| Maybe they can use the immense volunteer talent at their
| disposal to build their own AI/LLM.
|
| I'm sure all those editors with decades of experience can
| do quickly outdo OpenAI and Grok and what have you.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| So, as a non profit the other 55% or so (approximately 95m)
| goes to salaries? That's interesting considering how much
| work is performed by volunteers.
| nxobject wrote:
| How so? I imagine there are many things involved with
| Wikipedia that volunteer editors don't do.
| ryanwhitney wrote:
| They reported a headcount of 644 for 2024-2025.
|
| It's all very open if anyone wants to track down details
| themselves: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikime
| dia_Foundatio...
|
| 2025-2026 is in-progress: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/W
| ikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...
|
| >Similar to last year, technology-related work represents
| nearly half of the Foundation's budget at 47% alongside
| priorities to protect volunteers and defend the projects of
| an additional 29% - a total of 76% of the Foundation's
| annual budget. Expenses for finance, risk management,
| fundraising, and operations account for the remaining 24%.
| intended wrote:
| The production of factually accurate content is a pretty
| expensive job.
|
| We who were born before this era really took off, are spoiled
| by the journalism standards and information purity levels of
| the past, especially post the fall of the USSR.
|
| Wikipedia is impressive on what it manages to coordinate on a
| daily basis, especially given only 644 FT staff.
| nxobject wrote:
| I imagine that, unfortunately, global legal counsel these
| days will likely be taking an increasing chunk of their
| change.
| RickJWagner wrote:
| Not for me.
|
| Wikipedia had its day, in between print encyclopedias and quick
| query AI. Its place in history is now set.
|
| Something else will come along soon enough.
| kibwen wrote:
| Until LLMs gain the ability to cite their sources, they will
| be, at best, a search engine on top of Wikipedia, and not a
| replacement for it.
| Angostura wrote:
| .... And it will be worse
| somenameforme wrote:
| Most/all LLMs have already been able to cite sources for
| quite some time now.
| likium wrote:
| Citing is not referencing links, it's finding primary
| sources and fact-checking. Kurzgesagt[1], an
| informational YouTube channel, has had issues with LLMs
| citing LLM generated content.
|
| [1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_zfN9wnPvU0&t=175
| somenameforme wrote:
| LLMs aren't arbiters of truth - they're just natural
| language search engines. In a way it's quite similar to
| Wikipedia. Something being on Wikipedia doesn't mean that
| it's true, but rather it means that a "reliable source",
| which are not infrequently less than reliable, said so.
| And even that often doesn't hold as there's another layer
| of indirection where it's an editor saying this is what a
| source said, which is again not infrequently not exactly
| accurate. And then there's 'citogenesis' [1] where
| imaginary facts can be circularly whisked into existence.
|
| This is why Wikipedia is not a source, but can provide
| links to sources (which then, in turn, often send you
| down a rabbit hole trying to find _their_ sources), and
| it 's then up to you to determine the value and accuracy
| of those sources. For instance I enjoy researching
| historic economic issues and you'll often find there's
| like 5 layers of indirection before you can finally get
| to a first party source, and at each step along the road
| it's like a game of telephone of being played. It's the
| exact same with LLMs.
|
| [1] - https://xkcd.com/978/
| zerd wrote:
| I've had LLMs cite me bullshit many times, links that
| don't exist and claiming it does. It even cited a very
| realistic git commit log entry about a feature that never
| existed.
|
| Haven't yet had the same issue with Wikipedia.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| Without Wikipedia, where will AIs get their (factual)
| training data? Reddit?
| DanOpcode wrote:
| Torrented books
| hamdingers wrote:
| Backups of wikipedia.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Disagree. Say I'm looking for a list of countries and their
| populations.
|
| Wikipedia almost certainly has this in a nice table, which I
| can sort by any column, and all the countries are hyperlinked
| to their own articles, and it probably links to the concept
| of population estimation too.
|
| There will be a primary source - But would a primary source
| also have articles on every country? That are ad-free, that
| follow a consistent format? That are editable? Then it's just
| Wikipedia again. If not, then you have to rely on the LLM to
| knit together these sources.
|
| I don't see wikis dying yet.
|
| At work, I had rigged one of my internal tools so that when
| you were looking at a system's health report, it also linked
| to an internal wiki page where we could track human-edited
| notes about that system over time. I don't think an AI can do
| this, because you can't fine-tune it, you can't be sure it's
| lossless round-tripping, and if it has to do a web search,
| then it has to search for the wiki you said is obsolete.
|
| OpenStreetMap does the same thing. Their UIs automatically
| deep-link every key into their wiki. So if you click on a
| drinking fountain, it will say something like
| "amenity:drinking_water" and the UI doesn't know what that
| is, but it links you to the wiki page where someone's
| certainly put example pictures and explained the most useful
| ways to tag it.
|
| There has to be a ground truth. Wikipedia and alike are a
| very strong middle point on the Pareto frontier between
| primary sources (or oral tradition, for OSM) and LLM summary
| al_borland wrote:
| LLMs are useless without source material.
|
| AI companies should be donating large sums of money to
| Wikipedia and other such sites to keep them healthy. Without
| good sources, we're going to have AI training off AI slop.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I agree, we will need Wikipedia and it is OK if the traffic
| falls, and that AI is not a replacement (and videos are not a
| replacement either).
|
| Printed texts are still useful but so is Wikipedia (I continue
| to use both).
| Razengan wrote:
| Wikipedia is the best use of the Internet, the best reason &
| outcome of its existence.
|
| Right up there with anime torrenting sites.
|
| But seriously, AI trained on Wikipedia should donate to
| Wikipedia. Why are the AI companies not doing this, or are
| they?
| aeternum wrote:
| I think we need Wikipedia competitors.
|
| Wikipedia is a victim of it's own success, it was excellent at
| avoiding bias for quite awhile and the vast majority of
| articles are extremely well written.
|
| However it's massive popularity and dominance have also led to,
| well this guy put it best:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dalberg-Acton,_1st_Baron_...
| arunharidas wrote:
| Elon Musk is launching Grokipedia this week as a competition
| to Wikipedia.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| LOL I just tried to search "U2" on it but it sent me to a
| Twitter post. That Twitter post required me to login to see
| if I wanted to see it. What a joke.
| olalonde wrote:
| It hasn't launched yet.
| FranzFerdiNaN wrote:
| Ah yes, launched by the guy who keeps tweaking his own
| chatbot because it doesnt barf out the lies he wants it to
| tell.
| vkou wrote:
| I'm not sure why he feels the need to launch a competitor
| to Conservapedia.
| delecti wrote:
| If he's aware of it, he probably considered it to be
| insufficiently "based".
| FranzFerdiNaN wrote:
| Wikipedia is fine. Bias cant be avoided, only made explicit,
| and the fact that you think it can means you should probably
| move to Conservapedia or whatever slop Musk will release.
| chermi wrote:
| Shouldn't it be minimized? I think it's increasing on
| Wikipedia. I think there's too high of a barrier for actual
| experts to write/edit. What's left is primarily idealogues
| with a certain leanings resulting in a positive feedback
| loop to more bias. I don't think anyone should want an echo
| chamber where an encyclopedia is supposed to exist. It's
| not there yet, but this is exactly how they form - see
| reddit.
|
| Yeah, yeah, let me guess, the truth has a liberal bias.
|
| But continue to insist that everyone pointing should just
| move somewhere else, that will certainly make it less
| biased and more factual.
| spelk wrote:
| >Shouldn't it be minimized? I think it's increasing on
| Wikipedia. I think there's too high of a barrier for
| actual experts to write/edit. What's left is primarily
| idealogues with a certain leanings resulting in a
| positive feedback loop to more bias. I don't think anyone
| should want an echo chamber where an encyclopedia is
| supposed to exist. It's not there yet, but this is
| exactly how they form - see reddit.
|
| I find this kind of a fascinating social phenomena.
|
| I guess to give a personal example, I was trying to
| update a few pages about a country's Olympic history -
| that is, their Olympic bids, a few athletes, etc.
|
| Unknowingly, I had stumbled across a particular power-
| editor's fiefdom, because they created all these pages
| and they were very aggressive in policing their articles
| to meet a certain style, tone and their beliefs.
|
| Searching this person's username up (they went by their
| real name), they were closely related to that country's
| Olympic committee and an employee of a Ministry of Sport
| of sorts. The articles had lots of anonymous IP address
| edits from an university network this person was
| affiliated with in their program portfolio.
|
| There was a clear conflict of interest, and I tried to
| point that out when they mass-reverted my edits, but they
| seemed committed to accusing me of edit warring by not
| sandboxing my changes and waiting for their personal
| review and approval, and quoted at least 12 different
| Wikipedia policies on notability, style, acceptable
| citations, etc. I still feel I was in the right, but I
| didn't have the willpower or stamina to fight against
| several requests for comments, speedy deletions, etc.
| They did get a warning from an administrator and some
| detractors in the discussion threads, but they weren't
| willing to let it go and at that point, it wasn't fun
| anymore for me. I have better things to do than to fight
| factual and nitpicky disputes on Wikipedia.
| tines wrote:
| > Bias cant be avoided, only made explicit
|
| This is so untrue and this is a harmful belief. And I'm
| pretty much as liberal as they come.
| pastage wrote:
| Agree it is very bad for everyone to think like this. The
| problem is that on subject that divide you will always
| have two sides. Some times you need to tone down articles
| too much to not be biased to either way. So I also agree
| that there is a place for multiple articles on the same
| subject.
|
| Also Wikipedia has the problem of being one type of
| article many subjects really need a other way to explain
| it.
|
| Even facts can be slander.
| TheRoque wrote:
| It's true though, it's literally how your brain works.
| It's full of biases.
| dns_snek wrote:
| > Conservapedia
|
| This is the first time I've heard about it. Is that meant
| to be a satire website? I can't tell anymore.
| bawolff wrote:
| No, it was a fork from like a decade ago.
|
| https://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page
|
| It started out crazy but it only got crazier as time went
| on.
|
| The biggest problem with wikipedia competitors, is the
| only people who tend to put in effort to make one are
| usually crazy.
| TylerE wrote:
| > Conservapedia
|
| If you want a site that tells you that Jews launched a
| genocide of Nazis.
|
| Conservapedia is intellectual cancer.
| tokai wrote:
| Just fork it, the license is permissive :^)
| al_borland wrote:
| > Become self sustaining through investments so it can live for
| 1000 years.
|
| I always wondered why more companies or organizations didn't do
| this. Pile up money during the good years to allow themselves
| to not need continued outside income to keep going, so they can
| do what is right instead of compromising their vision for the
| sake of hitting quarterly earnings. That isn't to say they
| can't keep making money, but do it for the right reasons that
| will keep the core business around for the long run.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| It takes a pretty altruistic leadership team to plan for 1000
| years; even the multi-billionaire tech bros only plan to live
| for ~200 or so.
| al_borland wrote:
| "A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade
| they know they shall never sit in."
|
| I recently visited Scotland and on a visit to a distillery
| they mentioned they bought land in the US to grow trees
| that will make their barrels one day. The trees take over
| 100 years to grow (if I remember correctly). How is it we
| can invest ~200 years into a glass of scotch, yet we aren't
| willing to take the same care and long term thinking in
| most other areas.
|
| Even without being around for 1,000 years, I'd think doing
| this would de-stress and de-risk. Somewhere along way it
| became a bad thing to have a good, stable, long-lasting
| business. The only thing that seems to matter now is
| growth, even if they means instability, stress, excessive
| risk, and a short stay.
| redwall_hp wrote:
| Craftsmen care about what they make, pursuing excellence
| even if it may take generations. Businessmen care about
| robbing you now in the most efficient way.
| Fade_Dance wrote:
| There is also an element of tradition with scotch, which
| is something that can survive even the occasional
| craftsman who may not care as much about what they do, as
| long as they respect the traditions.
|
| Humans don't live that long, and there's a constant
| onslaught of fleeting fancies, especially in business
| (Wikipedia foundation should buy some crypto for it's
| treasury!)
|
| Tradition is simply brand value to be monetized for most
| businessmen (to add to your criticism). Just look at
| scotch whisky and multinational conglomerate
| acquisitions. They would never plant trees in America,
| they simply order giant vats used for the strongest PX
| Sherry to get maximum flavor per euro for their blending
| process.
| vovavili wrote:
| That's a bold and daring thing to say on a startup
| accelerator and venture capital forum, must I say.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Efficient robbery is a craft too, just not one you (or
| most people) appreciate.
| robotnikman wrote:
| I've always wondered if increasing everybody's lifespan
| would result in more people caring more about the long term
| future. Our lives are so short in the grand scheme of
| things that we never bother to really thing about the grand
| scheme of things.
| griffzhowl wrote:
| I've heard that in the Tibetan tradiation where they
| ardently belive in reincarnation that thinking about the
| consequences of your actions for the next thousand years
| isn't unusual
| Okx wrote:
| Unfortunately, Wikipedia doesn't seem interested in this.
| Their revenue is more than enough be able to invest and
| sustain the site forever, but they just increase expenses on
| non-core outgoings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CANCER
| pastage wrote:
| You pay for Wikipedia because you want it to prosper. The
| political part of Wikipedia is vital to make it succeed.
| Even though everyone uses Wikipedia not everyone knows why
| it succeeded and why it is important.
|
| The fluff is important to have a engaged super users. It is
| also important to get acceptance in certain circles.
| fruitworks wrote:
| what circles? I would like to have greater transparency
| into what this cabal of superusers doing, how are they
| recieving the cash flows, etc.
|
| It just seems like every wiki results in defensive mod
| cabals
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| Am I misssing something or is Wikipedia net positive 200M?
| If this is true, that's eye opening. Weird given how much
| they beg for money on every article.
| andersa wrote:
| The amount of money moving through Wikipedia is
| absolutely mind blowing, and next to none of that is even
| being used to sustain the site. Hope those still donating
| to it feel smart about what they're supporting...
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| They have that much in assets. I'm not sure what that
| actually looks like in terms of cash vs. non-liquid
| assets vs. assets with strings attached.
|
| If you look at revenue vs spend they are net positive by
| about 7mm last year.
| cg5280 wrote:
| You aren't missing anything. This has been an
| increasingly popular criticism of Wikipedia. They are
| doing just fine financially.
| nickff wrote:
| If a company retains earnings, it has to pay taxes on them
| (as profits), but the money is still at risk (from a
| shareholder's point of view) if something bad happens to the
| company (lawsuit or market problem). Shareholders usually
| want to receive whatever money the company has saved up, to
| safeguard it from being lost for no reason, and so that they
| (the shareholder) can put it to use elsewhere. This would
| change if the government stopped taxing retained earnings.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| That doesn't fully explain why this doesn't happen with
| non-profits.
| olalonde wrote:
| Many nonprofits do this -- it's called an endowment fund.
| ta1243 wrote:
| > This would change if the government stopped taxing
| retained earnings.
|
| No it wouldn't, because
|
| > the money is still at risk (from a shareholder's point of
| view) if something bad happens to the company (lawsuit or
| market problem).
| warkdarrior wrote:
| It would definitely change, because a shareholder could
| then take a loan against the non-taxed retained earnings
| they are owed. So then it comes down to whether the tax
| is higher or lower than the loan interest (adjust for the
| risk you mentioned).
| lottin wrote:
| Retained earnings are not taxed per se. A company pays
| taxes on profits. Whether the profits are distributed to
| shareholders or retained makes no difference whatsoever as
| far as taxes are concerned.
| nickff wrote:
| They are taxed; they are taxed because they are a subset
| of profits, which is a taxed category. They are not taxed
| more than other profits, but that doesn't mean they're
| 'not taxed'.
| raw_anon_1111 wrote:
| Because unless the company is temporarily making losses
| because of temporarily macroeconomic conditions, what's the
| point?
|
| Having a war chest wasn't going to help any of the retail
| companies, the technology companies who couldn't pivot, etc.
| There is no reason for a company to live forever.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > Pile up money during the good years to allow themselves to
| not need continued outside income to keep going, so they can
| do what is right instead of compromising their vision for the
| sake of hitting quarterly earnings.
|
| Typically, _individuals_ want to pile up money so that they
| don 't need outside income to keep going, and the
| shareholders of a "quarterly earnings" company will squeeze
| the entity to get it for themselves in the form of dividends
| or higher share-price.
| Panzer04 wrote:
| Money locked up in companies is managed at the leisure of
| its management, regardless of how good that might be for
| anyone else (ie. the shareholding owners). Money sitting
| there doing nothing is a poor use of it, so most companies
| are encouraged to run with only enough working capital to
| keep operations going.
|
| It sounds weird, but this is better for shareholders and
| the economy (and companies can raise capital as needed down
| the line) than having all companies hold 3x the cash on the
| balance sheet.
|
| The argument would be different for a foundation by
| wikipedia, albeit you still have problems between what the
| wikipedia management might want (high wages, little
| accountability) and everyone else.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| > Money locked up in companies is managed at the leisure
| of its management, regardless of how good that might be
| for [...] the shareholding owners
|
| But the management is aware that the shareholders can
| apply (direct or indirect) pressure for the money to be
| used in certain ways. Ultimately the shareholder can sue
| the management if they think the money is misused.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| I think Wikimedia needs expensive outreach and modernisation to
| stay relevant. And most of those attempts will be in vain.
|
| A poor comparison is how much money coca cola spends on
| advertisement, even though it is one of the best known brands
| in the entire world. And most of their advertisement is simply
| "This is our name, we exists", not even a value proposition or
| call to action.
|
| If Wikimedia sets themselves up to pay for servers and
| maintenance for perpetuity, they will fall into obscurity.
|
| With that being said, I also don't think they are spending
| their money in a good way.
| mmooss wrote:
| Many said (some still say) that Wikipedia is not a replacement
| for traditional encyclopedias with articles written by domain
| experts, such as Britannica.
|
| Many more scoffed at that, saying those people were just stuck
| in their old ways and unable to adjust to the obviously
| superior new thing.
|
| Is that you? AI applications are different than Wikipedia and
| are better in some ways: Coverage is much greater - you can get
| a detailed article on almost any topic. And if you have
| questions after reading a Wikipedia article, Wikipedia can't
| help you; the AI software can answer them. Also, it's a bit
| easier to find the information you want.
|
| Personally, I'm with the first group, at the top if this
| comment. And now truth, accuracy, and epistemology, and public
| interest in those things, take another major hit in the post-
| truth era.
| consumer451 wrote:
| > post-truth era.
|
| I know it's completely normalized and the official name, but
| this has to be the most dangerous euphemism of our time.
|
| It's _the era of lies._
| sixtyj wrote:
| You are absolutely right.
|
| But "era of lies" doesn't sound nice because nobody wants
| to be a liar... so "post-truth" sounds better: "I'm telling
| the truth. Almost. But I'm not lying."
| consumer451 wrote:
| The inevitable AI investment bubble popping is going to
| be a big deal, but I believe that the larger bubble of
| political lies popping is much more interesting to think
| about.
|
| What is that going to look like? How does one hedge
| against that eventuality?
| sixtyj wrote:
| It'll probably be a black swan anyway. So it's best to
| stay calm, because to hedge against it...
|
| Stephen Emmott ends his book Ten Billion with the line
| "Teach my son how to use a gun."
| consumer451 wrote:
| Interesting reference. I had not heard of him, or that
| book from 2013. 10B is now projected to be our peak, and
| at 7B we have so much spare food that we burn it as
| automotive fuel. And now... we realize that population
| "collapse" is much more likely to happen than endless
| growth.
|
| Obviously I have not read the book, but do you think it
| holds up in 2025?
| sixtyj wrote:
| Many books on the subject are very much "doomsayers" or
| "preppers" style.
|
| The Roman Empire has been crumbling for 400 years, so
| it's likely that we won't experience the collapse of
| society as described in most history books either - life
| is too short for that. Unless a black swan comes along...
|
| To answer your question, I like to come back to the book
| because it's written in the style of Dan Brown :) -
| short, punchy chapters. And it still makes sense (to me).
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| >> I believe that the larger bubble of political lies
| popping is much more interesting to think about.
|
| Does this mean that politics will finally get out of
| everything and give me back my sports that will be free
| of the constant political pandering?
| consumer451 wrote:
| When functional, politics should be boring af, and happen
| in the background, so yes.
| mmooss wrote:
| Post-truth means a couple of things to me:
|
| It indicates that it's a follow-on to postmodernism. To a
| significant degree the post-truth era is built on a
| reactionary attack on postmodernism - you can see it on HN,
| where many people reflexively attack like a mob anything
| they perceive is postmodern. You can see it in so many
| people who will accept lies and disaster over
| postmodernism.
|
| And post-truth is a postmodern term - ironic, ridiculing,
| makes you think, has some energy to it. How absurd to be
| literally //post-truth//.
|
| > era of lies
|
| That's a post-postmodern term. No irony or wit; a term of
| despair. :)
| convolvatron wrote:
| this is pedantic, but I think its important. We can say
| that a truth and lie are exclusive. when we lie, we know
| the truth. we just make up something else because it fits
| our agenda better. post-truth implies that the distinction
| doesn't matter anymore. nothing is true, everything is
| true. no statement can be evaluated outside the intent in
| which its delivered. that's much more substantial shift
| than just presenting a set of lies as the truth. a post-
| truth society is almost compelled to devalue science or any
| other pursuit of knowledge. by making all the voices
| selfish and mundane, it explicitly rejects beauty and
| accomplishment.
| consumer451 wrote:
| Whenever I can, I try to think of modern events from the
| point of view of archaeologists digging through the
| layers, at some point in the distant future.
|
| Given that perspective, my thought was: "Hey Bob, look at
| these morons, they called easily proven lies 'post-
| truth!' Can you believe that? In a civilization based on
| science, with AI, nuclear, and biological weapons?! No
| wonder they died out right after this. How did they not
| see this coming? Anyway, what's for lunch?"
| hamdingers wrote:
| While we are in an era of lies, it's only because so much
| of the public no longer finds truth compelling. Hence,
| post-truth.
| scuff3d wrote:
| Right, and where are all those LLMs without the billions upon
| billions of lines of text written by humans? A not
| insignificant number coming from Wikipedia?
|
| Also, LLMs don't produce truth. They don't have a concept of
| it. Or lies for that matter. If you are using LLMs do study
| something you know nothing about the information provided by
| them is as good as useless if you don't verify it with
| external sources written by a person. Wikipedia isn't
| perfect, nothing is, but I trust their model a shitload more
| then an LLM.
| mmooss wrote:
| > where are all those LLMs without the billions upon
| billions of lines of text written by humans? A not
| insignificant number coming from Wikipedia?
|
| Where is Wikipedia without all the learning and information
| from other sources, many of which it put out of business?
|
| > Also, LLMs don't produce truth. They don't have a concept
| of it. Or lies for that matter. If you are using LLMs do
| study something you know nothing about the information
| provided by them is as good as useless if you don't verify
| it with external sources written by a person. Wikipedia
| isn't perfect, nothing is, but I trust their model a
| shitload more then an LLM.
|
| Wikipedia produces consensus that correlates with truth to
| some degree. LLMs produce statistical output, which in a
| way is a automated consensus of the LLM's input, that also
| correlates with truth to some degree - and the correlation
| is hardly zero.
|
| I agree that information has no value if you don't know its
| accuracy; it's always a sticking point for me. IMHO
| Wikipedia has the same problem: I have no idea how accurate
| it is without verifying it with an external source (and
| when I've done that, I've often been disappointed).
|
| Has anyone researched the relative accuracy of Wikipedia
| and LLMs?
| internetter wrote:
| > Where is Wikipedia without all the learning and
| information from other sources, many of which it put out
| of business?
|
| Which businesses did Wikipedia put out of business? You
| will frequently see a 5k word article used for a couple
| of sentences in a Wikipedia page, with the entire
| Wikipedia page itself being smaller than one paper it
| cites for one small corner of said page. When I'm
| researching events, I frequently go to Wikipedia to find
| sources as search engines have a drastically larger
| recentism bias.
|
| > Has anyone researched the relative accuracy of
| Wikipedia and LLMs
|
| No comparative research on this specific topic has been
| conducted afaik, and most comparative research is aging
| (likely, to Wikipedia's own detriment-general consensus
| is that Wikipedia's reliability has increased over time).
| However at the time of research publication, the
| consensus seems to be that Wikipedia is generally only
| slightly less reliable than peers in a given field (ie
| textbooks or britanica), although Wikipedia is often less
| in depth. The most frequently cited study is a 2005
| comparison in Nature which found 4 major errors in both
| Wikipedia and Britanica, and 130 minor errors on
| Britanica whereas 160 on Wikipedia. All studies are
| documented on Wikipedia itself, see [[Reliability of
| Wikipedia]]. LLMs... do not have this same reputation.
| mmooss wrote:
| > Which businesses did Wikipedia put out of business?
|
| Just as a start, other sources of reference, including
| encylopedias, dictionaries, websites, etc. For example,
| I'm sure it impacts McGraw-Hill's AccessScience, which
| likely you've never heard of.
|
| > This is documented on Wikipedia itself
|
| Maybe there's a little bias there? Would Wikipedia accept
| Wikipedia's analysis of its own reliability as a valid
| source?
|
| I've heard that claim, but having no knowledge of the
| accuracy of any particular article, it's not worth very
| much to me.
|
| > LLMs... do not have this same reputation.
|
| They don't with you, but many people obviously use them
| that way. Also, reputation does not correlate strongly
| with reality.
| internetter wrote:
| > Just as a start, other sources of reference, including
| encylopedias, dictionaries
|
| This just seems like healthy competition. I thought we
| were talking about a situation where Wikipedia's _use_ of
| other encyclopedias is an instrument of their demise.
|
| > Maybe there's a little bias there
|
| Paradoxically, I suspect you'd be pleasantly surprised
| about how tough this article is on itself. A lot of
| attention is given to bias in this case.
|
| > Would Wikipedia accept Wikipedia's analysis of its own
| reliability as a valid source?
|
| First, it is not Wikipedia's own analysis. Editors should
| not present their own conclusions from research, just
| what each paper says. See [[WP:SYNTH]]. Second, generally
| Wikipedia discourages _anyone_ citing it as it is not a
| stable source of information. Much better is to use the
| sources the article itself conveniently cites inline. As
| a general policy citing _any_ encyclopedia is
| discouraged.
|
| > having no knowledge of the accuracy of any particular
| article, it's not worth very much to me.
|
| Wikipedia does have internal metrics grading the quality
| of an article. [[WP:ASSESS]]. In general though, even
| entirely discounting the Wikipedia component of the
| britanica comparison, based on britanicas own failures it
| seems wise to verify each and every claim in an
| encyclopedia, which Wikipedia does an excellent job of
| helping you do.
|
| > They don't with you, but many people obviously use them
| that way. Also, reputation does not correlate strongly
| with reality
|
| OpenAIs own benchmarks show much higher hallucination
| rates than any study on Wikipedia. Wikipedia itself is
| quite close to a ban on LLMs for reliability issues. If
| you ask literally any layman "has ChatGPT ever been wrong
| for you" they will say yes, either in that moment or
| after only a little prompting. It is much harder to
| elicit such a response regarding Wikipedia in my
| experience
|
| https://cdn.openai.com/pdf/2221c875-02dc-4789-800b-e7758f
| 372...
| Edman274 wrote:
| > "It is much harder to elicit such a response regarding
| Wikipedia in my experience"
|
| You're sincerely claiming that people can't think of
| times they've seen vandalism on Wikipedia?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > > Which businesses did Wikipedia put out of business?
|
| > Just as a start, other sources of reference, including
| encylopedias, dictionaries, websites, etc. For example,
| I'm sure it impacts McGraw-Hill's AccessScience, which
| likely you've never heard of.
|
| Your "for example" in response to a question about what
| businesses Wikipedia put out of business is a business
| that is...still in business?
| scuff3d wrote:
| The comment about Wikipedia supposedly putting companies
| out of business is so goofy I'm not even gonna comment on
| it. I'm surprised you'd bother trying to make a point
| there.
|
| The difference is humans _have a concept of truth_ ,
| humans have intent. A person, taking an aggregation of
| their research, expertise, and experience to produce an
| article is (presumably) trying to produce something
| factual. Other humans then come along, with similar
| intent, and verify it. Studies in the past have shown
| Wikipedia's accuracy rate is roughly on par with
| traditional encyclopedias, and more importantly sources
| are clearly documented. Making validation and further
| research fairly easy. And if something isn't sourced I
| know immediately it's more suspect.
|
| LLMs _have no concept of truth_ , they have no "intent".
| They just slap words down based on statistics. It is
| admittedly very impressive how good they are at doing
| that, but they don't produce truth in any meaningful way,
| it more a by product. On top of that all its sources get
| smashed together, making it much more difficult to verify
| the validity of any given claim. It's also unpredictable,
| so the exact same prompt could produce truth one time,
| and a hallucination another (a situation I have run into
| when it comes to engineering tasks). And worst of all.
| Not only will an LLM be wrong, but it will be confidently
| and persuasively wrong.
| matthewkayin wrote:
| Someone made a similar argument to me recently about AI,
| talking about how programmers used to have stacks of
| reference books at their desks and how many of the old guard
| had to have trainings convincing them to use google as a
| reference.
|
| I guess this argument was supposed to convince me to stop
| being such a luddite and accept the inevitable future, but
| really, in an increasingly post-truth world, it made me want
| to go and get myself a stack of reference books.
| mmooss wrote:
| I prefer the reference books myself - life is too short for
| anything but the highest quality information.
|
| But that's not how the world has worked out recently ...
| hamdingers wrote:
| Life is too short to waste it leafing through printed
| documentation.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| There should be many offline copies of Wikipedia since it makes
| data dumps publicly available
|
| Perhaps Wikimedia is only mentioning a drop in traffic as it
| suggests how www users may be gathering information, not
| because it is commercially significant, e.g., decline in
| audience for advertising
|
| Indeed, it is okay for traffic to fall when a website is not
| trying sell out www users to advertisers. It does not mean the
| information offered by the website is any less valuable
| jmathai wrote:
| > It does not mean the information offered by the website is
| any less valuable
|
| Maybe not less valuable but definitely less relevant. I think
| both are important.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| The value of information is determined by the person using it
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_information
|
| In the world of so-called "tech" companies, who use public
| information found on the www as "bait" to attract potential
| ad targets for data collection, surveillance and sometimes
| programmatic, targeted advertising, the information may have
| a value to those companies, for that purpose. They might
| measure that value by how popular the information is amongst
| www users
|
| But I'm referring to the value of information published on
| Wikipedia to www users, not so-called "tech" companies who
| seek to intermediate access to free, public information that
| they did not themselves produce
| nneonneo wrote:
| Traffic is how Wikipedia attracts future editors - people visit
| the site, some figure out that they can hit "edit", and some of
| those will go on to being productive editors on the platform.
|
| Falling traffic is a problem. As editors turn over and fewer
| new editors show up, Wikipedia will become harder to maintain.
| For example, these days, defending against AI slop vandalism is
| a real problem that needs real humans to tackle - even as AI
| tools become more useful at detecting low-level vandalism.
| epolanski wrote:
| Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write
| anything they want about any subject, so you know you are
| getting the best possible information.
| supportengineer wrote:
| Well, any writes are reverted within seconds by the
| gatekeepers, but sure, ok.
| fruitworks wrote:
| the free encyclopedia that ANYONE from Black Mesa can edit!
| Diederich wrote:
| Of the dozens of contributions I've made over the decades,
| some recent, either zero or one of them have been reverted.
| peab wrote:
| what topics did you make contributions to? From what I
| understand, it's mostly political and/or controversial
| topics that have this issue.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| I also have problems with Wikipedia's favoritism of
| insiders who have learned how to navigate its
| bureaucracy, but the fact that most edits of political
| and/or controversial topics are immediately reverted is
| not in itself evidence of a problem. A priori, I would
| expect that the majority of edits to political and
| controversial topics are bad and _should_ be reverted.
| WastedCucumber wrote:
| I don't have an extensive wikipedia career, but I've
| found that even my few edits to political topics have
| been accepted.
|
| What did get reverted was a trivial [citation needed]
| fix, for a musician's page, for a sentence stating they
| were involved in scoring a film. I found a relevant
| citation and this was promptly reverted, for reasons that
| were explained but, at least for me, utterly
| incomprehensible
| spelk wrote:
| You're not really considered a veteran editor until
| you've won at least 10 Request for Comments outquoting
| your detractors with at least 100 obscure Wikipedia
| guidelines and policies.
| nobodywillobsrv wrote:
| I've had tax stuff reverted even. eventually was allowed
| I think. Wikipedia has problems.
| amiga386 wrote:
| Were any on these topics?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contentious_topic
| s#L...
| consumer451 wrote:
| What percentage of Wikipedia does that cover? The entire
| world's knowledge has some controversial topics? Oh My!
| Burn it! Burn it all!
|
| The librarians of Alexandria would have killed for
| Wikipedia. It's _easily_ our greatest digital
| achievement.
|
| This is a hill on which I would happily fight to my
| metaphorical death, here and now.
| epx wrote:
| I have donated to them in the last two decades, and stopped
| because of this. Won't feed those beasts
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| should give them another chance
| greenchair wrote:
| one big reason why ai is garbage in garbage out
| Amorymeltzer wrote:
| "For those unaware, this is (exactly?) quoting Michael Scott
| from _The Office_. " - Wayne Gretzky
| Venn1 wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| Out 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 wrote:
| LLM'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 wrote:
| > 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.
| cheeze wrote:
| Counterpoint: 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 wrote:
| > _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.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Source: https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-
| wik...
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Oh good, Jimmy can stop hounding me for money like a late night
| infomercial or televangelist.
|
| 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Yeah ... 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?
| codinhood wrote:
| AI 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 wrote:
| tiktok seems to be the primary medium by which Gen Alpha obtain
| their news and knowledge
| undeveloper wrote:
| Gen Z as well. Many well into their 20s heavily consume
| tiktok.
| crazygringo wrote:
| No 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.
| 113 wrote:
| The younger generation absolutely use Tiktok search to find
| information.
| themafia wrote:
| I'm sure they do. Is that their primary source? Do they
| use nothing else? Is any of that information put to
| economic use in their lives or is it just curiosity?
| fred_is_fred wrote:
| They buy a ton of stuff from Tik-Tok and Instagram ads -
| yes.
| levocardia wrote:
| Yes -- sadly, the hottest new search engines are YouTube and
| TikTok.
| d--b wrote:
| traffic 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
| giving to it)
| Gigachad wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| If 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 wrote:
| It'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_c...
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| > 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
| Razengan wrote:
| How 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
| bad_username wrote:
| My 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 wrote:
| [citation needed]
| intended wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| > 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?
| incomingpain wrote:
| There 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
|
| 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 wrote:
| (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."
| pojzon wrote:
| Looking 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 wrote:
| So 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 wrote:
| I 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?
| pm2222 wrote:
| I still donate Wikipedia yearly. It's useful and I hope it stays
| afloat.
| simonmales wrote:
| That and the Internet Archive.
| abtinf wrote:
| Why? They have hundreds of millions in assets to operate a
| relatively simple site.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I considered donating to Wikipedia until I read this:
|
| 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 wrote:
| Remember that time that 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.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| That doesn't mean their spending money on what the people
| donating want. Most people seem to want to donate to keep
| Wikipedia running, but that is not necessarily where the
| money actually goes.
| dottjt wrote:
| Isn'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 wrote:
| Reduced traffic means less contributors and less donations.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| That 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 wrote:
| You 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 wrote:
| Good riddance to their constant begging for money they don't
| need.
| tech234a wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Suppress_display_of_...
| Wistar wrote:
| I do not doubt this for a second. I hope that this does not alter
| Wikipedia.
| thund wrote:
| openai, anthropic, gemini &co should pay wikipedia the rent.
| tonymet wrote:
| Wikipedia offers paid services , like realtime and incremental
| update feeds . I know a few of the big companies do pay .
| codethief wrote:
| So 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 wrote:
| The 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.
| orliesaurus wrote:
| that's a good thing? Wikipedia is always worrying about server
| costs or am I wrong?
| janalsncm wrote:
| Here is a list of their most popular pages:
|
| 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 wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| >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-wi...
|
| So not people just bloomberg... trash article. Probably just
| stealth donation marketing.
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