Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video
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Re: Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video
#2As 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.
Re: Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video
#3I'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.
Re: Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video
#4As 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.
> 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.”
Re: Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video
#5This 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.
Re: Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video
#6As 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.
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.
Re: Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video
#7As 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.
> 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.”
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.
Re: Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video
#8This 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.
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.
Re: Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video
#9I'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 tim…
>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?
Re: Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video
#10LLM'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.