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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

#101

Post by nxobject »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #9
irjustin wrote: post #3

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 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?

I imagine that, unfortunately, global legal counsel these days will likely be taking an increasing chunk of their change.

Re: Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video

#102

Post by Rebelgecko »

qingcharles wrote: post #6
crmd wrote: post #2

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.

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.

Bandwidth is a ridiculously tiny portion of Wiki foundation's spending

Re: Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video

#103

Post by nxobject »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #38
adventured wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

How so? I imagine there are many things involved with Wikipedia that volunteer editors don't do.

Re: Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video

#104

Post by mmooss »

consumer451 wrote: post #60
mmooss wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

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. :)

Re: Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video

#105

Post by internetter »

mmooss wrote: post #96
scuff3d wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

> 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 abou…

> 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 británica), 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 Británica, and 130 minor errors on Británica whereas 160 on Wikipedia. All studies are documented on Wikipedia itself, see [[Reliability of Wikipedia]]. LLMs… do not have this same reputation.

Re: Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video

#106

Post by chermi »

FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #73
aeternum wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_...

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.

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.

Re: Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video

#107

Post by tines »

FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #73
aeternum wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_...

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.

> 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.

Re: Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video

#108

Post by mmooss »

internetter wrote: post #105
mmooss wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 abou…

> 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 g…

> 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.

Re: Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video

#109

Post by griffzhowl »

robotnikman wrote: post #98
skeeter2020 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

Re: Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video

#110

Post by mmooss »

matthewkayin wrote: post #100
mmooss wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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 ...

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