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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

#111

Post by babelfish »

intended wrote: post #63

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.

> 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?

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

#112

Post by cm2012 »

ethmarks wrote: post #94
cm2012 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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...

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.

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

#113

Post by delecti »

vkou wrote: post #95
arunharidas wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elon Musk is launching Grokipedia this week as a competition to Wikipedia.

I'm not sure why he feels the need to launch a competitor to Conservapedia.

If he's aware of it, he probably considered it to be insufficiently "based".

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

#114

Post by ta1243 »

nickff wrote: post #64
al_borland wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

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…

> 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).

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

#116

Post by pastage »

Okx wrote: post #52
al_borland wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

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

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.

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

#117

Post by nneonneo »

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…

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.

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

#118

Post by NewsaHackO »

Okx wrote: post #52
al_borland wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

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

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.

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

#119

Post by pastage »

tines wrote: post #107
FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#120

Post by internetter »

mmooss wrote: post #108
internetter wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 hea…

> 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 británica comparison, based on británicas 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-e7758f372...

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