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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

#151

Post by Analemma_ »

peab wrote: post #148
Diederich wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of the dozens of contributions I've made over the decades, some recent, either zero or one of them have been reverted.

what topics did you make contributions to? From what I understand, it's mostly political and/or controversial topics that have this issue.

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.

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

#156

Post by levocardia »

codinhood wrote: post #22

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?

Yes -- sadly, the hottest new search engines are YouTube and TikTok.

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

#157

Post by greenchair »

epolanski wrote: post #138
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…

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.

one big reason why ai is garbage in garbage out

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

#158

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

pm2222 wrote: post #134

I still donate Wikipedia yearly. It's useful and I hope it stays afloat.

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.

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

#159

Post by skeaker »

Liquix wrote: post #130
khamidou wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

this is a very eye-opening read on their financials: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...

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.

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