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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

#181

Post by crazygringo »

themafia wrote: post #92
crazygringo wrote: post #10

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, ev…

> 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.

> 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.

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

#182

Post by TheRoque »

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.

It's true though, it's literally how your brain works. It's full of biases.

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

#183

Post by damnesian »

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.

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

#184

Post by dghlsakjg »

Kye wrote: post #24
mrcwinn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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

#185

Post by WastedCucumber »

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 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

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

#186

Post by spelk »

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.

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.

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

#187

Post by bawolff »

dns_snek wrote: post #122
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.

> Conservapedia This is the first time I've heard about it. Is that meant to be a satire website? I can't tell anymore.

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.

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

#188

Post by cg5280 »

NewsaHackO wrote: post #118
Okx wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You aren't missing anything. This has been an increasingly popular criticism of Wikipedia. They are doing just fine financially.

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

#189

Post by bawolff »

khamidou wrote: post #32
qingcharles wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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

#190

Post by citizenpaul »

>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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