Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by lottin » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 10:03 PM UTC

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…

Retained earnings are not taxed per se. A company pays taxes on profits. Whether the profits are distributed to shareholders or retained makes no difference whatsoever as far as taxes are concerned.

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

#192

Post by bawolff » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 10:04 PM UTC

mminer237 wrote: post #175

skeaker wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unreal…

AFAIK, they don't do any scholarships or really do any educational activities. By far their biggest spending item is just $105 million for salaries, mainly for all of its leadership, which is a majority of its expenses. The second biggest line item is grants at $25 million, primarily for users to travel to meet up. Then $10 million for legal fees, $7 million for Wikipedia-hosted travel. I think it's pretty unethical…

In person meetings move things forward.

Paying the travel for a bunch of highly active volunteer contributors to meet up ocassionally and hash out complex community issues pays massive dividends. It keeps the site moving forward. Its also pretty cheap when you consider how much free labour those volunteers provide.

Whenever people criticize wikimedia finances, i think they miss the forest for the trees. I actually think there is a lot to potentially crticize, but in my opinion everyone goes for the wrong things.

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

#193

Post by spelk » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 10:05 PM UTC

chermi wrote: post #106

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.

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…

>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.

I find this kind of a fascinating social phenomena.

I guess to give a personal example, I was trying to update a few pages about a country's Olympic history - that is, their Olympic bids, a few athletes, etc.

Unknowingly, I had stumbled across a particular power-editor's fiefdom, because they created all these pages and they were very aggressive in policing their articles to meet a certain style, tone and their beliefs.

Searching this person's username up (they went by their real name), they were closely related to that country's Olympic committee and an employee of a Ministry of Sport of sorts. The articles had lots of anonymous IP address edits from an university network this person was affiliated with in their program portfolio.

There was a clear conflict of interest, and I tried to point that out when they mass-reverted my edits, but they seemed committed to accusing me of edit warring by not sandboxing my changes and waiting for their personal review and approval, and quoted at least 12 different Wikipedia policies on notability, style, acceptable citations, etc. I still feel I was in the right, but I didn't have the willpower or stamina to fight against several requests for comments, speedy deletions, etc. They did get a warning from an administrator and some detractors in the discussion threads, but they weren't willing to let it go and at that point, it wasn't fun anymore for me. I have better things to do than to fight factual and nitpicky disputes on Wikipedia.

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

#194

Post by bawolff » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 10:06 PM UTC

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...

A web server is useless if you aren't paying someone to plug it in.

There is probably a lot to criticize, but you need to go deeper than "salaries" are bad. You need some of those to actually run the website.

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

#195

Post by bawolff » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 10:07 PM UTC

fart-fart-FART wrote: post #76

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.

[flagged]

Bandwidth costs aren't the dominating cost.

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

#196

Post by nobodywillobsrv » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 10:11 PM UTC

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've had tax stuff reverted even. eventually was allowed I think. Wikipedia has problems.

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

#197

Post by amiga386 » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 10:11 PM UTC

Diederich wrote: post #145

supportengineer wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, any writes are reverted within seconds by the gatekeepers, but sure, ok.

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

Were any on these topics?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contentious_topics#L...

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

#198

Post by bawolff » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 10:14 PM UTC

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #158

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.

Remember that time in feb 2005 when Wikipedia went down for several days and lost about a week of data because there was a power failure and they were too shoe strings to have proper back ups, and also had disabled a bunch of ACID features in mysql to get the last bit of performance out of mysql causing the power failure to corrupt the db, because they didn't have enough money for more servers and were desperate to try anything to get the last bit of performance out of their servers?

No? That's because it doesn't happen anymore now that WMF has a reasonable budget.

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

#199

Post by Kye » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 10:20 PM UTC

dghlsakjg wrote: post #184

Kye wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Check the source on the donation page. It looks like they actually use something called Gr4vy above all that to handle payments.

https://gr4vy.com

Using a platform with its own fee on top of payment processor fees would explain the 6.4%.

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

#200

Post by nitwit005 » Tue, Oct 21, 2025, 10:24 PM UTC

bawolff wrote: post #198

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Remember that time in feb 2005 when Wikipedia went down for several days and lost about a week of data because there was a power failure and they were too shoe strings to have proper back ups, and also had disabled a bunch of ACID features in mysql to get the last bit of performance out of mysql causing the power failure to corrupt the db, because they didn't have enough money for more servers and were desperate to t…

That doesn't mean their spending money on what the people donating want. Most people seem to want to donate to keep Wikipedia running, but that is not necessarily where the money actually goes.