Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 464 posts

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

#21

Post by hackyhacky »

RickJWagner wrote: post #16
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…

Not for me. Wikipedia had its day, in between print encyclopedias and quick query AI. Its place in history is now set. Something else will come along soon enough.

Without Wikipedia, where will AIs get their (factual) training data? Reddit?

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

#23

Post by zzo38computer »

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 agree, we will need Wikipedia and it is OK if the traffic falls, and that AI is not a replacement (and videos are not a replacement either).

Printed texts are still useful but so is Wikipedia (I continue to use both).

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

#24

Post by Kye »

mrcwinn wrote: post #15
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.

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.

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

#26

Post by arjie »

It's all right. Wikipedia was a magical device for its time, and it's still a great aggregator of information. It will probably last forever as such a link aggregator. Read-time curation is obviously far better than write-time curation, but the former used to be very hard. Now we have the former for cheap so it makes sense for Wikipedia to be Yet Another Source into the read-time curator. And the existence of a source database like Wikipedia makes many of these tools work a lot better.

People rightfully get upset about individual editors having specific agendas on Wikipedia and I get it. Often that is the case. But the chat interface for LLMs allows for a back and forth where you can force them to look past some text to get closer to a truth.

For my part, I think it's nice to be part of making that base substrate of human knowledge in an open way, and some kinds of fixes to Wikipedia articles are very easy. So what little I do, I'll keep doing. Makes me happy to help.

Some of the fruit is really low-hanging, take a look at this garbage someone added to an article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salvadoran_gang_c...

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

#27

Post by SanjayMehta »

adventured wrote: post #14
johnnyanmac wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

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.

Maybe they can use the immense volunteer talent at their disposal to build their own AI/LLM.

I'm sure all those editors with decades of experience can do quickly outdo OpenAI and Grok and what have you.

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

#28

Post by anthonyeden »

mrcwinn wrote: post #15
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.

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.

‘Processing fees’ likely includes the cost of administering the CRM, creating tax receipts and reports, donor support, and all the other ‘processing’ tasks that come with running a large fundraising effort. It wouldn’t just be the credit card fees.

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

#29

Post by byzantinegene »

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?

tiktok seems to be the primary medium by which Gen Alpha obtain their news and knowledge
Post reply on HN