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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

#231

Post by incompatible »

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…

The Wikimedia Foundation is unlikely to last for 1000 years as an organisation because it doesn't exist within a social / economic system that will last for 1000 years. The US government is already actively plotting against it. Sure, they can try hopping from one country to another, but it won't be sustainable for that long.

It's not even certain if Wikipedia itself can exist for such a long period, given fragility of technological civilisation and data storage.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/08/27/wiki...

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

#232

Post by papichulo2023 »

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…

How many comments did you write on this thread to justify Wikipedia's expenses? I counted at least 6.

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

#233

Post by bawolff »

amiga386 wrote: post #197
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.

Were any on these topics? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contentious_topics#L...

I love how this list goes: Arab-Israel conflict, abortion, ...

All making sense so far. But then:

Article title capitalization.

Somehow this is peak wikipedia.

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

#234

Post by parpfish »

yorwba wrote: post #55
johnnyanmac wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

scraping Wikipedia feels like the stupidest possible move. You can in fact download the entire encyclopedia at any time and take all the time in the world parsing offline. For such purposes, I'd naively just setup some weekly job to download Wikipedia and then run a "scrape" on that. Even weekly may be overkill; a monthly snapshot may do more than enough.

You can download twice-monthly database dumps, but they consist of the raw wikitext, so you need to do a bunch of extra work to render templates and stuff. Meanwhile, if you write a generic scraper, it can connect to Wikipedia like it connects to any other website and get the correctly-rendered HTML. People who aren't interested in Wikipedia specifically but want to download pretty much the entire internet unsurprisi…

as somebody that has wrassled with the wikipedia dumps a number of times, i don't understand why wiki doesn't release some sort of sdk that gives you the 'official' parse

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

#235

Post by bawolff »

portaouflop wrote: post #220
amiga386 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were any on these topics? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contentious_topics#L...

Why the hell is Yasuke so controversial oO

To quote from the page:

"In May 2024, it was announced that Yasuke would be a major character in an upcoming video game (Assassin's Creed Shadows). While onwiki disagreement about Yasuke's status as a samurai predates this announcement, the historical figure's Samurai status became part of a culture war around video games (J2UDY7r00CRjH evidence) that media sources have described as a continuation of or successor to Gamergate, leading to an increase in attention to the article. (Symphony Regalia evidence)"

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

#237

Post by porphyra »

portaouflop wrote: post #220
amiga386 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were any on these topics? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contentious_topics#L...

Why the hell is Yasuke so controversial oO

* He's a quite interesting historical character popularized by the video game Assassin's Creed Shadows. However, this insertion has also been controversial. East Asian male protagonists are underrepresented in Western media already, and with Assassin's Creed there's the perception that now they snubbed East Asians again, following a long trend of forcefully inserting foreign perspectives in Asian settings, like The Last Samurai, Shōgun, etc.

* There aren't that many real historical accounts about him so people can argue all day about stuff like "Was Yasuke a real samurai?" without clear evidence about who's right.

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

#238

Post by bawolff »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #9
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'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?

> I understand, even with static pages

Wikipedia's pages are not static.

Realistically though most of the budget is spent on improving the website not just treading water.

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

#240

Post by Levitz »

mmooss wrote: post #104
consumer451 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> post-truth era. I know it’s completely normalized and the official name, but this has to be the most dangerous euphemism of our time. It’s the era of lies.

Post-truth means a couple of things to me: It indicates that it's a follow-on to postmodernism. To a significant degree the post-truth era is built on a reactionary attack on postmodernism - you can see it on HN, where many people reflexively attack like a mob anything they perceive is postmodern. You can see it in so many people who will accept lies and disaster over postmodernism. And post-truth is a postmodern ter…

>It indicates that it's a follow-on to postmodernism.

How? it's just postmodernism itself.

There is no truth because everything is relative. There is no singular, objective truth, facts are intrinsically bound to their context, hence post-truth.

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