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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

#271

Post by internetter »

boringg wrote: post #260
itishappy wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

25.60 GB https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dump_torrents#English_W...

Wow they could easily maintain that for infinity at a low cost (less inflation and you know upkeep).

This is only the size of the text at one moment in time. The edit history is dozens of terabytes and the media is hundreds. All of this must be served to billions of requests a day. Almost every single request involves executing arbitrary lua and/or template syntax which was transcluded into the page. The media, particularly, introduces huge copyright problems. Ect ect. The WMF is undoubtably bloated, but it is not a walk in the park to run Wikipedia.

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

#272

Post by consumer451 »

internetter wrote: post #269
consumer451 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What percentage of Wikipedia does that cover? The entire world's knowledge has some controversial topics? Oh my! Burn it! Burn it all!! The librarians of Alexandria would have killed for Wikipedia. It's easily our greatest digital achievement. This is a hill on which I would happily fight to my metaphorical death, here and now. If you disagree, let's discuss please.

I don't get your point. You are allowed to edit articles on contentious topics. Its just more likely to be reverted. Because the topic is... contentious.

My attempt at a point is that the controversial topics are a tiny percentage of the human knowledge stored on Wikipedia. If there were no controversies, then I would actually start to get worried. That would indicate that there was pure control of information on Wikipedia, like a theoretical CCPedia. [0]

Wikipedia is so open, that they even have their own "controversial" section! Is that not the coolest thing ever?

The chip on my shoulder is that there is a concerted effort to destroy and discredit Wikipedia.

The accomplishment of Wikipedia is not just beating the Library of Alexandria by many orders of magnitude, but doing so while keeping moderation logs in the open as well.

Ask @dang, or anyone that has ever had anything to do with forum moderation, if they would be cool with their moderation logs being completely open. Almost everyone with experience would say 100% no. They likely tried that and saw how much nutso drama it creates. Wikipedia actually does that, at the largest possible scale!

[0] Of course that exists, apparently it's called Baidu Baike

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

#273

Post by parineum »

redwall_hp wrote: post #66
al_borland wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” I recently visited Scotland and on a visit to a distillery they mentioned they bought land in the US to grow trees that will make their barrels one day. The trees take over 100 years to grow (if I remember correctly). How is it we can invest ~200 years into a glass of scotch, yet we aren’t willing to take the same care and…

Craftsmen care about what they make, pursuing excellence even if it may take generations. Businessmen care about robbing you now in the most efficient way.

Craftsman are businessesman.

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

#274

Post by tentahedronic »

vovavili wrote: post #161
redwall_hp wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Craftsmen care about what they make, pursuing excellence even if it may take generations. Businessmen care about robbing you now in the most efficient way.

That's a bold and daring thing to say on a startup accelerator and venture capital forum, must I say.

While that is technically true I have always thought hn as a mere place to find interesting content. Of course many of us, me included, dream about finding someone who pays millions for our code. But the attitude towards businessmen is generally hostile here and for a good reason. They can't make things and they aren't even interested in making things, and overall they are more often than not just lame and boring. They are interested in making money, ripping people off, being leeches, extracting every possible penny they just can. Weird geeks are what the hacker culture is all about and politically correct c-suite suckers can go pound sand.

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

#275

Post by TheRoque »

adastra22 wrote: post #270
TheRoque wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What about math and physics?

They try to work hard and get rid of bias through various methods: peer reviews, precise methodology (randomization, blind tests etc.). And of course, even those sciences are not perfect, subject to biases, and evolve. This applies only to a subset of fields, in a lot of fields you either don't have the time to remove biases this way or it's impossible because it's inherently subjective. Besides, if you needed unbiased perfect opinions before taking any decision, the world would be stuck and slow.

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

#276

Post by fc417fc802 »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #255
bee_rider wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia seems like a pretty good candidate for a seed vault style “let’s make sure this gets really backed up” type project.

There are a million backups of wikipedia. That's not the main issue, it's the future of the project. If the main org goes down, there will be a million forks of it where none of them have the same legitimacy of the original, edits will die off, views will die off, and the content will become increasingly stale and vandalised.

I see that as an argument for serious research effort into systems of decentralized governance. A project like Wikipedia shouldn't need a centralized community or a singular centralized host. Unfortunately "web of trust" doesn't seem like it will be resolved in a robust manner anytime soon.

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

#277

Post by mayli »

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…

Yeah, it's good for them to save money for fewer traffic.

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

#278

Post by g-b-r »

dmitrygr wrote: post #132

I stopped contributing money, and then stopped trusting and using Wikipedia after I saw how wrong they are on a subject I am well-informed on personally (ARM architecture), and how fast they revert properly-cited 100% factually correct changes (literally citing the arm architecture manual). How could I trust them on things I do not know, if I know for a fact they are unrepentantly wrong about things I do know?

In my experience it's always better to only leave comments on the talk page and at most add template comments to the article, for a couple weeks; after that time passed you can go ahead with editing the page, and there's a better chance of the edits not getting reverted.

But I've always hated the way Wikipedia works.

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

#279

Post by panxyh »

pveierland wrote: post #268
SchemaLoad wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you actually tried editing wikipedia? It's extremely difficult to get anything approved. You have to provide multiple credible sources for things or else the mods just revert/delete your page.

Isn't is good that there are some forcing factors to help ensure the quality of the content? I get that there's plenty of drama and difficulties in building and moderating the content of Wikipedia, but it certainly does not appear to stagnate in terms of content if you are looking at e.g. the number of articles on English Wikipedia. The overall process appears to produce great outcomes and it is the greatest collecti…

GP wasn't complaining.

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

#280

Post by g-b-r »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #262
Razengan wrote: post #34

How is it not conflict of interest when Google's AI summary (which is sometimes hilariously wrong) takes a click away from websites that pay for ads? Specially if it was trained on those websites

The sites paying for ads are usually offering products and services, not information. If you search "Plumbers near me", there will be no reason to have an AI summary, so they can show the ads. If you are searching "what temperature does copper melt", no one was buying ads on that anyway.

The point is that the sites from which the AI summary sourced its information might have ads, and if Google only linked to them they'd get ads impressions
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