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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

#281

Post by consumer451 »

Levitz wrote: post #240
mmooss wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

First, I mean no personal insults. Let's discuss ideas.

As someone who grew up being de-programmed from Soviet propaganda by my parents every time I came home, starting from pre-school, I cannot even begin to communicate how allergic I am to this discourse. "There is no truth" is some grade-A bullshit to me. What's next? Maybe Stalin wasn't Hitler's military ally to start WWII? Maybe we live in a simulation? What's the point of anything? 1+1=3!

I could just be dumb, but my theoretical view from 30,000 feet, or 30,000 years in the future can be read here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45661175

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

#282

Post by fc417fc802 »

consumer451 wrote: post #272
internetter wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? T…

> if they would be cool with their moderation logs being completely open

It takes a certain mentality. That's rare but I think it makes for much better communities on the whole.

However I think most participants, not just moderators, don't like the environment that sort of mentality results in. When anything and everything, including the moderation itself, is up for civilized debate that tends to foster an environment in which it's acceptable to question core parts of people's worldviews. There's little shared doctrine beyond "argue any position you'd like" which most people seem to find intensely uncomfortable.

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

#283

Post by g-b-r »

myth_drannon wrote: post #215
babelfish wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At this point, I am coming around to the argument that governments should make their own local/national AI. I think this is a terrible idea. How do current Chinese-built LLMs respond when asked about Tianamen Square? How would American-built LLMs response when asked about Israel/Palestine?

If Wikipedia was the source for training data of the LLM then the answer would be quite horrible. There was a ring of Pro-Palestinian editors (possibly state sponsored) that were writing a lot of misinformation on that topic.

Check the pro-Israel ones too

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

#284

Post by pveierland »

panxyh wrote: post #279
pveierland wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I took it as a statement that it is prohibitively difficult to contribute to Wikipedia, and wanted to point out that a large number of contributions are being made and the resulting quality being high, in part due to the difficulty of making contributions.

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

#285

Post by wslh »

pveierland wrote: post #284
panxyh wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP wasn't complaining.

I took it as a statement that it is prohibitively difficult to contribute to Wikipedia, and wanted to point out that a large number of contributions are being made and the resulting quality being high, in part due to the difficulty of making contributions.

You are mistaking quality with difficulty. Many people have quality information for contributing but lack the time for politics.

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

#286

Post by username223 »

kapone wrote: post #230
portaouflop wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Invest a little bit in everything / cut all the useless staff and just focus on longevity of the encyclopaedia it’s certainly doable but requires selfless dedication at the top

“Selfless” - what world are you living in?? Money rules. There’s no ifs and buts about it. If it doesn’t have a reasonable rate of return, nobody gives a shit.

What Wikipedia are you looking at? It's one of the things that has survived the longest on the Internet without being enshittified. It could live on in Cockroach Mode forever off the money from a modest solar farm or investment in an index fund. If someone sociopath bought the Wikimedia Foundation and tried to strip-mine Wikipedia, the Wikipedia editors could easily take a copy and go elsewhere.

Ironically, I was just listening to an interview with Jimmy Wales in which he said that, as individuals, most humans are basically good. They don't meet someone on the street and think "what is the rate of return on interacting with this thing?"

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

#287

Post by fc417fc802 »

dvsfish wrote: post #254
tines wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I get the sentiment of what you're saying, but I don’t think that’s totally fair to the parent. Biases aren’t automatically "bad" or "failings". they’re akin to heuristics, and it’s practically impossible to eliminate them entirely. For example, we’re all here talking about how we should treat Wikipedia with skepticism. That's a sort of "neutral" bias that doesn't conjure a strong emotion, and is perhaps more accepta…

It depends on if you take the parent (err GGP) literally versus in context. My personal experience has been that people claiming that bias is unavoidable (alternatively that objectivity is impossible, or that everything is political, or ...) have usually been attempting to justify a reasoning process that supports a political or religious slant of one form or another.

A helpless "we couldn't possibly do anything about that issue" sort of mentality.

That said if we're talking literally then I fully agree with you that heuristics are a form of bias and can sometimes be a very good thing on a case by case basis.

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

#288

Post by breppp »

The hard truth is that LLMs will fully replace wikipedia.

Let's put aside wikipedia being rotten with bureaucracy and obsession-driven bias, which is similar to stackoverflow preexisting flows before LLMs streamrolled.

Fact is, wikipedia is a human driven summarization engine of secondary sources, hopefully in a way that echos the sources consensus.

This is exactly what LLMs are best for, summarizing huge amount of text, and training can easily focus on high quality books and thus exceed wikipedia in quality.

It's enough to read an AI summary where the first line talks about the subject in hand, compared to wikipedia where the first line is the product of some petty argument about a political disagreement

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

#289

Post by kemayo »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #261
nxobject wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? I imagine there are many things involved with Wikipedia that volunteer editors don't do.

Yeah, probably. I understand there's a lot if logistics I simply don't know about. I was inquiring about more details on what the paid staff need to do.

You can get a general sense of it from the org chart here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation/Organiz...

A lot of it is engineers who work on improving the software that runs Wikipedia, and keeping the site running, which you can see happening at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org -- outside of security issues, all the dev work is done in the open. There's constant ongoing work on making Wikipedia and all the related projects work better.

There's also people who do the fundraising, community management, legal defense, etc. Then there's general HR infrastructure around employing hundreds of people.

Basically, that "Hosting was 3.4%. Facilities was 1.4%." point gets brought up, and neglects to mention that you then need to pay for a bunch of people to manage those servers and facilities.

(Disclaimer: I'm an employee of the WMF. I'm just an engineer, so I'm not speaking authoritatively about financial details.)

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

#290

Post by epolanski »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #256
epolanski wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is the best thing ever. Anyone in the world can write anything they want about any subject, so you know you are getting the best possible information.

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.

It's too politicized and biased for my taste to give it any of my time.
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