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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

#291

Post by pveierland »

wslh wrote: post #285
pveierland wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where do I mistake quality for difficulty?

My statement was that the quality of Wikipedia overall is high, and that one of the reasons for that is because they set and enforce standards for contributions.

Certainly many people are put off by the process and will not have time to deal with it, but my belief would be that such cases are more likely on more controversial topics, and less likely for less controversial topics. Inherently, collaborating on difficult topics will be a difficult process, which also means that there are likely no easy answers for how to make this process not discourage anyone.

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

#294

Post by loeg »

byzantinegene wrote: post #29
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

You probably mean Gen Z. Alpha's oldest members are 14-15. Middle schoolers have never been particularly well read.

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

#296

Post by loeg »

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…

There are like 3 orders of magnitude of budget difference; I'm sure a happy middle ground could be found. Even going back to 2010's budget would save $160M/year and still be 17x 2005's budget.

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

#297

Post by [deleted] »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #131
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be many offline copies of Wikipedia since it makes data dumps publicly available Perhaps Wikimedia is only mentioning a drop in traffic as it suggests how www users may be gathering information, not because it is commercially significant, e.g., decline in audience for advertising Indeed, it is okay for traffic to fall when a website is not trying sell out www users to advertisers. It does not mean the in…

The value of information is determined by the person using it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_information In the world of so-called "tech" companies, who use public information found on the www as "bait" to attract potential ad targets for data collection, surveillance and sometimes programmatic, targeted advertising, the information may have a value to those companies, for that purpose. They might measure tha…

[deleted]

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

#298

Post by dvsfish »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #287
dvsfish wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 abou…

Yep fair point. I was taking them literally, though I didn't necessarily feel the context meant their post was bad faith or concessional, just a simple truth. Your elaboration adds a fair bit to your argument though and I am pretty sure I agree for the most part.

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

#299

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #89
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…

There should be many offline copies of Wikipedia since it makes data dumps publicly available Perhaps Wikimedia is only mentioning a drop in traffic as it suggests how www users may be gathering information, not because it is commercially significant, e.g., decline in audience for advertising Indeed, it is okay for traffic to fall when a website is not trying sell out www users to advertisers. It does not mean the in…

The term "relevance" usually refers to something, i.e., relevant to what

But it can also mean "popular"

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/relevant

"Popular" information, evidenced by web traffic for example, may be important for so-called "tech" companies seeking to profit from intermediating access to free, public information, i.e., acting as a middleman. The information may be valuable to the so-called "tech" company middleman for purposes of supporting data collection, surveillance and online advertising services

However, the so-called "tech" company does not determine the value of the information to others. For example, a small group of people may find information on a web page to be valuable for their individual purposes. The web page may receive little traffic. The amount of traffic does not determine the value of the information to the small group

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

#300

Post by bamboozled »

Little off topic but does anyone else find AI summarise really misleading, almost dangerously misleading ? In a search box you can never rally provide anywhere near enough context to get a sufficient answer on anything of even small consequence.

Yes I do use the internet for “medical opinion” and information and seriously some of the falsehoods it’s provided…similarly anything related to construction. Steer clear.

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