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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

#311

Post by Aurornis »

qingcharles wrote: post #6
crmd wrote: post #2

As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that is not dependent on web traffic for revenue, is a decline in traffic necessarily bad? I always assumed the need for metastatic growth was limited to VC-backed and ad-revenue dependent companies.

They are highly dependent on web traffic for revenue. And their costs are even increasing because while human viewers are decreasing they are getting hugged to death by AI scrapes.

> they are getting hugged to death by AI scrapes.

Wikipedia is not getting hugged to death by AI scrapers.

The source letter shows a relatively small portion of traffic was reclassified as bot traffic.

They get a lot of page views globally. It’s a popular website. The bot traffic is not crushing their servers.

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

#312

Post by tim-- »

incompatible wrote: post #231
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 o…

The Wikimedia Endowment [0] has been created for this. From it's Financials [1] it mentions that

> ... [its mission is...] to act as a permanent fund that can support in perpetuity the operations and activities of current and future Wikimedia projects, which are projects that are approved by and advance the purposes of the Foundation or its successor if the Foundation ceases to exist

[0] https://wikimediaendowment.org/

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f6/Wikim...

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

#314

Post by eru »

incompatible wrote: post #231
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 o…

> The US government is already actively plotting against it.

Surely, they can set up shop elsewhere on the globe?

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

#315

Post by hnidiots3 »

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 very bias too. If you cite a book from 1870 stating something and it doesn’t align with the persons beliefs it can be rejected.

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

#316

Post by breppp »

viccis wrote: post #309
breppp wrote: post #288

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 t…

This is the kind of attitude that I hope Wikipedia continues to exist and educate people away from falling for.

Being condescending is unwarranted really.

Is your argument that Wikipedia rules are not highly tailored to suppress original research and rely on secondary sources

For the latter LLMs are better than wikipedia today, the former arguably current alignment is better at suppressing bias than current editors

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

#317

Post by submeta »

For Wikipedia to last 1000 years, we need a publisher who sells a print of a snapshot of it every ten years or so. When the civilisation dies, and our civilisation will die eventually, sooner or later, just like any other civilisation, then there won‘t be no internet, no wikipedia foundation or anything. But printed paper might survive.

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

#318

Post by ryan_lane »

khamidou wrote: post #263
bawolff wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People cite this figure a lot, but its a little misleading because when you own your own servers a lot of the expenses that are typically hosting actually fall under a different category. If you use AWS, the people hired to manage the servers is part of the price tag. When you own your own you have to actually hire those people.

I mean, it's not like you can get away with running with zero SREs if you're running in the cloud. The personnel costs for on-prem hosting are vastly exaggerated, especially if you contract out the actual annoying work to a colo.

Smart hands is more expensive than having dedicated datacenter staff, and the dedicated staff do a considerably better job. It's worth noting that WMF runs _very_ lean in terms of its datacenter staff.

You're also ignoring the need for infrastructure/network engineers, software engineers, fundraising engineers, product managers, community managers, managers, HR, legal, finance/accounting, fundraisers, etc.

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

#319

Post by jader201 »

incompatible wrote: post #231
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 o…

The WF is not even 25 years old. It’s crazy to think it will exist another 100 years, let alone 1000.

Even the US isn’t 1000 years old. Who’s to say it will even exist in a remotely recognizable form in 1000 years.

The last 1000 years changed at a snails pace compared to the last 25 years.

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

#320

Post by _def »

WatchDog wrote: post #306
qingcharles wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are highly dependent on web traffic for revenue. And their costs are even increasing because while human viewers are decreasing they are getting hugged to death by AI scrapes.

Infrastructure has long been a tiny portion of wikipedias costs. I think Wikipedia even makes it easy to export all of its data, I don’t think AI scrapers would be a significant new cost

These are two very different cost factors. Scrapers don't use the available data dumps, that's why they scrape. They are also kind of dumb as they get lost in link structures constantly, which leads to unecessary traffic spikes.
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