321–330 of 464 posts
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Of the dozens of contributions I've made over the decades, some recent, either zero or one of them have been reverted.
Or you could make significant contributions, then get banned because of ignorant sociopaths like BrownHairedGirl and her coterie of followers.
LLM's have definitely replaced 90% of what I used to look up on a Wikipedia, simply because they integrate from so many more additional sources. But at the same time I continue to contribute edits to Wikipedia. Because it's the source of so much data. To me, it doesn't matter if the information I contribute gets consumed on Wikipedia or consumed via LLM. Either way, it's helping people. Wikipedia isn't going away, ev…
> Either way, it's helping people. Wikipedia gives away your creation for free. The LLM companies do not. Google is operating a loss leader and not "helping people." In fact, quite the opposite.
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AFAIK, they don't do any scholarships or really do any educational activities. By far their biggest spending item is just $105 million for salaries, mainly for all of its leadership, which is a majority of its expenses. The second biggest line item is grants at $25 million, primarily for users to travel to meet up. Then $10 million for legal fees, $7 million for Wikipedia-hosted travel. I think it's pretty unethical…
In person meetings move things forward. Paying the travel for a bunch of highly active volunteer contributors to meet up ocassionally and hash out complex community issues pays massive dividends. It keeps the site moving forward. Its also pretty cheap when you consider how much free labour those volunteers provide. Whenever people criticize wikimedia finances, i think they miss the forest for the trees. I actually th…
Also, asking out of ignorance, what things need to move forward? I thought wikipedia is a solved problem, the only work i would expect it to need is maintenance work, security patches etc.
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They also serve images.
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What a ridiculous comparison. You either don't know what you are talking about, or are a troll. Maybe even both.
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A web server is useless if you aren't paying someone to plug it in. There is probably a lot to criticize, but you need to go deeper than "salaries" are bad. You need some of those to actually run the website.
Even at a quarter million a year that's 400 salaries. How many people are needed to maintain a website?
There's also the need to support the staff and volunteer developers, which includes wikimedia cloud services, git hosting, config management and orchestration, CI, community hosted tool/bot services, etc.
WMF has ~600 employees, and that's quite lean, for a service of their complexity.
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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.
Bandwidth is a ridiculously tiny portion of Wiki foundation's spending
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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.
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Am I misssing something or is Wikipedia net positive 200M? If this is true, that's eye opening. Weird given how much they beg for money on every article.
You aren't missing anything. This has been an increasingly popular criticism of Wikipedia. They are doing just fine financially.
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> where are all those LLMs without the billions upon billions of lines of text written by humans? A not insignificant number coming from Wikipedia? Where is Wikipedia without all the learning and information from other sources, many of which it put out of business? > Also, LLMs don't produce truth. They don't have a concept of it. Or lies for that matter. If you are using LLMs do study something you know nothing abou…
The comment about Wikipedia supposedly putting companies out of business is so goofy I'm not even gonna comment on it. I'm surprised you'd bother trying to make a point there. The difference is humans have a concept of truth , humans have intent. A person, taking an aggregation of their research, expertise, and experience to produce an article is (presumably) trying to produce something factual. Other humans then com…
I've learned that when people don't have any merits to argue, they turn to ridicule. Right back at you buddy.
> The difference is humans have a concept of truth, humans have intent. A person, taking an aggregation of their research, expertise, and experience to produce an article is (presumably) trying to produce something factual.
It's pretty naive to think that humans have intent and motivation for the truth, and no others. Just look around you in the world - most communication disregards the truth either carelessly or incidentally (because they are motivated to believe or claim something else) or intentionally (lots of that).
> LLMs have no concept of truth, they have no "intent".
My calculator app has no intent or concept of truth, but outputs truth pretty reliably.
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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.