Live data from Hacker News

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

techcrunch.com

331–340 of 464 posts

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

#331
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…

> and training can easily focus on high quality books and thus exceed wikipedia in quality.

Then it will never exceed Wikipedia. There are no high quality books to many of Wikipedia‘s articles and even if who qualifies those books as as high quality.

And less traffic is not only a problem of Wikipedia but also other websites.

So AI is killing the source it feeds on.

This is the golden age of AI. The next age will be filled with less good sources, more AI generated content and sites that actively try to poison LLMs

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45529587

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

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of the dozens of contributions I've made over the decades, some recent, either zero or one of them have been reverted.

I have contributed inconsequential lies to clown on a friend and they persisted for years.

In middle school, I pretended my friend was a famous rapper and snuck his name onto random articles. Some of those stuck around really long.

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

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it was a fork from like a decade ago. https://www.conservapedia.com/Main_Page It started out crazy but it only got crazier as time went on. The biggest problem with wikipedia competitors, is the only people who tend to put in effort to make one are usually crazy.

I notice this with a lot of projects/communities. The only people who tend to create change are usually eccentric.

like the xorg fork

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

#334
post #316
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

LLMs nowadays are like search engines before SEO.

They will habe there own kind of spam problem.

And wait what happens to their quality as soon as the AI companies habe to generate profit.

I doubt you can collect second source references at the same price Wikipedia does. People aren’t as eager to help a billion dollar company for free to make profit.

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

#335
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In 1000 years Sweden went from a Viking culture to an egalitarian, tolerant, multicultural society. Just imagine how much change you can have in the next 1000 years. 50 years ago you guys had basically an apartheid and women’s place was the kitchen.

The problems with that argument are that first, the Viking culture was mostly rural and agricultural, the raiding and pillaging was a tiny side-effect that mostly happened during times of economic hardship, not as a way of life ... and that today's Sweden is rapidly recessing back to a less-tolerant, anti-multicultural society for many reasons. You also conveniently ignore the much more bloody 'military superpower' phase in the 1600s.

It’s not Ragnar Lodbrok turning into ABBA. It’s a mostly peaceful peasant society getting tossed around by history until it became a mostly peaceful service economy - and the shaking never really stopped.

History is not a straight progress line. Ask the Romans.

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

#336
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In 1000 years Sweden went from a Viking culture to an egalitarian, tolerant, multicultural society. Just imagine how much change you can have in the next 1000 years. 50 years ago you guys had basically an apartheid and women’s place was the kitchen.

[flagged]

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

#337

I really hope that the same thing is happening to all kinds of SEO-ridden websites out there. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44631662

It happens to all, means the good sites to that need add money and the AI crawlers add traffic to all so that even those without adds may get a cost problem.

Not to mention all the sites that will pop up to poison the LLMs in their favor.

On top of that LLMs will either cost more or will get adds too.

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

#339
post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.or…

But Wikipedia only really exists as long as there are editors of a certain quality and dedication. Without those, what good is the foundation?

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

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lol the pace things change. If there was an accurate time travel movie it would be more of a comedy. I don't care where you're from. Which language you speak. Even Chinese has changed. But any language especially English has changed so much it would be a foreign language if you went back.
Post reply on HN