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

I think criticism should be based on looking at what they were trying to accomplish by spending the money, was it a worthwhile thing to try and do and was the solution executed effectively.

Just saying they spent $X, X is a big number, it must be wasteful without considering the value that is attempting to be purchssed with that money is a bit meaningless.

> 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.

I think the person who i was responding to was referring to volunteer travel not staff travel (which of course also happens but i believe would be a different budget line item). This would be mostly for people who write the articles but also for people who do moderation activity. In person meetings can help resolve intractable disputes, share best practises, figure out complex disagreements, build relationships. All the same reasons that real companies fly their staff to expensive offsites.

Software is never done, there are always going to be things that come up and things to be improved. Some of them may be worth it some not.

As an example, there are changes coming to how ip addresses are handled, especially for logged out users. Nobody is exactly saying why, but im 99% sure its GDPR compliance related. That is a big project due to some deeply held assumptions, and probably critical.

A more mid-tier example might be, last year WMF rolled out a (caching) server precense in Brazil. The goal was to reduce latency for South American users. Is that worth it? It was probably a fair bit of money. If WMF was broke it wouldn't be, but given they do have some money, it seems like a reasonable improvement to me. Reasonable minds could probably disagree of course.

And an example of stupid projects might be WMF's ill-fated attempt at making an AI summarizer. That was a pure waste of money.

I guess my point it, WMF is a pretty big entity, some of the things they do are good, some are stupid, and i think people should criticize the projects they embark on rather than the big sum of money taken out of context.

Source: the Wikipedia founder himself..

https://www.dailysignal.com/2025/10/12/wikipedia-co-founder-...

And the real reason that editing Wikipedia is difficult, is because of the ideological bias of the moderators so they support only the editors to conform to their ideology and reject any edits that go against their ideology even if those edit are literal proven truths.

Source: I am an editor on Wikipedia and my own informative useful edits to some important topics on my country have been rejected, while the misinformative and even malicious edits by agents of the enemy nation on those same topics were allowed and continue to persist and mislead whoever reads those articles.

Wikipedia has become a weapon of misinformative propaganda, and it's not a tool or repository of useful accurate information. This is why Wikipedia is banned in schools and universities, because its information may not be credible and Wikipedia has long ago lost the integrity that any worldwide free information repository should have had.

We would just need a good system to a) keep humans in the loop and b) sort out bad actors.