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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

#361

Post by miningape »

DocTomoe wrote: post #335
brabel wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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' p…

Yes! It annoys me to no end when people pretend that time is developing us into a perfect image - we're just the latest generation in a long string of improvements. Making it seem like development is predetermined.

Ask a medieval peasant and he wouldnt even be able to describe how his life is different from his father's.

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

#362

Post by tsimionescu »

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…

Wikipedia, while not being reliant on ads, nor even on donations that much (given how much they have amassed) is still 100% dependent on having active users. People who get a ChatGPT answer will not go on to edit Wikipedia if that answer happens to be wrong. They won't curate articles to notice when someone is vandalizing them and put the right info back.

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

#363

Post by tsimionescu »

al_borland wrote: post #48
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…

> Become self sustaining through investments so it can live for 1000 years. I always wondered why more companies or organizations didn’t do this. Pile up money during the good years to allow themselves to not need continued outside income to keep going, so they can do what is right instead of compromising their vision for the sake of hitting quarterly earnings. That isn’t to say they can’t keep making money, but do i…

I think some NGOs and privately owned companies actually do this. But most companies exist to increase the wealth of their shareholders, so if they don't consistently grow, they serve no purpose. If NVIDIA kept its exact current revenue and profits for the next two years, their CEO would be fired and their share price would be in the gutter.

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

#364

Post by busymom0 »

rkomorn wrote: post #67
intended wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The warning sign is not traffic for ads, although this will result in a drop in donations eventually. It means that now, people are paying for their AI subscriptions, while they don’t see Wikipedia at all. The primary source is being intermediated - which is the opposite of what the net was supposed to achieve. This is the piracy argument, except this time its not little old ladies doing it, but massive for profit fi…

Wait, when were little old ladies the perpetrators of piracy?

I believe that comment is referencing this recent news:

> Sony tells SCOTUS that people accused of piracy aren’t “innocent grandmothers”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/10/sony-tells-scotu...

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

#366

Post by busymom0 »

maltelandwehr wrote: post #355
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…

If if all this is true, LLMs would still need to create a repository of such aggregated "summarizations of secondary sources". LLMs cannot in real time find and read thousands of secondary sources. Especially not if some of these might have already disappeared or are not digitalized. I can see a future where LLM labs a) donate to Wikipedia and b) contribute to it with agents that suggest edits and review facts.

I think LLM companies will need to donate and contribute to more direct sources are newspapers, journalists, bloggers, coders posting on stack overflow etc and not Wikipedia (which is more of a tertiary source).

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

#367

Post by IshKebab »

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.

If nobody uses Wikipedia they won't get any donations, and unfortunately they wasted the last two decades blowing literally hundreds of millions of dollars on random community and outreach programs instead of building an endowment in case something exactly like this happened.

No really, it was in the news a few years ago but nothing changed as far as I know.

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

#368

Post by lanyard-textile »

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…

It most certainly will not.

LLMs lack the human nuance that a good Wikipedia article requires. Weighing quality sources and digesting them in the most useful way that a human would want and expect — that is very difficult for both humans and machines, and it is why Wikipedia as a whole is such a treasure: Because a community of editors take the time to tweak the articles and aim for perfection.

There are guidelines across all Wikipedia articles that make a good experience for the reader. We can’t even get the world’s greatest LLMs to follow a set of rules in a small conversation.

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

#369

Post by yorwba »

Gander5739 wrote: post #345
yorwba wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can download twice-monthly database dumps, but they consist of the raw wikitext, so you need to do a bunch of extra work to render templates and stuff. Meanwhile, if you write a generic scraper, it can connect to Wikipedia like it connects to any other website and get the correctly-rendered HTML. People who aren't interested in Wikipedia specifically but want to download pretty much the entire internet unsurprisi…

There are also dumps of Wikipedia in html format.

Do you mean the discontinued Enterprise HTML dumps https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/enterprise_html/ or the even older discontinued static HTML dumps https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/static_html_dumps/current/... or is there another set of dumps I'm not aware of?

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

#370

Post by maltelandwehr »

I_dream_of_Geni wrote: post #99

(looks outside at the street) I'm wondering why would traffic be less because of AI search?? SO I asked AI. Its answer? "By analyzing data and demand in real-time, AI is able to predict peak travel times and adjust train, subway, and bus routes as needed, reducing overcrowding and, in the case of buses, traffic congestion."

In the past, you would type a question into Google. To get the full, detailed answer you had to click on the Wikipedia search result.

With ChatGPT or Google AI Mode, you get all answers directly in the chat. And you can even ask follow-up questions. There is no need to click on a link.

From the data I have seen, 40% of searches on Google used to lead to a click to another website. In ChatGPT and Google AI Mode, this number is lower than 5%. One study (with a small N) even came to the conclusion that the number is 0%.

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