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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

#371

Post by dguest »

brabel wrote: post #330
jader201 wrote: post #319

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.

35 years ago South Africa had the apartheid, and now they outrank the US on a The Economist's Democracy Index [1]. So yeah, things move fast.

Nitpick: The US Voting Rights Act became law in 1965 [2], which is more like 60 years ago. Not sure if that's what you were getting at with "basically an apartheid" but it was the closest concrete landmark near your 50 year timeline.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965

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

#372

Post by imtringued »

hnidiots3 wrote: post #315
SchemaLoad wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've seen people cite an english book on a German topic and intentionally mistranslate words to construct a connection that doesn't exist and was never intended by the authors of the english book.

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

#373

Post by Shorel »

buovjaga wrote: post #348
Shorel wrote: post #341

The other day I was reading the page about the Library of Alexandria. The Wikipedia version virtually doesn't mention the stoning of Hypatia or the burning of the library, except for a different smaller fire caused by a war during Julius Caesar. This page certainly reads like Christian apology, where the almost total destruction of the library by Christian fanatics didn't happen. For me, this heavy bias in basically…

What you say sounds influenced by the movie Agora: https://bookhaven.stanford.edu/2016/03/the-library-of-alexan...

I haven't fully watched that film.

It is definitely influenced by the book Cosmos by Carl Sagan. I feel I read it a hundred times.

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

#374

Post by arbol »

crazygringo wrote: post #178
arbol wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But were you originally convinced to donate by one of those giant Jimmy Wales banners that come up once a year? People won't see them anymore if they're using AI summaries.

My point is, using Wikipedia 10% as much is still using Wikipedia. Does it matter if you see the banner 10 times or 100 times in a month?

In terms of the effectiveness of the banner, yes it absolutely does. Multiple exposures increase your propensity to convert.

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

#375

Post by breppp »

lanyard-textile wrote: post #368
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 a…

In my opinion simply using a dataset of high quality books and highly rated academic journals is enough to surpass current Wikipedia quality.

In my experience when using LLMs as a replacement for Wikipedia (learning about history), it is often of higher quality in niche topics and far less biased in political contentious areas

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

#376

Post by hunterpayne »

al_borland wrote: post #59
skeeter2020 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes a pretty altruistic leadership team to plan for 1000 years; even the multi-billionaire tech bros only plan to live for ~200 or so.

“A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” I recently visited Scotland and on a visit to a distillery they mentioned they bought land in the US to grow trees that will make their barrels one day. The trees take over 100 years to grow (if I remember correctly). How is it we can invest ~200 years into a glass of scotch, yet we aren’t willing to take the same care and…

Scotch is aged in previously used Bourbon barrels from the US. Those Bourbon barrels are harvested from local forests (in Kentucky) which are very large and healthy. The probable reason they purchased land was for an investment or perhaps an alternate income stream or even for some sort of government tax break or credit. They may have told you it was to make barrels but it isn't at all likely that will ever happen. Good story though...

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

#377

Post by ragazzina »

vee-kay wrote: post #356
SchemaLoad wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And yet Wikipedia is biased (and hence may even be misinformative) on many topics, because its editors and moderators are biased. 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…

>I am an editor on Wikipedia and my own informative useful edits to some important topics on my country have been rejected

This sounds really interesting, can you provide an example?

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

#378

Post by mmooss »

dragonwriter wrote: post #139
mmooss wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which businesses did Wikipedia put out of business? Just as a start, other sources of reference, including encylopedias, dictionaries, websites, etc. For example, I'm sure it impacts McGraw-Hill's AccessScience, which likely you've never heard of. > This is documented on Wikipedia itself Maybe there's a little bias there? Would Wikipedia accept Wikipedia's analysis of its own reliability as a valid source? I've hea…

> > Which businesses did Wikipedia put out of business? > Just as a start, other sources of reference, including encylopedias, dictionaries, websites, etc. For example, I'm sure it impacts McGraw-Hill's AccessScience, which likely you've never heard of. Your “for example” in response to a question about what businesses Wikipedia put out of business is a business that is...still in business?

I bet your mind is more subtle than that.

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

#379

Post by imtringued »

adastra22 wrote: post #358
TheRoque wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They try to work hard and get rid of bias through various methods: peer reviews, precise methodology (randomization, blind tests etc.). And of course, even those sciences are not perfect, subject to biases, and evolve. This applies only to a subset of fields, in a lot of fields you either don't have the time to remove biases this way or it's impossible because it's inherently subjective. Besides, if you needed unbias…

I think we have a fundamental disagreement here. There is no bias in the statement "2 + 2 = 4". Nor is there bias in stating that "any two masses experience an attraction force proportional to the masses and inverse-square proportional to the distance separating them." Not less bias -- no bias.

There is a pretty strong bias in the statement "2 + 2 = 4" because math doesn't care about the encoding used to describe a sum. For example, in an alternative society the expression could be written with flipped number symbols, right to left or in a vertical layout. Axioms are also a form of bias.

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

#380

Post by antegamisou »

pveierland wrote: post #268
SchemaLoad wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't is good that there are some forcing factors to help ensure the quality of the content? I get that there's plenty of drama and difficulties in building and moderating the content of Wikipedia, but it certainly does not appear to stagnate in terms of content if you are looking at e.g. the number of articles on English Wikipedia. The overall process appears to produce great outcomes and it is the greatest collecti…

The forcing factors aren't what they are supposed to be though. "Credible" sources and citations are exclusively up to the article moderators personal tastes which are very rarely objective.
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