Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 464 posts

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

#41

Post by arunharidas »

aeternum wrote: post #39
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…

I think we need Wikipedia competitors. Wikipedia is a victim of it's own success, it was excellent at avoiding bias for quite awhile and the vast majority of articles are extremely well written. However it's massive popularity and dominance have also led to, well this guy put it best: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dalberg-Acton,_1st_Baron_...

Elon Musk is launching Grokipedia this week as a competition to Wikipedia.

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

#42

Post by undeveloper »

lwansbrough wrote: post #7
sublinear wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As Miller puts it, “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.”

Contributors are a tiny % of users. I'm sure they've got some room for improvement on incentivizing new contributors. But Wikipedia is a gift to humanity and I hope we find new ways for them to be paid for their contributions to AI.

> Contributors are a tiny % of users most of them were wikipedia users in some form before they were contributors I imagine

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

#43

Post by undeveloper »

byzantinegene wrote: post #29
codinhood wrote: post #22

AI seems obvious, but social video? Are they saying people watch TikToks instead of reading Wikipedia, or people who used to look things up don’t bother anymore because of TikTok?

tiktok seems to be the primary medium by which Gen Alpha obtain their news and knowledge

Gen Z as well. Many well into their 20s heavily consume tiktok.

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

#44

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

RickJWagner wrote: post #16
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…

Not for me. Wikipedia had its day, in between print encyclopedias and quick query AI. Its place in history is now set. Something else will come along soon enough.

Disagree. Say I'm looking for a list of countries and their populations.

Wikipedia almost certainly has this in a nice table, which I can sort by any column, and all the countries are hyperlinked to their own articles, and it probably links to the concept of population estimation too.

There will be a primary source - But would a primary source also have articles on every country? That are ad-free, that follow a consistent format? That are editable? Then it's just Wikipedia again. If not, then you have to rely on the LLM to knit together these sources.

I don't see wikis dying yet.

At work, I had rigged one of my internal tools so that when you were looking at a system's health report, it also linked to an internal wiki page where we could track human-edited notes about that system over time. I don't think an AI can do this, because you can't fine-tune it, you can't be sure it's lossless round-tripping, and if it has to do a web search, then it has to search for the wiki you said is obsolete.

OpenStreetMap does the same thing. Their UIs automatically deep-link every key into their wiki. So if you click on a drinking fountain, it will say something like "amenity:drinking_water" and the UI doesn't know what that is, but it links you to the wiki page where someone's certainly put example pictures and explained the most useful ways to tag it.

There has to be a ground truth. Wikipedia and alike are a very strong middle point on the Pareto frontier between primary sources (or oral tradition, for OSM) and LLM summary

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

#45

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

arjie wrote: post #26

It's all right. Wikipedia was a magical device for its time, and it's still a great aggregator of information. It will probably last forever as such a link aggregator. Read-time curation is obviously far better than write-time curation, but the former used to be very hard. Now we have the former for cheap so it makes sense for Wikipedia to be Yet Another Source into the read-time curator. And the existence of a sourc…

> Read-time curation is obviously far better than write-time curation, but the former used to be very hard. Now we have the former for cheap

It's _kinda_ cheap. Wikipedia is so cheap you can fit it all on a phone and search it instantly.

I agree overall but LLMs are just so heavy. I don't know if most people can afford to run one locally, and they're lossy. Both on a phone would be great. I fret a lot about data ownership, you know

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

#46

Post by KPGv2 »

lwansbrough wrote: post #7
sublinear wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As Miller puts it, “With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.”

Contributors are a tiny % of users. I'm sure they've got some room for improvement on incentivizing new contributors. But Wikipedia is a gift to humanity and I hope we find new ways for them to be paid for their contributions to AI.

1/3 of all donations are from the banner. I just went and looked at their annual report, which disclosed this.

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

#47

Post by ryanwhitney »

adventured wrote: post #14
johnnyanmac wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I've always scoffed at the Wikimedia Foundation's warchest and continuously increasing annual spending. what are they increasing spending on? Are they still trying to branch out to other initiatives? I understand, even with static pages, that hosting one of the largest websites in the world won't be cheap, but it can't be rising that much, right?

For 2023-2024, their budget was ~$177 million. Travel & events was 7.4% of their expenses. Processing fees on donations was 6.4%. Grants & movement support was 25%. Hosting was 3.4%. Facilities was 1.4%. The Wikimedia Foundation is another Komen Foundation.

They reported a headcount of 644 for 2024–2025.

It's all very open if anyone wants to track down details themselves: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikimedia_Foundatio...

2025–2026 is in-progress: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_Annual_...

>Similar to last year, technology-related work represents nearly half of the Foundation's budget at 47% alongside priorities to protect volunteers and defend the projects of an additional 29% – a total of 76% of the Foundation's annual budget. Expenses for finance, risk management, fundraising, and operations account for the remaining 24%.

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

#48

Post by al_borland »

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 it for the right reasons that will keep the core business around for the long run.

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

#49

Post by likium »

somenameforme wrote: post #37
kibwen wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until LLMs gain the ability to cite their sources, they will be, at best, a search engine on top of Wikipedia, and not a replacement for it.

Most/all LLMs have already been able to cite sources for quite some time now.

Citing is not referencing links, it's finding primary sources and fact-checking. Kurzgesagt[1], an informational YouTube channel, has had issues with LLMs citing LLM generated content.

[1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=_zfN9wnPvU0&t=175

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

#50

Post by skeeter2020 »

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…

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.
Post reply on HN