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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

#411

Post by epolanski »

jdiff wrote: post #403
epolanski wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's too politicized and biased for my taste to give it any of my time.

Biased in what way? The traditional "reality has a distinct liberal bias" way or some other way I'm unaware of?

In countless ways, there's endless wars among admins.

An example though is that several historically relevant facts are edited out to favor some narrative.

E.g. Crimea, the Ukrainian autonomous republic that seceded/was annexed by Russia, tried to split 3 times from Ukraine, once even during the Soviet Union, but those events have been edited out on multiple pages to favor some western-centric narratives.

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

#412

Post by scuff3d »

mmooss wrote: post #329
scuff3d wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comment about Wikipedia supposedly putting companies out of business is so goofy I'm not even gonna comment on it. I'm surprised you'd bother trying to make a point there. The difference is humans have a concept of truth , humans have intent. A person, taking an aggregation of their research, expertise, and experience to produce an article is (presumably) trying to produce something factual. Other humans then com…

> The comment about Wikipedia supposedly putting companies out of business is so goofy I'm not even gonna comment on it. I've learned that when people don't have any merits to argue, they turn to ridicule. Right back at you buddy. > The difference is humans have a concept of truth, humans have intent. A person, taking an aggregation of their research, expertise, and experience to produce an article is (presumably) tr…

To think that I'm saying all humans intend to produce truth you'd have to intentionally misread my comment. Wikipedia obviously has to deal with bad actors and vandalism, and they have processes in place for that. My point is that the intent matters.

Calculators aren't a useful analogy for LLMs. They produce a deterministic output based on a (relatively) narrow range of inputs. The calculations to produce those outputs follow very rigid and well defined rules.

LLMs by their very nature are non-deterministic, and the inputs/outputs are far more complicated.

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

#413

Post by insane_dreamer »

andersa wrote: post #137
NewsaHackO wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I misssing something or is Wikipedia net positive 200M? If this is true, that's eye opening. Weird given how much they beg for money on every article.

The amount of money moving through Wikipedia is absolutely mind blowing, and next to none of that is even being used to sustain the site. Hope those still donating to it feel smart about what they're supporting...

Because that's how you build up a foundation that will be self-sustaining when the donations run out.

It's not a bad strategy. I've looked at Wikimedia's financial statements and have no problem giving a small monthly amount to them considering how much value I get from the site.

I certainly prefer my money going to them than to Zuckerberg or Altman or MSFT shareholders.

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

#414

Post by philipkglass »

parpfish wrote: post #234
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…

as somebody that has wrassled with the wikipedia dumps a number of times, i don't understand why wiki doesn't release some sort of sdk that gives you the 'official' parse

I have wrestled with it too. I believe it's because wikitext is an ad-hoc format that evolved so that the only 100% correct parser/renderer is the MediaWiki implementation. It's like asking for an SDK that correctly parses Perl. Only Perl can do that.

There are a bunch of mainly-compatible third party parsers in various languages. The best one I've found so far is Sweble but even it mishandles a small percentage of rare cases.

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

#415

Post by adastra22 »

imtringued wrote: post #379
adastra22 wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Definitely disagree.

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

#416

Post by Shocka1 »

zerd wrote: post #128
bad_username wrote: post #58

My personal traffic to Wikipedia fell after around 2019, when activist editors took over, and the site ceased to be trustworthy for a lot of important topics.

[citation needed]

I was curious too and found these pretty quickly - I dunno if this applies to all topics, but at least the political ones:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5022797

https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/is...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241750096_Is_Wikipe...

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

#417

Post by 8bitsrule »

8bitsrule wrote: post #57
Mistletoe wrote: post #20

Oh good, Jimmy can stop hounding me for money like a late night infomercial or televangelist. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34106982 >2022 >It’s the dishonesty of Wikipedia that bothers me. The implication is that donations are urgently needed to keep the website running. In reality they have $300m in the bank and revenue is growing every year[0]. Even Wikipedia says only 43% of donations are used for site ope…

Yeah ... Some days it feels as though 98% of the net has turned into a giant begging-bowl. Long-time major sites are now saying stuff like "You're reading your last free article." Yeah? Don't count on that. Many of them are sites that have built themselves without any original reporting. Where will they scrape the content they've used to grow if their sources take the same attitude?

Here's looking at you, Wired

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

#418

Post by ksherlock »

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?

Here's a direct quote from a WSJ article the other day: "She searched for the drug on TikTok, her go-to information source"

gift link: https://www.wsj.com/health/wellness/anti-depressants-lifesty...

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

#419

Post by I_dream_of_Geni »

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."

wow, bunches of downvotes? Because of a little humor? My god people, what is it with you?

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

#420

Post by jjtheblunt »

incompatible wrote: post #231
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…

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 US government is already actively plotting against it.

the article you linked in no way supports that sentence.

(there's just a committee looking into claims that edits are used for propaganda in general.)

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