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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

#51

Post by al_borland »

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.

LLMs are useless without source material.

AI companies should be donating large sums of money to Wikipedia and other such sites to keep them healthy. Without good sources, we’re going to have AI training off AI slop.

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

#52

Post by Okx »

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…

Unfortunately, Wikipedia doesn't seem interested in this. Their revenue is more than enough be able to invest and sustain the site forever, but they just increase expenses on non-core outgoings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CANCER

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

#53

Post by wodenokoto »

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 Wikimedia needs expensive outreach and modernisation to stay relevant. And most of those attempts will be in vain.

A poor comparison is how much money coca cola spends on advertisement, even though it is one of the best known brands in the entire world. And most of their advertisement is simply "This is our name, we exists", not even a value proposition or call to action.

If Wikimedia sets themselves up to pay for servers and maintenance for perpetuity, they will fall into obscurity.

With that being said, I also don't think they are spending their money in a good way.

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

#54

Post by mmooss »

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…

Many said (some still say) that Wikipedia is not a replacement for traditional encyclopedias with articles written by domain experts, such as Britannica.

Many more scoffed at that, saying those people were just stuck in their old ways and unable to adjust to the obviously superior new thing.

Is that you? AI applications are different than Wikipedia and are better in some ways: Coverage is much greater - you can get a detailed article on almost any topic. And if you have questions after reading a Wikipedia article, Wikipedia can't help you; the AI software can answer them. Also, it's a bit easier to find the information you want.

Personally, I'm with the first group, at the top if this comment. And now truth, accuracy, and epistemology, and public interest in those things, take another major hit in the post-truth era.

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

#55

Post by yorwba »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #11
qingcharles wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are highly dependent on web traffic for revenue. And their costs are even increasing because while human viewers are decreasing they are getting hugged to death by AI scrapes.

scraping Wikipedia feels like the stupidest possible move. You can in fact download the entire encyclopedia at any time and take all the time in the world parsing offline. For such purposes, I'd naively just setup some weekly job to download Wikipedia and then run a "scrape" on that. Even weekly may be overkill; a monthly snapshot may do more than enough.

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 unsurprisingly choose the latter option.

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

#56

Post by cindyllm »

al_borland wrote: post #51
RickJWagner wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LLMs are useless without source material. AI companies should be donating large sums of money to Wikipedia and other such sites to keep them healthy. Without good sources, we’re going to have AI training off AI slop.

[dead]

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

#57

Post by 8bitsrule »

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?

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

#59

Post by al_borland »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #50
al_borland wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

“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 long term thinking in most other areas.

Even without being around for 1,000 years, I’d think doing this would de-stress and de-risk. Somewhere along way it became a bad thing to have a good, stable, long-lasting business. The only thing that seems to matter now is growth, even if they means instability, stress, excessive risk, and a short stay.

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

#60

Post by consumer451 »

mmooss wrote: post #54
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…

Many said (some still say) that Wikipedia is not a replacement for traditional encyclopedias with articles written by domain experts, such as Britannica. Many more scoffed at that, saying those people were just stuck in their old ways and unable to adjust to the obviously superior new thing. Is that you? AI applications are different than Wikipedia and are better in some ways: Coverage is much greater - you can get a…

> post-truth era.

I know it’s completely normalized and the official name, but this has to be the most dangerous euphemism of our time.

It’s the era of lies.

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