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

91–100 of 464 posts

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

#91

Post by incomingpain »

There are multiple new start ups and existing competition that's impacting them. They are facing competition.

The curious thing is that big LLM folks put together RAG systems which act much like wikipedia. But it's more than that. They built dictionaries, book repos(borderline illegal), news repos, and data knowledge base. These are bigger than wikipedia. Better because you dont have anonymous partisans.

Wikipedia is at a point where they have purged multiple perspectives and it has left an unreliable systemic bias in wikipedia. They are dealing with this problem and competitors are popping up because of these problems.

Larry put out his theses on his user page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Larry_Sanger/Nine_Theses

Originally being heavily censored, vandalized, and deleted. It does seem to have been allowed, despite it being in user space.

Every one of those theses is correct.

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

#92

Post by themafia »

crazygringo wrote: post #10

LLM's have definitely replaced 90% of what I used to look up on a Wikipedia, simply because they integrate from so many more additional sources. But at the same time I continue to contribute edits to Wikipedia. Because it's the source of so much data. To me, it doesn't matter if the information I contribute gets consumed on Wikipedia or consumed via LLM. Either way, it's helping people. Wikipedia isn't going away, ev…

> Either way, it's helping people.

Wikipedia gives away your creation for free. The LLM companies do not. Google is operating a loss leader and not "helping people." In fact, quite the opposite.

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

#93

Post by themafia »

113 wrote: post #84
crazygringo wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not. It's the primary medium by which they get their entertainment . TikTok replaces YouTube and Tumblr before that. It's not like people are watching it instead of reading history books or the New Yorker. And just because you use TikTok doesn't mean you don't check actual news headlines or listen to two-hour-long podcasts.

The younger generation absolutely use Tiktok search to find information.

I'm sure they do. Is that their primary source? Do they use nothing else? Is any of that information put to economic use in their lives or is it just curiosity?

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

#94

Post by ethmarks »

cm2012 wrote: post #12
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.

Isn't it true that only around 10% of Wikipedia massive budget is used to actually run the core website? The rest goes to bloated initiatives in the Wikimedia foundations orbit.

Page 21 of their 2024 annual report[1] has expenses listed. About $3,000,000 for web hosting, about $100,000,000 for salaries and benefits out of $178,000,000 total.

[1]: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/W...

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

#95

Post by vkou »

arunharidas wrote: post #41
aeternum wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure why he feels the need to launch a competitor to Conservapedia.

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

#96

Post by mmooss »

scuff3d wrote: post #61
mmooss wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right, and where are all those LLMs without the billions upon billions of lines of text written by humans? A not insignificant number coming from Wikipedia? Also, LLMs don't produce truth. They don't have a concept of it. Or lies for that matter. If you are using LLMs do study something you know nothing about the information provided by them is as good as useless if you don't verify it with external sources written b…

> where are all those LLMs without the billions upon billions of lines of text written by humans? A not insignificant number coming from Wikipedia?

Where is Wikipedia without all the learning and information from other sources, many of which it put out of business?

> Also, LLMs don't produce truth. They don't have a concept of it. Or lies for that matter. If you are using LLMs do study something you know nothing about the information provided by them is as good as useless if you don't verify it with external sources written by a person. Wikipedia isn't perfect, nothing is, but I trust their model a shitload more then an LLM.

Wikipedia produces consensus that correlates with truth to some degree. LLMs produce statistical output, which in a way is a automated consensus of the LLM's input, that also correlates with truth to some degree - and the correlation is hardly zero.

I agree that information has no value if you don't know its accuracy; it's always a sticking point for me. IMHO Wikipedia has the same problem: I have no idea how accurate it is without verifying it with an external source (and when I've done that, I've often been disappointed).

Has anyone researched the relative accuracy of Wikipedia and LLMs?

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

#97

Post by jmathai »

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…

> It does not mean the information offered by the website is any less valuable

Maybe not less valuable but definitely less relevant. I think both are important.

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

#98

Post by robotnikman »

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.

I've always wondered if increasing everybody's lifespan would result in more people caring more about the long term future. Our lives are so short in the grand scheme of things that we never bother to really thing about the grand scheme of things.

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

#99

Post by I_dream_of_Geni »

(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."

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

#100

Post by matthewkayin »

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…

Someone made a similar argument to me recently about AI, talking about how programmers used to have stacks of reference books at their desks and how many of the old guard had to have trainings convincing them to use google as a reference.

I guess this argument was supposed to convince me to stop being such a luddite and accept the inevitable future, but really, in an increasingly post-truth world, it made me want to go and get myself a stack of reference books.

Post reply on HN