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 time to save money. Become self sustaining through investments so it can live for 1000 years.
To me, it is an existence for the common good and should be governed as such.
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?
Grants & movement support was 25%.
Hosting was 3.4%. Facilities was 1.4%.
The Wikimedia Foundation is another Komen Foundation.
I'm sure all those editors with decades of experience can do quickly outdo OpenAI and Grok and what have you.
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.
Printed texts are still useful but so is Wikipedia (I continue to use both).
665 ChatGPT-User
396 Bingbot
296 Googlebot
037 PerplexityBot
Fascinating.
About 80% of traffic to my sites (a few personal blogs and a community site) is from ai bots, search engine spiders or seo scrapers.
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, even if its website stops being the primary way most people get information from it.
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 operations[1], and that includes all of their sites, not just Wikipedia. Fully 12% of the money they collect from you is. . . used to ask you for more money[1]
People rightfully get upset about individual editors having specific agendas on Wikipedia and I get it. Often that is the case. But the chat interface for LLMs allows for a back and forth where you can force them to look past some text to get closer to a truth.
For my part, I think it's nice to be part of making that base substrate of human knowledge in an open way, and some kinds of fixes to Wikipedia articles are very easy. So what little I do, I'll keep doing. Makes me happy to help.
Some of the fruit is really low-hanging, take a look at this garbage someone added to an article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salvadoran_gang_c...
crmd•1h ago
I always assumed the need for metastatic growth was limited to VC-backed and ad-revenue dependent companies.
sublinear•1h ago
lwansbrough•1h ago
qingcharles•1h ago
And their costs are even increasing because while human viewers are decreasing they are getting hugged to death by AI scrapes.
johnnyanmac•1h ago
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.
cm2012•1h ago
crmd•59m ago
AstroBen•45m ago
Something tells me a person is way less likely to donate if they're consuming the content through an LLM middleman
khamidou•9m ago
I doubt that they're getting "hugged to death" by AI scrapers.