Have Wikipedia and Mozilla passed a point of inevitable decline?
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Mozilla is so dependent on Google today that they begged US courts not to enforce antitrust laws against Google, because it would hurt their only source of revenue. So much for the champions of the open web!
Mozilla’s CEO discusses testimony in U.S. v. Google search case | The Mozilla Blog
Mozilla's CFO testified in the U.S. v. Google LLC search trial, highlighting its potential impact on small and independent browsers.
(blog.mozilla.org)
I don't know if Mozilla is definitively boxed in at this point. Maybe there's an act 3 for them somewhere. I use their VPN and it's fine. They have a few other paid products.
They've repeatedly failed to leverage their Firefox userbase to build other products -- the mobile OS, of course, but also Mozilla Social, which they shut down without ever really launching it.
Eventually, that userbase is going to be too small to launch anything off of.
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@evan @pizaaman I dont google, I search
In fact I do not use google search much at all these days. I am going on international friends/colleagues who train wikipedians, and/ or use WP in their teaching. I am going on the resources it offers and not headline news. I think the AI deals are a massive ethical problem but we soldier on. All this applies to IA as well. -
I don't know if Mozilla is definitively boxed in at this point. Maybe there's an act 3 for them somewhere. I use their VPN and it's fine. They have a few other paid products.
They've repeatedly failed to leverage their Firefox userbase to build other products -- the mobile OS, of course, but also Mozilla Social, which they shut down without ever really launching it.
Eventually, that userbase is going to be too small to launch anything off of.
For those of us who depended on Mozilla as a standard bearer for open source and the open web, it's disheartening to see that ember dying. We needed a Mozilla that launched new products, not one that shut them down without moving forward.
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For those of us who depended on Mozilla as a standard bearer for open source and the open web, it's disheartening to see that ember dying. We needed a Mozilla that launched new products, not one that shut them down without moving forward.
Wikipedia is in a similar bind -- although from the comments, I think it's only obvious to Wikimedia insiders right now. Wikipedia has fallen from a peak of about 5th-biggest web site to about 12th today. Still huge, but trending in the wrong direction.
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Wikipedia is in a similar bind -- although from the comments, I think it's only obvious to Wikimedia insiders right now. Wikipedia has fallen from a peak of about 5th-biggest web site to about 12th today. Still huge, but trending in the wrong direction.
My friend @luis_in_brief has written a couple of good articles about Wikipedia's collapsing web traffic:
https://lu.is/2026/04/wikipedia-decline-by-topic/
https://lu.is/2026/04/wikipedia-career-cliff/
I especially appreciate this article about how Wikipedia's "flat" traffic growth over the last decade masks a precipitous decline in relative Web traffic:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now
My former colleague Marshall Miller at WMF wrote about a vertiginous 8% quarterly drop in Wikipedia page views at the end of 2025:
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wikipedia/
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My friend @luis_in_brief has written a couple of good articles about Wikipedia's collapsing web traffic:
https://lu.is/2026/04/wikipedia-decline-by-topic/
https://lu.is/2026/04/wikipedia-career-cliff/
I especially appreciate this article about how Wikipedia's "flat" traffic growth over the last decade masks a precipitous decline in relative Web traffic:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now
My former colleague Marshall Miller at WMF wrote about a vertiginous 8% quarterly drop in Wikipedia page views at the end of 2025:
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wikipedia/
Page views are the lifeblood of Wikipedia. Content generation and revenue derive from this important source. When search summaries or AI chatbots insert themselves between readers and Wikipedia, they cut the project off from that content source and revenue.
Evan Prodromou (@evan@cosocial.ca)
@anime_reference@wetdry.world Wikipedia edits depend on page views. People edit the the pages when they read something that's untrue, clumsy, or misspelled. If they don't get page views, they don't get edits. Wikimedia Foundation revenue depends on page views. People donate to Wikimedia when they land on a Wikipedia page with a donation request banner. If there aren't page views, WMF doesn't get donations. Page views are a very big deal for Wikimedia.
CoSocial (cosocial.ca)
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Page views are the lifeblood of Wikipedia. Content generation and revenue derive from this important source. When search summaries or AI chatbots insert themselves between readers and Wikipedia, they cut the project off from that content source and revenue.
Evan Prodromou (@evan@cosocial.ca)
@anime_reference@wetdry.world Wikipedia edits depend on page views. People edit the the pages when they read something that's untrue, clumsy, or misspelled. If they don't get page views, they don't get edits. Wikimedia Foundation revenue depends on page views. People donate to Wikimedia when they land on a Wikipedia page with a donation request banner. If there aren't page views, WMF doesn't get donations. Page views are a very big deal for Wikimedia.
CoSocial (cosocial.ca)
I wrote about this in 2017.
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I wrote about this in 2017.
Since that time, Wikimedia Foundation has made a lot of deals with big companies who reuse Wikipedia and other Wikimedia data. (As a staff member, I was part of the initial product discovery for those deals.) I don't think any of those deals has taken into account the need for editing affordances in re-use products.
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Since that time, Wikimedia Foundation has made a lot of deals with big companies who reuse Wikipedia and other Wikimedia data. (As a staff member, I was part of the initial product discovery for those deals.) I don't think any of those deals has taken into account the need for editing affordances in re-use products.
A lot of the commenters on this poll have noted the different approaches to LLMs by both Mozilla and Wikimedia. Mozilla has started https://mozilla.ai/ and is actively working on AI features in Firefox. Wikimedia has been less enthusiastic, and English Wikipedia banned wholesale rewrites of WP articles with AI. https://www.theverge.com/tech/901461/wikipedia-ai-generated-article-ban
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A lot of the commenters on this poll have noted the different approaches to LLMs by both Mozilla and Wikimedia. Mozilla has started https://mozilla.ai/ and is actively working on AI features in Firefox. Wikimedia has been less enthusiastic, and English Wikipedia banned wholesale rewrites of WP articles with AI. https://www.theverge.com/tech/901461/wikipedia-ai-generated-article-ban
I'm not sure either of those policies is going to matter in the long run.
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I'm not sure either of those policies is going to matter in the long run.
So, here's the hard part of the poll question: *inevitable* decline. Have these two major projects reached a point where their optionality has run out, and they're going to just keep shrinking, failing to support other projects in the ecosystem, living with less and less? Losing the manganese mine, losing the barley fields, trying to stretch the last of the soup next to a cold fire as the orcs beat down the last walls of the university?
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So, here's the hard part of the poll question: *inevitable* decline. Have these two major projects reached a point where their optionality has run out, and they're going to just keep shrinking, failing to support other projects in the ecosystem, living with less and less? Losing the manganese mine, losing the barley fields, trying to stretch the last of the soup next to a cold fire as the orcs beat down the last walls of the university?
I don't know, honestly.
My harsh assessment is that Mozilla has developed a culture of quitters -- they kill products long before they've had a chance to thrive.
Wikimedia, on the other hand, is an intrinsically conservative ecosystem. I don't know if it has the culture to try new things. They may try cutting their way to success, too, like with the shutdown of Wikinews.
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So, here's the hard part of the poll question: *inevitable* decline. Have these two major projects reached a point where their optionality has run out, and they're going to just keep shrinking, failing to support other projects in the ecosystem, living with less and less? Losing the manganese mine, losing the barley fields, trying to stretch the last of the soup next to a cold fire as the orcs beat down the last walls of the university?
@evan We'll still be migrating off jQuery UI at that point, so at least we'll be occupied as the walls fall.
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Wikipedia is in a similar bind -- although from the comments, I think it's only obvious to Wikimedia insiders right now. Wikipedia has fallen from a peak of about 5th-biggest web site to about 12th today. Still huge, but trending in the wrong direction.
@evan agree on both. People vote with their hearts, but what's happening is the techno-orcs have sucked the oxygen out of all the heroic old-time projects. Not an insider but I wouldn't be surprised if Wikipedia is dropping because it too is no longer needed as fig leaf. They took some risky bets (I know of abstract Wikipedia, wikibase) but they didn't flourish. Actually I can't think of any growing open project today that touches *mass* audiences. Signal with their 70 mln users comes closest.
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I don't know, honestly.
My harsh assessment is that Mozilla has developed a culture of quitters -- they kill products long before they've had a chance to thrive.
Wikimedia, on the other hand, is an intrinsically conservative ecosystem. I don't know if it has the culture to try new things. They may try cutting their way to success, too, like with the shutdown of Wikinews.
And I guess that's surfacing something important about both cases -- and a chance to overextend my metaphor. Pulling out of a death spiral in a video game requires a lot of knowledge of the game, and a certain willingness to take risks. You have to sometimes send an expeditionary force through the mountains to find a uranium mining site. Or you put all your barley resources into building a war blimp. If you don't know these long-shot options are possible, you won't try them, and you'll fail.
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I don't know, honestly.
My harsh assessment is that Mozilla has developed a culture of quitters -- they kill products long before they've had a chance to thrive.
Wikimedia, on the other hand, is an intrinsically conservative ecosystem. I don't know if it has the culture to try new things. They may try cutting their way to success, too, like with the shutdown of Wikinews.
@evan Who decides what needs to be killed? That is key.
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Mozilla is so dependent on Google today that they begged US courts not to enforce antitrust laws against Google, because it would hurt their only source of revenue. So much for the champions of the open web!
Mozilla’s CEO discusses testimony in U.S. v. Google search case | The Mozilla Blog
Mozilla's CFO testified in the U.S. v. Google LLC search trial, highlighting its potential impact on small and independent browsers.
(blog.mozilla.org)
@evan didn't know about this - but this is really feeding their enemy long-term. Failing US antitrust is a huge part of the issues there is with big tech in these years.
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And I guess that's surfacing something important about both cases -- and a chance to overextend my metaphor. Pulling out of a death spiral in a video game requires a lot of knowledge of the game, and a certain willingness to take risks. You have to sometimes send an expeditionary force through the mountains to find a uranium mining site. Or you put all your barley resources into building a war blimp. If you don't know these long-shot options are possible, you won't try them, and you'll fail.
What could Mozilla do? Build cloud services attached to your Firefox account -- like Google and Apple have. Use their reputation for openness and privacy to attract a generation of users who are despondent over Big Tech.
What could Wikimedia do? Use public pressure and shame to rewrite those re-use deals. And also disintermediate -- get directly connected to users, with chatbots, search, and voice assistants of their own.
Or maybe even wilder things. I don't know everything; I'm just some guy.
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What could Mozilla do? Build cloud services attached to your Firefox account -- like Google and Apple have. Use their reputation for openness and privacy to attract a generation of users who are despondent over Big Tech.
What could Wikimedia do? Use public pressure and shame to rewrite those re-use deals. And also disintermediate -- get directly connected to users, with chatbots, search, and voice assistants of their own.
Or maybe even wilder things. I don't know everything; I'm just some guy.
Anyway, I'm going to choose to stay hopeful. I think most of the options for these two big organizations are revolutionary and not evolutionary. But I believe they still exist. I'm going to say Neither, but ask me again next year.
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And I guess that's surfacing something important about both cases -- and a chance to overextend my metaphor. Pulling out of a death spiral in a video game requires a lot of knowledge of the game, and a certain willingness to take risks. You have to sometimes send an expeditionary force through the mountains to find a uranium mining site. Or you put all your barley resources into building a war blimp. If you don't know these long-shot options are possible, you won't try them, and you'll fail.
@evan the thing that bums me out about firefox is it shouldn't matter if mozilla lives or dies. it's open source! but it got built up so big and the stakes are so high it might not be enough just to have a community of people who give a shit to try to maintain it. i think they crossed the point of no return on accident a long time ago and google has just been keeping them on life support as an anti-anti-trust talisman since then
