Have Wikipedia and Mozilla passed a point of inevitable decline?
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@anime_reference 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.
@evan@cosocial.ca @anime_reference@wetdry.world Wikipedia edits depend on autism.
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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.
I should also say that the Wikimedia editor community is a big drag on developing new interfaces for editing, since the editors are also the fact checkers. Getting a flood of new edits from ChatGPT users or Alexa users or Google search users is a WP editor's worst nightmare.
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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.
@evan Firefox had a transformative impact, providing the platform upon which the modern web could be built. I still can't stop thinking about the impact Thunderbird would have had on the world of digital communications if it had had the same resources and attention.
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@evan@cosocial.ca @anime_reference@wetdry.world Wikipedia edits depend on autism.
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Sounds like Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, or any number of other "cozy" games that don't focus on combat. (Which doesn't really help your analogy, admittedly)
@funcrunch both of those are economic games that depend on growth. They're fine examples. You can get boxed in on both games.
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Have Wikipedia and Mozilla passed a point of inevitable decline?
@evan i think it's really difficult to solve.
My daughter stated something the other day, i can't recall what, but my response was "go read the Wikipedia article, you'll know"
To which she replied "anyone can edit Wikipedia, and I'll have to read so much, I'll ask chatGPT instead"
I was stricken; you trust chatGPT, the bullshit machines over Wikipedia?
But i think it's a trend, and I think a lot of people would rather because they can get a "summary" and won't have to think.
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@evan We'll still be migrating off jQuery UI at that point, so at least we'll be occupied as the walls fall.
@samwilson something to look forward to!
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@evan i think it's really difficult to solve.
My daughter stated something the other day, i can't recall what, but my response was "go read the Wikipedia article, you'll know"
To which she replied "anyone can edit Wikipedia, and I'll have to read so much, I'll ask chatGPT instead"
I was stricken; you trust chatGPT, the bullshit machines over Wikipedia?
But i think it's a trend, and I think a lot of people would rather because they can get a "summary" and won't have to think.
@rasmus91@fosstodon.org @evan@cosocial.ca Generals prepare for the war that has already passed,
and parents prepare their children for a world that no longer exists. -
@evan For what its worth, I used to think CBC was a hopeless organization in the face of Netflix and YouTube. But it turns out that it's now one of the few news sources I trust, and they've done more for Canadian sports than Rogers.
Sometimes it takes a catalyst for people to realize why an institution is important.@atomicpoet yeah, good point!
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@evan I don't think so. In Mozilla's case, I still use both Firefox and Thunderbird daily.
In Wikipedia's case, I'm admittedly using it *less*. When I want to know something quick, I rely on the AI summaries. But when I want to dive deeper into a topic, or if I want to share a topic with someone else, I'll still visit the Wikipedia page.
And I still edit Wikipedia pages. So no, neither. The way we use it is maybe changing, but I think they'll both survive just fine.
@GrahamDowns is surviving enough?
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@funcrunch @evan Like I said, froma development perspective. Actually forking the contributor base would be a lot harder, although if there was a sufficiently bad enough incident I am sure many contributors would willingly join an alternative project. whether that'd be sufficient for critical mass is hard to say however
@astraleureka @funcrunch there are a lot of mirrors and forks of Wikipedia already.
Dumps are available in multiple formats:
Kiwix provides great offline readers and downloads:
Kiwix - Home
Kiwix is a nonprofit organisation making free knowledge accessible where the Internet is not. We create and support open technologies that bring the world’s knowledge Offline via our own open-source software dedicated to providing offline access to free educational content, and more…
Kiwix (kiwix.org)
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@GrahamDowns is surviving enough?
@evan It depends on the goal, I guess. In Mozilla's case, the goal is probably to keep growing the business, so... probably not.
Wikipedia is ostensibly not concerned with making profit at all; all they need to do is keep the lights on. Which they've traditionally done by asking their regular members and supporters for donations once a year. The amount of people willing to donate has probably gone down, but hopefully the ones that remain are just as passionate as ever.
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@evan I don't like to think anything's inevitable. I've been disillusioned with both for different reasons, but a turnaround is always possible. Still use Wikipedia heavily and Firefox as my primary browser.
@wlach some things are inevitable, and it's good to pay attention so that you can change before they become inevitable.
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@evan i think it's really difficult to solve.
My daughter stated something the other day, i can't recall what, but my response was "go read the Wikipedia article, you'll know"
To which she replied "anyone can edit Wikipedia, and I'll have to read so much, I'll ask chatGPT instead"
I was stricken; you trust chatGPT, the bullshit machines over Wikipedia?
But i think it's a trend, and I think a lot of people would rather because they can get a "summary" and won't have to think.
@rasmus91 a lot of people are reluctant to churn their own butter these days, too.
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@astraleureka @funcrunch there are a lot of mirrors and forks of Wikipedia already.
Dumps are available in multiple formats:
Kiwix provides great offline readers and downloads:
Kiwix - Home
Kiwix is a nonprofit organisation making free knowledge accessible where the Internet is not. We create and support open technologies that bring the world’s knowledge Offline via our own open-source software dedicated to providing offline access to free educational content, and more…
Kiwix (kiwix.org)
@evan @funcrunch yep, the tech and the content is the easy part - it's pulling along the userbase that would be the really hard part. forks only tend to survive when there's sufficient momentum in community following imo
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@evan @funcrunch yep, the tech and the content is the easy part - it's pulling along the userbase that would be the really hard part. forks only tend to survive when there's sufficient momentum in community following imo
@astraleureka @funcrunch I think there's a strong opportunity for national mirrors that synch dynamically with the Wikimedia Foundation ones. Canadian, European, Asian, and so on.
For us in Canada, we'd probably only mirror English, French, Mandarin, Punjabi, Arabic, Spanish and a few other languages practiced in Canada. Plus the dozen or so indigenous language versions.
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@astraleureka @funcrunch I think there's a strong opportunity for national mirrors that synch dynamically with the Wikimedia Foundation ones. Canadian, European, Asian, and so on.
For us in Canada, we'd probably only mirror English, French, Mandarin, Punjabi, Arabic, Spanish and a few other languages practiced in Canada. Plus the dozen or so indigenous language versions.
@astraleureka @funcrunch digital sovereignty is a strong motivator.
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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.
@evan great thread.
I actively, intentionally, avoid #AI summaries in search engines (e.g. with &udm=14 appended to Google searches), and choose Wikipedia as the most likely to be authoritative source, because I am searching for facts (or at least scientific consensus), rather than LLM statistically regurgitated convincing but almost certainly wrong slop.
But unless you go to the same effort as I do, I can see why Wikipedia's traffic will fall off a cliff.
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@nickapos Wikipedia is *NOT* a lot more than user traffic.
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)
@evan Interesting, i did not know they were depending so much on user traffic. i stand corrected.
in that case yes Wikipedia will be affected by AI absorbing most user traffic. -
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