Have Wikipedia and Mozilla passed a point of inevitable decline?
-
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 Just some other guy, but it seems game over to me. The land lies in waste. The orcs rule every square of the board and are erecting blood sucking factories, sorry meant "data centers", in each and every one.
There might be some sort of restart, with new rules
. But it will need outside help. Deus ex machina. Maybe some enlightened democratic government deciding this *is* existential. Maybe a trillionaire in their death bed wishing to pass through the head of a needle. -
My friend @luis_in_brief has written a couple of good articles about Wikipedia's collapsing web traffic:
Wikipedia's traffic drop: more on languages and freshness
Following up on last week's post, I looked at 5,000 "Vital Articles" across eight major-language Wikipedias. Articles about math, physical sciences and tech are waaaay down, while people, geography, and history hold up far better—regardless of which language they're in. Article freshness matters too—but not as much.
lu.is (lu.is)
Career articles on Wikipedia: some scary numbers
I took a look at English Wikipedia pageviews for ~4,000 articles about careers. The numbers are grim: the median is down 28% from pre-COVID, with a huge drop in the last year.
lu.is (lu.is)
I especially appreciate this article about how Wikipedia's "flat" traffic growth over the last decade masks a precipitous decline in relative Web traffic:
My former colleague Marshall Miller at WMF wrote about a vertiginous 8% quarterly drop in Wikipedia page views at the end of 2025:
New User Trends on Wikipedia
An update on user trends from the Wikimedia Foundation.
Diff (diff.wikimedia.org)
@evan @luis_in_brief Thank you for sharing!
-
@evan Is Wikipedia considered in decline?
@pizaaman my long response is here.
Evan Prodromou (@evan@cosocial.ca)
I like playing video games and board games with an economic component. In these games, you build farms or factories or mines or whatever, and they generate resources that you can use to build armies or research centres or monuments, which in turn let you build more farms and mines and so on.
CoSocial (cosocial.ca)
-
@rhelune @pizaaman my long response is here.
Evan Prodromou (@evan@cosocial.ca)
I like playing video games and board games with an economic component. In these games, you build farms or factories or mines or whatever, and they generate resources that you can use to build armies or research centres or monuments, which in turn let you build more farms and mines and so on.
CoSocial (cosocial.ca)
-
@philip I don't think it's a good idea for me to convince you either way. Use a search engine if you're curious. If you find evidence that makes you think one way or another, use that to inform your answer. If that's more work than you think a poll is worth, feel free to skip the question.
@philip here's my long response.
Evan Prodromou (@evan@cosocial.ca)
I like playing video games and board games with an economic component. In these games, you build farms or factories or mines or whatever, and they generate resources that you can use to build armies or research centres or monuments, which in turn let you build more farms and mines and so on.
CoSocial (cosocial.ca)
-
@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.
@anime_reference here's my full response:
Evan Prodromou (@evan@cosocial.ca)
I like playing video games and board games with an economic component. In these games, you build farms or factories or mines or whatever, and they generate resources that you can use to build armies or research centres or monuments, which in turn let you build more farms and mines and so on.
CoSocial (cosocial.ca)
-
@evan Mozilla yes, Wikipedia no. Wikipedia is a lot more than user traffic. When someone wants to actually check the sources of AI they have to go to the source.
@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)
-
@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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
@evan@cosocial.ca @anime_reference@wetdry.world Wikipedia edits depend on autism.
-
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.
-
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.
-
@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!
-
@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!
-
@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?
-
-
@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)
-
@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.
