Have Wikipedia and Mozilla passed a point of inevitable decline?
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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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AMirrors_and_forks
Dumps are available in multiple formats:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ADatabase_download
Kiwix provides great offline readers and downloads:
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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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3AMirrors_and_forks
Dumps are available in multiple formats:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ADatabase_download
Kiwix provides great offline readers and downloads:
@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 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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