Have Wikipedia and Mozilla passed a point of inevitable decline?
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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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