I'll go out on a limb and say we _need_ Wikipedia and it's okay that traffic falls.
Physical print encyclopedias got replaced by Wikipedia, but AI isn't a replacement (can't ever see how either). While AI is a method of easier access for the end user, the purpose of Wikipedia stands on its own.
I've always scoffed at the Wikimedia Foundation's warchest and continuously increasing annual spending. I say now is the time to save money. Become self sustaining through investments so it can live for 1000 years.
To me, it is an existence for the common good and should be governed as such.
show comments
crmd
As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that is not dependent on web traffic for revenue, is a decline in traffic necessarily bad?
I always assumed the need for metastatic growth was limited to VC-backed and ad-revenue dependent companies.
show comments
crazygringo
LLM's have definitely replaced 90% of what I used to look up on a Wikipedia, simply because they integrate from so many more additional sources.
But at the same time I continue to contribute edits to Wikipedia. Because it's the source of so much data. To me, it doesn't matter if the information I contribute gets consumed on Wikipedia or consumed via LLM. Either way, it's helping people.
Wikipedia isn't going away, even if its website stops being the primary way most people get information from it.
codinhood
AI seems obvious, but social video? Are they saying people watch TikToks instead of reading Wikipedia, or people who used to look things up don’t bother anymore because of TikTok?
show comments
arjie
It's all right. Wikipedia was a magical device for its time, and it's still a great aggregator of information. It will probably last forever as such a link aggregator. Read-time curation is obviously far better than write-time curation, but the former used to be very hard. Now we have the former for cheap so it makes sense for Wikipedia to be Yet Another Source into the read-time curator. And the existence of a source database like Wikipedia makes many of these tools work a lot better.
People rightfully get upset about individual editors having specific agendas on Wikipedia and I get it. Often that is the case. But the chat interface for LLMs allows for a back and forth where you can force them to look past some text to get closer to a truth.
For my part, I think it's nice to be part of making that base substrate of human knowledge in an open way, and some kinds of fixes to Wikipedia articles are very easy. So what little I do, I'll keep doing. Makes me happy to help.
Some of the fruit is really low-hanging, take a look at this garbage someone added to an article:
My personal traffic to Wikipedia fell after around 2019, when activist editors took over, and the site ceased to be trustworthy for a lot of important topics.
[deleted]
Venn1
This made me curious enough to check the stats for my little site. According to Cloudflare’s AI Overview, over the last 24 hours the breakdown is:
665 ChatGPT-User
396 Bingbot
296 Googlebot
037 PerplexityBot
Fascinating.
show comments
intended
I’m a pro-market solution person, but markets are a tool.
This is the kind of capitalistic behavior that is repugnant to our idea of how things should work.
This is not what the commons is for - taking the work of creators, repackaging it, and using platform capability to re-sell it.
At this point, I am coming around to the argument that governments should make their own local/national AI.
Razengan
How is it not conflict of interest when Google's AI summary (which is sometimes hilariously wrong) takes a click away from websites that pay for ads? Specially if it was trained on those websites
d--b
traffic falling means wikipedia will be cheaper to run. since they don’t rely on ads, it’d likely not affecting their revenues either (assuming those who don’t use it anymore weren’5 those givîng to it)
>It’s the dishonesty of Wikipedia that bothers me. The implication is that donations are urgently needed to keep the website running. In reality they have $300m in the bank and revenue is growing every year[0]. Even Wikipedia says only 43% of donations are used for site operations[1], and that includes all of their sites, not just Wikipedia. Fully 12% of the money they collect from you is. . . used to ask you for more money[1]
I'll go out on a limb and say we _need_ Wikipedia and it's okay that traffic falls.
Physical print encyclopedias got replaced by Wikipedia, but AI isn't a replacement (can't ever see how either). While AI is a method of easier access for the end user, the purpose of Wikipedia stands on its own.
I've always scoffed at the Wikimedia Foundation's warchest and continuously increasing annual spending. I say now is the time to save money. Become self sustaining through investments so it can live for 1000 years.
To me, it is an existence for the common good and should be governed as such.
As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that is not dependent on web traffic for revenue, is a decline in traffic necessarily bad?
I always assumed the need for metastatic growth was limited to VC-backed and ad-revenue dependent companies.
LLM's have definitely replaced 90% of what I used to look up on a Wikipedia, simply because they integrate from so many more additional sources.
But at the same time I continue to contribute edits to Wikipedia. Because it's the source of so much data. To me, it doesn't matter if the information I contribute gets consumed on Wikipedia or consumed via LLM. Either way, it's helping people.
Wikipedia isn't going away, even if its website stops being the primary way most people get information from it.
AI seems obvious, but social video? Are they saying people watch TikToks instead of reading Wikipedia, or people who used to look things up don’t bother anymore because of TikTok?
It's all right. Wikipedia was a magical device for its time, and it's still a great aggregator of information. It will probably last forever as such a link aggregator. Read-time curation is obviously far better than write-time curation, but the former used to be very hard. Now we have the former for cheap so it makes sense for Wikipedia to be Yet Another Source into the read-time curator. And the existence of a source database like Wikipedia makes many of these tools work a lot better.
People rightfully get upset about individual editors having specific agendas on Wikipedia and I get it. Often that is the case. But the chat interface for LLMs allows for a back and forth where you can force them to look past some text to get closer to a truth.
For my part, I think it's nice to be part of making that base substrate of human knowledge in an open way, and some kinds of fixes to Wikipedia articles are very easy. So what little I do, I'll keep doing. Makes me happy to help.
Some of the fruit is really low-hanging, take a look at this garbage someone added to an article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Salvadoran_gang_c...
My personal traffic to Wikipedia fell after around 2019, when activist editors took over, and the site ceased to be trustworthy for a lot of important topics.
This made me curious enough to check the stats for my little site. According to Cloudflare’s AI Overview, over the last 24 hours the breakdown is:
665 ChatGPT-User
396 Bingbot
296 Googlebot
037 PerplexityBot
Fascinating.
I’m a pro-market solution person, but markets are a tool.
This is the kind of capitalistic behavior that is repugnant to our idea of how things should work.
This is not what the commons is for - taking the work of creators, repackaging it, and using platform capability to re-sell it.
At this point, I am coming around to the argument that governments should make their own local/national AI.
How is it not conflict of interest when Google's AI summary (which is sometimes hilariously wrong) takes a click away from websites that pay for ads? Specially if it was trained on those websites
traffic falling means wikipedia will be cheaper to run. since they don’t rely on ads, it’d likely not affecting their revenues either (assuming those who don’t use it anymore weren’5 those givîng to it)
Source: https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wik...
Oh good, Jimmy can stop hounding me for money like a late night infomercial or televangelist.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34106982
>2022
>It’s the dishonesty of Wikipedia that bothers me. The implication is that donations are urgently needed to keep the website running. In reality they have $300m in the bank and revenue is growing every year[0]. Even Wikipedia says only 43% of donations are used for site operations[1], and that includes all of their sites, not just Wikipedia. Fully 12% of the money they collect from you is. . . used to ask you for more money[1]