The world’s most important knowledge platform needs young editors to rescue it from chatbots – and its own tired practices
Established in 2001, Wikipedia is an “old man” by internet standards. But the role it plays in our collective knowledge of the world remains astonishing. Content from the free internet encyclopedia appears in everything from high-school term papers and pub trivia questions to search engine summaries and voice assistants. Tools like Google’s AI Overviews and ChatGPT rely heavily on Wikipedia, although they rarely credit the site in their responses.
And therein lies the problem: as Wikipedia’s visibility diminishes, reduced to mere training data for AI applications, it also loses prominence in the minds of readers and potential contributors. When someone notices a topic that is poorly described on Wikipedia, they might feel motivated to correct it. But this can-do spirit goes away when the error comes through an AI summary, where the source of the information isn’t clear.
I use wikipedia all the time, and I make a monthly donation.
You should stop. The wikimedia foundation has all the money it needs to fund wikipedia perpetually. The endowment was met years and years ago. Your money is being spent on parasitic non-profit management class nonsense things.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer
This
isreads like anti-labor propaganda. They hired hundreds more employees and subsequently paid them (presumably) decent wages which drove their expenses up. Personnel costs are pretty much always the biggest expense in (almost?) any organization.This article smells very much like elon “fire all the engineers to increase efficiency” logic, right down to describing the employed as a cancer.
Repugnant.
That essay isn’t terribly well thought out. They have an issue with the increase in employees, but lack any evidence that they’re not actually required. The core of their thesis seems to be “it was fine with fewer employees before, why do we need more now?” but they fail to provide much supporting evidence beyond substantiating increasing levels of spending over the years.
Edit: also, this is seven years old and it appears Guy’s predictions have yet to even begin to manifest.
Lol trash article.
Oh for chrisakes. I also donate to The Wikimedia Foundation, feeling secure in the knowledge that at least I could feel good about that one. Time to do some reading I guess.