“With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.”
Archived version: https://archive.is/20251017020527/https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-says-ai-is-causing-a-dangerous-decline-in-human-visitors/
Personally, I have been moving the opposite way. There are so many bullshit websites, wading through them is a pain. Instead, I directly jump to Wikipedia
Same! I have Wikipedia pinned as the first search result on Kagi if there’s an entry
I was thinking of sharing a kagi duo plan with my dad, is it worth it? I currently use ecosia
I have been using it for about a year. There is zero advertisement anywhere. No sponsored posts. Just pure search. And they give you quite some good tools to derank or delist websites for you to define your own quality of search results, it’s very effective. They also go the extra mile of de-ranking websites with many trackers as that apparently correlates with SEO which normally doesn’t track with result quality. It’s a very refreshing take on the web. I love it :)
Edit: they also have an extension which allows you to search while being logged out using tokens which improves privacy, in case you want to go the extra mile.
I think so! I’m pretty sure they still give you 100 free searches to try it out, might be worth test driving before you pay for it. From what I understand it’s mostly Google on the back end with Kagi’s own algorithm. My favorite part about it is being able to rank how the results sort themselves based on sites you want to see more or less of, and some other pretty powerful filters. I definitely think it’s worth a shot if you’re curious.
More proof that AI ruins everything - if it was needed.
Well, you won’t ever be losing me, WP.
We got WordPress’s number one fan here.
I’ll be honest with you: I have absolutely no idea how to interpret that in this context.
WP interpreted as “Winnie the Pooh” instead of “Wikipedia”?
I cancelled my donations to wikipedia since the WMF announced they’d be using AI, and they gave me a really milquetoast bullshit response when I emailed them. Can’t trust such a precious, collaborative, human effort as Wikipedia to a bunch of anti-human robofuckers. 🤷♂️
Correct me if im wrong, but haven’t they since gone back on AI integration, and are no longer planning any, after backlash from their contributors?
Honestly, I don’t know. I stopped listening after they said they were going to.
Too little too late for me really; unless they replace the people who made that decision in the first place, that sort of anti-human, lazy, irresponsible sentiment will remain present in their leadership.
Why do you want to replace people that are capable of changing their minds giving input from other people?
I would say we need more of that kind of leadership.
I don’t know why backing down after massive backlash is being lauded if I’m being completely honest. I want to replace them because the decision in the first place to pollute Wikipedia at all with AI is so poor that I no longer trust them to make good choices.
I was following along when they initially announced it and while I personally think its an awful idea, it did seem to stem not from a profit motive but an intention to make Wikipedia easier to use and more effective, and when the vast majority of contributors and editors responded to tell Wikipedia that it was an atrocious idea and that they shouldn’t do it they listened and scrapped the plan.
My point being, isn’t it better as a whole that they’re willing to consider new things but will also listen to the feedback they get from their users and maintainers and choose not to implement ideas that are wildly unpopular?
Writing off all of Wikipedia (the most effective tool for collaborative knowledge collection in human history) just because they announced a well intentioned tool addition and then scrapped the plan when they realized it was unpopular and would likely degrade their platform seems short sighted at best imo.
I get that I’m being pigheaded, but unfortunately I don’t trust that it was done out of some purely good intention and naivety. Even if that was the case, then the people making that decision are gullible enough to fall for LLM hype and too irresponsible to be in charge of something that we both agree is an absolute marvel of our modern age, and a massive collaborative effort contributed to by so many hundreds of thousands of people, and used by so many millions more.
I totally understand that I’m being stubborn, but this isn’t a principle I’m willing to compromise on in this case!
AI scrapers don’t make donations
I use Gemini for my web searches now. But still donate to the WMF. In most cases I just want an answer with the least amount of bullshit. Even using Startpage to get Google results without Google bullshit, it’s annoying. My wife demands sources, and Gemini will provide those as well.
I’ve been saying this for some time now: AI is going to kill so many business models because it’s really great at creating summaries.
You don’t even need a huge cloud-basrd AI! Local AI—running on your PC—can search the web, summarize the news (and Wikipedia articles), and perform similar tasks without a human ever visiting the site.
It’s like having your own personal secretary that you can tell to go do stuff.
I think it’s going to kill free search engines because it can go do a search on all of them at once in seconds and no human will ever see those ads.
I think it’s going to kill free search engines because it can go do a search on all of them at once in seconds and no human will ever see those ads.
So sites will move to paywalls or aggresive WAFs and those LLMs will become useless at the same time succeeding in killing search engines leaving no viable alternatives.
Already half the public internet is inaccessible without allowing to be heavily fingerprinted and be tracked just to prove you are a human user.
It’s possible that a huge number of sites that are currently free will turn to paywalls but that won’t make the local AI useless. You’ll just give it your login credentials for any sites you want it to search and it’ll do it’s thing (and no, captias don’t work with AI models… They’re only good at stopping basic crawlers).
WAFs are not captchas. Do some research.
If you think AI is going to stay without ads/subscriptions for much longer you’re not paying attention
Don’t need subscriptions for a local AI friend
Who’s giving you the model?
FOSS nerds, god bless them
What about non-human visitors?
Just edit the article of you don’t like what Wikipedia says.
Yeah that’s what I do. Won a few arguments this way.
I cannot read the article, but this seems like a non-issue.
Loads of old Wikipedia pages are essentially complete. Just freeze them.
And didn’t the Wikipedia foundation have years worth of funding already? And wouldn’t fewer visitors imply less need for server and bandwidth?
Current events need editors, and those will have controversy. I expect primary news sources would be better for anything less than a week old.
A Wikipedia that freezes at 2024 would still be of great value.
Clearly, I am missing the problem.
