But the future will raise the bar. Perhaps we'll see wiki of wikis, or something else getting the web closer to truly semantic knowledge.
Humans will never again create a project like Wikipedia (economist.com)
353 pointsby edward4 hours ago283 comments
MitPitt 3 hours ago
This is most definitely wrong. People volunteer and crowdsource all the time, driven by ideals. And the async nature of the web will only make such projects stronger. There's OpenStreetMap, TV Tropes, fandom wikis, movie dbs, and a thousand others with no sign of stopping.
pjc50 3 hours ago
However, it's now operationally much harder to make sure that the contributors actually are humans.
MitPitt 3 hours ago
I look forward to human curation to be reinvented in some way. Social media algos are a tyranny. I think something new will be driven by people's desire to be different and niche.
mag7269 3 hours ago
That’ll just have to be 100% analog, and that’s until Physical AI has a massive breakthrough where they’ll make the analog also possible to be automated away.
It’s not over… “OVER” but it’s sure feeling that we are heading there, though.
weezing 2 hours ago
Be the curator yourself, browse the small web.
Ragnarork 2 hours ago
Browsing the small web is not that simple right now. Even if tools such as Marginalia help, it's still quite difficult for discoverability.
unpleasurable 27 minutes ago
help us, Google!
archargelod 2 hours ago
There is, something like that all over the internet. But it's not on any popular website or platform. Barely anyone knows about those places. And they're better that way.
I won't post a link here, but check out KamTape.
thesuitonym 2 hours ago
That's the thing about human intervention: It can't be hyperscale. I think that's a feature, but until we as a society come to the conclusion that not every aspect of life has to be the biggest and the only, we're not going to get there.
api 3 hours ago
In the end there's no foolproof way, so we'll just have to converge on the idea that quality is what matters.
Good AI contributions are better than lazy crap or trolling from humans, right?
dannyw 3 hours ago
Right. And I consider it a blessing that Claude-speak and GPT-speak continue to be so obvious :)
crote 3 hours ago
But who's going to filter out the good AI contributions from the bad AI trolls and bargain-bin-model slop?
With AI there is an infinite stream of contributions to curate. No human is ever going to volunteer for that, so unless you keep AI contributions very tightly restricted you'll rapidly lose all human contributors. At which point nobody is left to ensure only good contributions get in, so it is only a matter of time before it devolves into a giant pile of crap.
Besides, who's going to pay to run those AIs? Good models aren't free, so you are effectively turning it into a pay-to-win project. You can be absolutely certain that some tech billionaires are going to burn a few million to have "good AI" constantly rewrite their pages the way they want it.
matkoniecz 2 hours ago
> Good AI contributions are better than lazy crap or trolling from humans, right?
but worse than no contributions at all
> we'll just have to converge on the idea that quality is what matters.
for me it is not changed at all, just that volume of spam increased and it is now harder to detect
singpolyma3 3 hours ago
You've discovered some sentient non humans have you?
pjc50 24 minutes ago
You don't have to be sentient to post on the internet.
netdevphoenix 2 hours ago
We need a dev voucher system. Persist it across projects and time. Belonging to a vouching chain with a rogue dev down the chain loses you points the closer you are to it. Anything else is just too unreliable imo.
sunir 2 hours ago
If anyone remembers advogato.org it was a web of trust of open source devs.
silon42 an hour ago
PGP web of trust?
unpleasurable 13 minutes ago
and what do points win?
oblio 3 hours ago
The real test is the creation rate for those projects.
From your list, I think most were started 15-20+ years ago[1] so your argument isn't contradicting the original point.
* * *
[1] OSM, Fandom and TV Tropes were started 22 years ago. Wikipedia itself was started 25 years ago.
bluGill 3 hours ago
The food shelf I volunteered at yesterday is a lot more than 20 years old. There'll probably not be another Wikipedia, because we already have Wikipedia. There's no point in having a second. Assembly for other things listed. We have one. Why would we need a second one to do that?
I don't know what the future will be, but the future people who live in it will know and they're going to do something. I can say that with confidence, even without knowing exactly what they're going to do.
edit: grammar - see reply for old/wrong version.
Hamuko 3 hours ago
>There'll probably be another Wikipedia, because we already have Wikipedia. There's no point in having a second.
Unless you have a political view to push. Visit Grokipedia today!
throw0101c 2 hours ago
> Visit Grokipedia today!
"Would you like to know more?"
TFNA 3 hours ago
Many longtime OSM mappers have sensed that there has been some decline in interest and a risk to the long-term future of the project as a truly amateur-enthusiast phenomenon. Causes include: younger generations raised on corporate platforms and their phone apps are less aware of non-corporate alternatives, and might even be suspicious of libre and altruistic movements (this is a concern in Free Software circles, too); as the map got filled in, there were fewer obvious blanks that struck a total newbie as a place he/she could contribute; corporations got onboard both as OSM users and stakeholders, and then some idealistic anti-capitalistic people have asked why they should contribute if the map can benefit corps, too, etc.
Hendrikto 3 hours ago
> then some idealistic anti-capitalistic people have asked why they should contribute if the map can benefit corps, too
”We should respect freedoms and not restrict them arbitrarily… except when I do not like the people using those freedoms.“
It is always a weird take to me. Pick a license that matches your preferences, like the GPL. Do not pick MIT/whatever and then complain when corps make use of the freedoms you afforded them.
singpolyma3 3 hours ago
TBF corps can use and profit from GPL and AGPL stuff just fine, even if they comply with the license (though they usually just don't bother)
basilikum 3 hours ago
GPL should absolutely be the default choice for software. It is quite weird when people choose the MIT license and then complain when others use their open source software and turn it into a proprietary for profit software when the author explicitly allowed them to do this in the license. The MIT is really not long. People should read it before using it.
But you can also take a noncommercial GPL software, slightly modify and put your logo and name on it, do some marketing and get cash out of it without contributing anything significant. You just can't make it proprietary. But it's still an unfair situation.
limagnolia 2 hours ago
Why should the GPL be the default?
If you don't want your software used commercially, don't Open Source (or Free Software) it. Maybe a CC-NC license if you want to give it away for noncommercial use.
The rest of us will continue to use and make OSS and enjoy it without worrying about what others are doing with it.
globular-toast 2 hours ago
The GPL has nothing to do with usage and what others are doing with it. On the contrary: it explicitly provides the freedom to use the software as you wish, including for commercial use. Even Stallman is against licences that would prohibit commercial use.
But the GPL goes even further than that, and this appears to be the source of your confusion. The GPL stops people redistributing the software under terms that would restrict or prohibit use, including commercial use. The GPL guarantees that anyone receiving the software now or in the future has the same rights you have.
stavros an hour ago
Because I want to open source my software AND don't want it used commercially. What's the problem? I just use the AGPL and that's that.
poulpy123 an hour ago
Default for people who want their open source work to stay open source and not privatized by billionaire companies.
js8 2 hours ago
I agree but the reality is most authors want to use their OSS creations at work, which usually means they will make a compromise with capitalists who reject copyleft licenses.
Many human problems could be solved if humans were less willing to compromise with greedy people, but unfortunately authors are too nice in general to do that.
thesuitonym 2 hours ago
The people choosing the MIT/BSD license and the people complaining about for-profit use are not the people.
account42 2 hours ago
Yeah and the soup kitchen has no right to complain that I packaged up all their food and sold it next door. Clearly they should have made everyone sign a contract before getting any food if they didn't want that.
limagnolia 2 hours ago
Soup kitchens don't generally give away bulk quantities of food to just anyone.
matkoniecz 2 hours ago
Well run soup kitchens ban buying in bulk
Doctor_Fegg 2 hours ago
You're more or less right. OSM (via an exhaustive licence change process) did indeed choose the licence that matched its preferences, and almost all contributors are happy that it allows commercial use.
What does stick in the craw with many of us, however, is that Meta, Mapbox, and various other bigcos have nonetheless decided to disregard the attribution requirements of what is a fairly permissive licence, simply because they're sufficiently big that they can say to the OSM Foundation (annual turnover about £3.27) "suck it, we dare you to sue us".
icantevenhold 2 hours ago
Tolerating the intolerant will erode the very basis that enables you to be tolerant.
It’s the same thing with freedoms
nik282000 2 hours ago
<tangent>
> younger generations raised on corporate platforms and their phone apps are less aware of non-corporate alternatives
All the new guys I work with are trapped in the app store/play store bubble. If it's not available directly through the device's software distribution system it's not getting used.
> might even be suspicious of libre and altruistic movements
All my boomer bosses think that anything that is outside the Windows/O365 ecosystem, or doesn't come with a $150 yearly license, is clearly pirate hacker software that will give your e-mail a virus and steal your bitcoin.
It is increasingly frustrating when we have a problem that could be fixed with GNU corutils and a bash script, or a raspberrypi/arduino translating between 2 serial devices, but we end up getting some $1500 black box from the 'official' vendor. It teaches the newer guys that step one is not to think about the problem, it's to grab your wallet and call a salesman.
</tangent>
raddan 2 hours ago
This is not a new problem. I worked in corporate IT in the early 2000’s. Both attitudes existed even then, though of course there was no App Store back then. Nevertheless there was a strong preference among younger employees for paid software—the kind you get in boxes. The older generation viewed most software as suspect, but were willing to accept “official” solutions from Microsoft and other name brand software vendors. It seems comical now, but at the time Red Hat was viewed almost universally among my coworkers as a terrible idea. And forget about custom software. Rolling one’s own software was widely seen as crazy talk.
Moru 2 hours ago
Never underestimate the blame game. It's a lot easier to place the blame on MS than on your own organisation. All customers knows you can't do anything about how windows works and have accepted the dysfunction already.
wtch98 an hour ago
It took me the best part of 20 years of working in the corporate world to realise that the decisions aren't about the best thing for the user, or the employee, or even the shareholder, it's about the best thing for the decision maker. Ideally one which allows them to have no accountability whatsoever.
It's the whole reason management consultancies exist. If Deloite tell you to do X, or Gartner say buy Y, and you do, you aren't going to have the blame. Even when you end up losing half a billion as our last CxO did, you'll just get a golden handshake and a move to another company.
astura 36 minutes ago
Someone who worked in corporate law once said "in the rare case you have to hire outside counsel you always hire the fanciest name brand firm. Not because the fancy firm does better work, but because of risk mitigation and CYA. If things go sideways then you can say 'not my fault,I hired the fanciest firm.'"
f1shy 26 minutes ago
Already in the 90‘s I has advocating for FOSS in a big company. And someone told me “nobody was ever fired for buying IBM” that phrase was already very old…
etempleton 2 hours ago
IT told me recently that I couldn’t install a piece of software because since it was open source it wasn’t secure.
ninjalanternshk 2 hours ago
These same folks will very soon be replacing software that’s worked for years with something they vibe coded last week.
wtch98 an hour ago
To be fair it's true. And likewise closed source is also not secure.
Turn it all off, bury it in concrete, toss the concrete in a river and hurl the river into space, and maybe then IT will be happy with the security.
x62Bh7948f 2 hours ago
in most corporate environments if your homebrew solution breaks, then you have a problem. If something that came from a vendor breaks, that’s not your problem.
I understand your frustration but I’ve given up fighting with IT and just let them sort it out
bee_rider an hour ago
In their defense, if something isn’t in my distro repo, 75% of the time I’ll ignore it. Using the operating system’s built in method of installing software is very preferable. It is mostly just Windows (and to a lesser extent MacOS) where some repo (because what is an App Store if not a paid repo) isn’t the default.
Of course, all the software in the distro repo is there because somebody went against this tendency.
elric 2 hours ago
Many longtime OSM mappers like myself are acutely aware of various corporations making big bucks on the back of our volunteered time and effort. Often times without contributing anything. Recently made worse by horrible API abuses.
I get why people might not be motivated to join us in the tragedy of the commons.
mycall 2 hours ago
How many of the OSM mappers work for government agencies? Curious as they should be a reliable data source.
TFNA 2 hours ago
Very few, and in not all countries is government data compatible with OSM's license, so even people employed in state GIS can't necessarily edit the map from the office.
bulbar an hour ago
Isn't there a solution to that like dual licensing or restricting free API access for corporations?
devsda an hour ago
It is not that the they make money, but the problem is that corporations with huge budgets can overshadow the volunteer run packaging of the said projects and eventually become the canonical way of using them.
Then the project loses visibility to end users. I don't know if that is worth the occasional commercial contributions from them to satisfy their own requirements.
soperj 40 minutes ago
Why doesn't OSM have a separate price for corporate users of their data?
ie: a company with above a certain number of employees pays more
jimnotgym 2 hours ago
I was done with OSM within a few days. I fixed some streams to be in the right place, reverted.
This post box is no longer there. "I'll drive round and check", "no need I'm stood there, it has gone". "I'll drive round tomorrow"...I got the impression i was on someone else's patch and gave up
TFNA 2 hours ago
To get instant pushback from other mappers is fairly unusual; I would say you had bad luck (or live in Lithuania). In a lot of the world, edits correct or incorrect can take months or years to be noticed by another mapper.
But with regard to bodies of water, there are systems that monitor OSM and warn if someone has tried to "move them to the right place". These details were often added to OSM from professionally surveyed maps, so they are in the right place. However, ordinary people's consumer GPS is typically a few meters off, and they end up moving things to the inaccurate coordinates on their screens.
maxweylandt 2 hours ago
Is Lithuania known for particularly engaged OSM mappers? (wondering what reference I'm not catching)
TFNA 2 hours ago
For long years it was dominated by one mapper who considered the country his personal project and insisted on an idiosyncratic tagging scheme. He became infamous for instantly reverting edits even by savvy mappers. Intervention by OSM's conflict-resolution body has reduced that somewhat, but that country remains a special case.
Freak_NL an hour ago
The utterly insane way the Danish community forbids linking addresses to POIs (shops, restaurants, you name it) comes to mind. They've built a system where they import all addresses, but they never managed to make it work in combination with user contributed data, so every address gets deleted unless imported by their official import tool. So a restaurant can never get associated with its address in Denmark on OpenStreetMap.
Meanwhile, the Dutch community also imports all official addresses, but there the tool simply allows for these to be used with other OpenStreetMap tags. It makes you wonder about the Danish approach.
Moru 2 hours ago
The times I have done something in Germany the pushback has been swift and not very friendly so I stopped. I guess it's a localised problem, haven't had any problems in Sweden so far.
origini an hour ago
I had the opposite expeirence just a few years back adding a air gun club. I used some layer and someone else fixed it up for me.
larodi 2 hours ago
speaking of OSM... I've been part of teams at _certain country_'s _certain municipalities_ and teams working on GIS projects. so little among those people, who consume OSM content on a daily basis, even think about giving back, that even though I am not an OSM contributor, I start to get outraged at their total ignorance and disregard for crowd-sourced content, and the fact that someone put some work to have it there. same people are then getting royalties delivering this content to third parties. this is so wrong on so many levels, and I can't think of a way to make it work in a future where data is more precious than software packages.
Aurornis 2 hours ago
> corporations got onboard both as OSM users and stakeholders, and then some idealistic anti-capitalistic people have asked why they should contribute if the map can benefit corps,
Anecdotally, I’ve had a lot of experiences like this with newer generations of people on topics like open source software or community projects: They’ve been trained, usually by a social media niche, to believe that the only good fight is to actively harm corporations. Their idea of the world is a very clear black and white contrast with people on one side and corporations on the other.
Such a clean separation of the world only exists in ideas they get from social media and movies. Encountering a project like OSM or an open source project where the largest users (and for OSS, maybe the largest contributors) are people involved with corporations doesn’t fit into their worldview, so they file it in the “corporate” side of the divide and dislike it.
poisonborz an hour ago
I would argue that the MAG7 - about whom these complaints are about I assume, not some random little startup that uses OSM API - can no longer be seen as classical corporations. The power and moat they assumed can not be achieved by most other such entities.
WarmWash an hour ago
I think the difficult thing to reconcile is that you naturally will expect some degree of compensation (power, recognition, money, or a combo) for putting a lot of work into something.
However on the other hand, it has been drilled into your head repeatedly that wanting compensation for work is "bad" and antithetical to social movements. You work for the whole, not for yourself. Besides, you (along with everyone else) gets to enjoy the fruits of others free work.
But then after dwelling on it, you realize that 90% of the people holding you to this ideology aren't contributing much if anything at all, and just gorging themselves on the work of a few.
So now you either consolidate power into your hands (nazi mods), lose motivation (project decays), or become an "evil" capitalist(start charging money for access).
armchairhacker an hour ago
Expecting compensation is fine. Demanding compensation is not, simply because it doesn't work: open source succeeds because those who contribute gets more collaboration and visibility than those who don't.
You can be compensated by "gorging" on other open-source that you haven't contributed to, working outside OSS, or asking for funding to keep working or work more. But if you work privately, you're competing against someone who will work publicly, while limiting someone else who would like to use your private work but can't afford it (like you can't afford others).
6510 an hour ago
> now you either consolidate power into your hands (nazi mods), lose motivation (project decays), or become an "evil" capitalist(start charging money for access).
You never hear about them but there are also invitation only communities where contributing is required. The benefits are not shared outside.
RussianBot9580 an hour ago
There's also a teapot in space. Prove that there isn't.
jimmydddd 14 minutes ago
Same with taxes. People with less money have the most opinions about how other people (with more money) should spend their money.
zugi an hour ago
> ideas they get from social media and movies.
This is something I've noticed as well.
- Movies made after WWII that needed villians often made them Nazis.
- During the cold war, evil villians were communists or Soviet spies.
- Movies made after the fall of the Soviet Union often make their villians evil faceless corporations.
A generation or two has been raised by Hollywood and Disney on business always being evil, while simultaneoulsy choosing to consume and make themselves dependent on giant corporate content.
latexr 39 minutes ago
> A generation or two has been raised by Hollywood and Disney on business always being evil, while simultaneoulsy choosing to consume and make themselves dependent on giant corporate content.
It’s fascinatingly devilish, isn’t it? They control the outrage and profit from it. I’m reminded of Bill Hicks’ bit on marketing.
wat10000 16 minutes ago
We constructed alien superintelligences with no human emotion or morality, they took over much of the world, and people are surprised that they’re seen as villains.
We’ve been very lucky that the incentive structure has them doing a lot of useful things for us, but that doesn’t mean we have to be happy about having so much of our lives being ruled by these amoral aliens.
jodrellblank 6 minutes ago
> "A generation or two has been raised by Hollywood and Disney on business always being evil"
Oh hollywood and disney, not the behaviour of Standard Oil, DeBeers, Nestle, Coca Cola, banks in the sub-prime mortgage crisis, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, OPEC, DuPont, Chemie Grünenthal, an "epidemic" of wage theft in America estimated in the tens of billions per year, the trends towards enshittification, nickel-and-diming, rent-extraction and grifting of most products and services over time, health insurance companies, the lived experience of millions of workers being devalued, insulted, and treated like cattle?
soperj 44 minutes ago
> They’ve been trained, usually by a social media niche, to believe that the only good fight is to actively harm corporations.
Or maybe they just feel that corporations are actively trying to harm them and this is the logical response?
I don't think that's unfair at this point.
xyzzy123 33 minutes ago
If you think about government and corporations - they're responsible for so many bad things in the world! I guess that's true, but how much of it is them just doing all the stuff?
So I don't know that it's fair? Nearly all the material goods around me and a ton of services were provided by corporations, which are largely composed of regular people glued together at scale by bureacracy.
Computer0 30 minutes ago
The material goods around me are crap and only serve to bring me further from being in touch with what it means to be human
soperj 29 minutes ago
Everything is actively getting worse for more corporate espionage.
I didn't actually say anything about government, mine seems to genuinely care for our welfare.
Corporate food products (at least from the US) seem to be designed to just get you to consume more of them.
unrented7977 11 minutes ago
There's a growing sentiment in the US that capitalism in general and consumerism in particular are inherently bad and cause only hardship and exploitation for the general public.
unrented7977 31 minutes ago
Yeah, that seems like a perfectly natural response to the corporate capitalist hellscape the rising generations find themselves in.
Shock horror, people tend to care most about things that they feel personally affect them.
Aurornis 22 minutes ago
This is another theme I notice in this same cohort: It is not permissible to even suggest that they’re doing anything wrong. Any time someone highlights behaviors or beliefs that have problems or are inconsistent, someone will pop up and blame that on the corporations, too.
So even when these people have turned into a broken clock about being anti-corporate to the point that they’re anti-open-projects, someone will always come along to explain why we everything is the fault of corporations. A normal working class person can not be faulted for their beliefs in this model, because every fault will be transformed into something that can be blamed on a corporation.
Personally I find the erasure of individual thought in this model to be demeaning. You can’t blame everything every individual does on corporations having either made them do it or forced them to believe it through their actions. At some point we have to admit that people’s thoughts and actions are their own.
If someone becomes so bitter that they’re becoming anti-OSM or anti-Wikipedia or anti-OSS, I’m fully okay with holding them to account for their chosen beliefs.
pastel8739 16 minutes ago
> This is another theme I notice in this same cohort
> Personally I find the erasure of individual thought in this model to be demeaning.
The fact that you are describing a behavior that you believe to be shared among a sizable group of people seems to contradict your claim that their beliefs are due to individual failings rather than some broader social forces that caused them to believe these things, no?
imoverclocked 34 minutes ago
Much of the open source movement has its roots in anti-corporate culture too. Given that open source is now largely funded by corporations is a win for the ideals of open source but also a corruption of the early ethos; It’s very easy to equate open source with corporatism.
possibilistic 2 hours ago
New opportunities and directions open up all the time! AI is opening a whole new salient to attack the gatekeepers.
Craft is Wikipedia / OSM for software. We're building an open source AI software factory to agentically remake everything.
We're going to open source all the apps, turn platforms into protocols, build open infra, and help assist open weights.
Everything will be rewritten as high quality open source software. And once we've covered the space of everything people use, we'll turn the components into highly reusable open source libraries that can be reshaped into new workflows in real time.
We're going to make a seamless bridge between local and cloud AI, we're going to make a rich set of primitives for fine tuning and sharing.
Not just applications. Data, infra, hardware, the whole of technology.
manphone 2 hours ago
This reads as so pollyannish as to be nonsense.
chipdale an hour ago
I'm not a fan of pollyannish declarations, but I try not to dismiss ideas on delusionally enthusiastic tone alone.
I've been around long enough to know that sustained collective enthusiasm can sometimes blindside you.
I took a brief look at the posted projects and quickly surveyed the community behind it and I'm not ready to dismiss them yet. I'm not exactly sold either, but I am going to put them on my radar and check in every few months.
0c3ca83 2 hours ago
AI is the attack. You can't possibly be this clueless, so I only have to assume trolling.
Toynbeeidea an hour ago
Very cool, chatgpt. Get a real website and MAYBE I'll take you seriously.
0xbadcafebee an hour ago
OSM is still too difficult to contribute to for mass engagement. I spent an entire day trying to figure out how I could contribute fixes to the map for my corner of the country. There are 30 roads nearby with inaccuracies that would take me weeks to correct by hand. That could be fixed easily if there was a convenient app that recorded my driving and uploaded it to a central source, processed it, and converted that into edits for me to confirm. Such a system might exist, but I wasn't able to figure out where it was or how to use it. If they want more users to contribute the system needs to be easier. Same for Wikis.
striking an hour ago
https://streetcomplete.app/ I think is a pretty good example of OSM making it easy to contribute. Maybe try it as an on-ramp? It doesn't record driving or anything, just gives you little quests for your area
The full list is at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Editors
armchairhacker an hour ago
Unironically, try asking Claude to make it for you.
Then please publish it. Others can ask Claude too but it's stupid, and one central repository will have everyone's bugfixes and feature recommendations.
Freak_NL an hour ago
Do you have suitable aerial imagery available? Because if it that's the case (and this is the case in most countries) aligning 30 or so roads is an evening of mapping once you've bitten the bullet and learned to use JOSM (which is really not hard for most people with some technical background).
Did you ask for help in the community group for your country?
> That could be fixed easily if there was a convenient app that recorded my driving and uploaded it to a central source, processed it, and converted that into edits for me to confirm.
Mapping requires more than that. GPS traces can be useful in areas where no recent aerial imagery is available, but automated importing of that would cause a lot of errors.
hasbot 31 minutes ago
Record your driving using any app that can export a GPX file (e.g. Strava, RideWithGPS, or Komoot). Import that GPX file into the standard OSM web editor and trace the displayed tracks.
txrx0000 36 minutes ago
The kids are alright (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Zeloof). They are putting up more of a fight than you can imagine. The root cause of centralization is the way we do hardware manufacturing (as explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49690354). I think it will take about 5 years to make fabs into home appliances, then the entire stack will decentralize from the bottom up. The future is most likely solar/cypherpunk, at least in America.
vablings 12 minutes ago
I personally think most people become disengaged from the side of things like OSM because they literally don't have visibility to the problem. It becomes even worse when there are literally trillions of dollars of market value derives from the good work of open source, but people only see the badge of product and not all of the layers of onion beneath it.
I really wish the world recognized and provided tax income to these projects because they have been the backbone of our ever-complex technological society for probably about thirty years. Rather than what we have now where large corporations will take a foothold in an open-source project and hollow it out for parts then sell it as a "turnkey" product like we have seen time and time again.
xattt 3 hours ago
It’s the infinite value extraction hustle that’s killing the fun of projects.
I used to contribute to [X] project because it felt good to make something, but realizing that someone is getting a dollar on the back of my work that I am not is just not worth it.
philpem 2 hours ago
People volunteer and crowdsource driven by ideals, and then others involve themselves seeking fame, control, power -- slowly the idealism dies, and eventually only a husk remains.
icantevenhold 2 hours ago
Power attracts the corruptible
naasking 2 hours ago
I think AI and spread of technology both suppresses and supercharges crowdsourcing inclinations. Once AI is better than the best researchers, who would manually maintain a Wikipedia? There might still be random manual human audits, but something like Grokipedia seems inevitable.
I think this will be the case for other things too. OpenStreetMaps won't need as many contributors as more sensors come online, eg. sensors and footage from hobby drones and people's phones augment how much information a single person can enter about a city.
Lizeng 2 hours ago
totally with you, we are still on the way find the best way to work with AI, way too early to jump into another"we are cooked" conclusion
Forgeties79 2 hours ago
Just because a lot of people still do it doesn’t mean it isn’t declining.
Let’s take 2 of your examples: OSM still has major gaps that seem to be getting worse actually (so much outdated or missing stuff and I’ve seen the community worry about interest) and fan wikis have almost all consolidated onto the ad riden, unreadable monstrosity that is fandom.
Aurornis an hour ago
It’s also not a new belief. I remember all of the skepticism about Wikipedia being possible when it was a new idea.
What’s interesting is that most younger people I interact with now have a better idea of what’s possible through crowdsourced collaboration than older people. In the tech world, people who grew up with crowdsourced sites have seen the end state of Stack Overflow and its moderation, or they’ve seen enough controversies around Wikipedia edit wars where controversial topics become battlegrounds to see which moderators can wield the site’s rules more effectively to revert edits they don’t want on the page. On a long enough timeframe, community projects are at high risk of turning into fiefdoms for power hungry moderators.
The younger people grow up seemingly seeing the same things, but having a different experience about what it means. Talk to any younger generation gamer and they’ll have stories about Discord or Minecraft communities collapsing under power tripping moderators. But in the newer world where internet resources are cheap and now that LLMs can help migrate things, they may have established a new Discord or moved the community to a new game server by the end of the week. Their favorite game emulator or other project may have been forked 4 times already and the community will move to another fork again at the first signs of the new maintainer not doing what they like.
dfbdns53463 an hour ago
adding arrstack to this
asim an hour ago
Totally agree, with AI it feels like we will actually accelerate that or be able to take on more ambitious projects as per the things you mentioned, its been a laborious effort by mankind. Now imagine we really want to do open maps, communication, even search. There are all sorts of possible ways we can do some large scale crowdsourced effort and its probably going to be realtime news e.g video streaming live events on an open platform not owned by corporations. Where there is no misinformation. No one can lie to us, we can see it happening.
10111001 an hour ago
> Totally agree, with AI it feels like we will actually accelerate that or be able to take on more ambitious projects as per the things you mentioned, its been a laborious effort by mankind. Now imagine we really want to do open maps, communication, even search.
But then it'll just be your AI slop and no one will care. If they want one they'll slop one up themselves instead of using yours.
The people building these technologies do not have a good understanding of humanity (they have some oversimplified view focused on reducing friction), and even if they did their goal is not to help communities from but rather extract the most profit for themselves out of society. They won't maintain the friction that helps communities form and keeps them cohesive, just like they won't maintain the friction that keeps us healthy as individuals.
> There are all sorts of possible ways we can do some large scale crowdsourced effort and its probably going to be realtime news e.g video streaming live events on an open platform not owned by corporations. Where there is no misinformation. No one can lie to us, we can see it happening.
That's a fantasy. The technological trend is towards more corporate ownership and more misinformation (or if there's less, it will only be because the corporate overlord AIs will suppress misinformation that's against their interests, and promote other misinformation that suits them better).
I think you're generalizing a brief summer, when the web was new and the power-that-be had not yet muster their resources to control it, as the natural state, when it was really a happy but unsustainable state.
watwut an hour ago
> movie dbs, and a thousand others with no sign of stopping.
They do show signs of stopping.
muvlon 42 minutes ago
Exactly. Erosion of the Internet's commons by spam, abuse, botting etc. were always a problem they had to contend with, but it's gotten way worse recently, to the point where several are either failing to cope or already dead (like StackOverflow).
uptrails an hour ago
I'm guessing that most commenters here didn't read the article, and the headline itself was abridged by omitting the word "quite" in "quite like". The article isn't saying that nothing vaguely shaped like Wikipedia will ever be created again. It's saying that there will probably be no room for a similar human-written effort because the internet is morphing into something not conductive to having human-curated websites in the first place:
"AI’s absorption of Wikipedia means that more people than ever are reading its content. Yet it also means that fewer people are visiting the site itself. When a Wikipedia link is suggested by a search engine, nearly a tenth of users click through. When Wikipedia is cited by an LLM, the clickthrough rate is only 0.33% (and not all credit their sources)."
Individuals may keep blogging out of the force of habit or to cater to narrow / walled-garden audiences, but there aren't that many people you can attract to a planetary-scale project with the pitch of "let's edit a training dataset for OpenAI together". We're taking away the motivation of trying to make something useful and good.
Some folks are saying that AI will only accelerate the creation of future Wikipedias, and that's obviously missing the point. Yes, there might be Grokipedia-style entities, probably a number of them.
RajT88 an hour ago
This seems to be an article which didn't fact check itself.
Wikis by article count:
Wikipedia: 65 million (English: 7.2 million)
Baidu Baike: 30 million
Hudong Baike: 15 million
Namuwiki: 8.7 million
Fandom: 40 million
In fact, the Everquest 2 wiki dwarfs the Yongle encyclopedia at ~400k articles.
poulpy123 an hour ago
There are two critical points for a wikipedia level project:
1. the culture of sharing your work 2. the sense of usefulness and purpose
I'm not sure the newest generation share the 1, but in any case LLM companies destroy the 2.
Why would you thanklessly work for free and for the community if your work is pillaged and sold for a lot of money by AI companies before the project even reaches a critical mass ?!
sandos 40 minutes ago
Wikitree is also fascinating, to me at least! :)
grumbel 32 minutes ago
> and a thousand others with no sign of stopping.
StackOverflow used to be one of the big ones in that area and that is as good as dead. I see the same coming to TVTropes, fandom wikis, movie dbs and Co. once AI gets a good at interpreting video and getting access to some sizable movie libraries. When it comes to /r/tipofmytongue/ style questions AI is already much better than large groups of humans together, though only if the necessary information is available on the public Web.
Lack of access to content outside the Web is really what is hampering progress so far, but that could go away very quickly whenever any of the big players decides to let AI run wild on whatever libraries they have.
As for humans, I just don't see how they could compete. Wikipedia took decades to write, millions of volunteers and Grokipedia (despite being a bit of an unmaintained mess) caught up to its article count in a few months. On top of that comes that all those projects aim for a neutral POV, which is very non-human to begin with and only going to benefit AI.
cardanome 15 minutes ago
> On top of that comes that all those projects aim for a neutral POV, which is very non-human to begin with and only going to benefit AI.
LLMs are not more neutral than humans. Not only because their learning material is biased but also because they can develop unexpected biases due to the non-deterministic and emergent nature of generative AI.
The idea that an LLM would be more neutral and less partial than a human is a very dangerous and very wrong one. It misunderstands the very nature of generative AI.
And while some people are able to tolerate AI generated text, a lot of people would never read Grokipedia. I would not. Despite great progress, generative AI is not able to create images that don't look absolutely disgusting in the eyes of actual artists. And the same is true for text output for anyone who cares about writing.
ajayyy 2 hours ago
I recently did a talk in opposition of this sentiment
Yes, some projects like stack overflow may be losing contributors by a large degree, but it doesn't have to be this way
I run SponsorBlock and DeArrow which are two human powered crowdsourced browser extensions that are only growing in scale in opposition to the want to slopify everything
We have 17% of submitters every week being first time contributors and 19% being old, a nice balance.
Unfortunately the talk isn't available yet but you can see the slides here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1nGArM7c3i9cVGGvkh6ER...
radlad 2 hours ago
Excellent counterexample! I have been using SponsorBlock and DeArrow for years and anecdotally I'm hearing more and more using SB.
bspammer 2 hours ago
SponsorBlock was the first thing that popped into my head when I read the article title! Thank you for both of these extensions, they’re almost as important as uBlock for my experience of the web.
chrismorgan an hour ago
> We have 17% of submitters every week being first time contributors
That doesn’t sound like necessarily a positive thing; it sounds like it could well be unsustainable churn (impossible to tell from such limited numbers, I don’t know what the general growth figures are or proportional trends).
I have contributed in the past, but don’t any more because of how you went out of your way to make it tedious: https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock/issues/2106. I suspect there are a lot more that have been driven away by the unnecessary and not even accurate mandatory preview step.
ajayyy an hour ago
we also have 19% of constributors every week who have been submitting for over 3 years! I think that's a pretty impressive number, especially when it is so easy to reset your account by reinstalling the extension because we don't use traditional emails and passwords.
theturtletalks 35 minutes ago
This is the most optimistic way to look at it. People who couldn't code before but had ideas can code now, can build things, can contribute to projects they had no business understanding before LLMs.
laserlight 24 minutes ago
What I like about SponsorBlock is the statistics it presents. Every sponsor segment I've contributed has saved 682 people from seeing it. Per each submission I've contributed by spending maybe 1.5 minutes, I've saved 459 person-minutes. Wow. What an impact.
ryankrage77 11 minutes ago
I didn't know about the stats, I just checked and found it's saved me over 3 days. I assume that's local to this machine, so that's just in the last year.
markasoftware 7 minutes ago
I'm convinced SponsorBlock could be completely automated with modern TTS and a fairly small LLM
brians 2 hours ago
Before Wikipedia, people like this author predicted it would be impossible. Science fiction authors wrote about it, but understood it to be fictional—Asimov showed how a great encyclopedia contained the seeds of its own project failure. Adams meant it as a joke.
And attempts like everything2 and h2g2 were neat art but nothing like Wikipedia. The spinoff attempts to do something like Wikipedia also failed.
This is characteristic of something that is probability zero in its particulars but rather likely as an example of a class.
sunir 2 hours ago
H2g2 and everything2 were positioned as silly things whereas Wikipedia had the audaciousness of being serious and that was what it took.
Humans do like getting serious and accomplishing something before the twinkling light of our lives fades.
apiclay 2 hours ago
Wikipedia is unique in its own way, no question about it, and true. But calling a project like this can never be recreated is wrong.
Wherever there is a community, people will contribute; people love being social, and many platforms do this broadly and well enough.
- OpenstreetMap
- GitHub ( people contributing Code, issues and bugs)
- All Reviews Platform ( this creates such a sign that today, whenever people buy or use any product, they would like to see reviews)
Thousands of others with no sign of stopping, and the future will keep on bringing more.
Peer-to-peer is a social culture that will always be there, and whenever new things come up, a similar peer-to-peer culture will back them.
larodi 2 hours ago
well call then why would it be recreated. only for Dario's and Samas to .ZIP it and sell it back in a more convenient form? if that's okay, well - everyone rush to contribute, but I somehow don't see this happening and don't expect to see it in the future.
throw10920 an hour ago
I'm confused. It seems pretty clear to me that search-equipped LLMs have vastly improved the availability of high-quality knowledge to the average person, who no longer needs to go to Wikipedia and find a page and then look at the sources on that page (which is the most reliable part of WP) - especially because nobody reads the sources to begin with.
Isn't that availability of information the entire point of Wikipedia? Heck, wasn't that the point of Google before they turned evil?
za_creature an hour ago
Almost. The point of wikipedia is the availability of unbiased information.
Probably half of their edits are flame wars between editors with different political slants.
With a LLM, the system prompt can tell it exactly which way to bias the search space, and you only have to do this once. And no, open weights models won't save you because someone will figure out a way to embed the system prompt into the weights themselves (if they haven't already have).
throw10920 an hour ago
> The point of wikipedia is the availability of unbiased information.
I think they've failed at that, then. I regularly come across articles that have every slant you can imagine - political, technical, and corporate (written as marketing material for a product).
The value that I get from Wikipedia is in its aggregation of sources - not it's neutrality, because they're regularly cherry-picked to favor whatever the spin is - but having some sources is better than having none, which was the pre-WP state.
You can't defeat confirmation bias, but LLMs at least have the ability to provide more objective evidence than Wikipedia (while also being more tenacious when trying to find new sources).
kingleopold an hour ago
my fellow hacker news commentor, there are PR firms and people that specially create and craft wikipedia pages. Have you ever thought what is the barrier to have wikipedia page for company or people? It's bot too high and barrier and decisions are made by people, PR firms and people are paid for it. Not every page is about super famous or inventors etc. This is why it can never be unbiased, every human and org have bias.
sholladay 19 minutes ago
I’m going to argue that YouTube is a lot like Wikipedia.
Sure, it has ads. The business models are different. There may be less moderation and thus more garbage. But it’s mostly volunteer work. And it’s got a massive amount of knowledge, from arcane facts to highly practical educational content. The good channels provide a table of contents, links and cite their sources in the description. It’s a community effort, which has spawned communities of its own. It’s also been relatively stable in being that way for 20 years, which is remarkable.
fwlr 2 hours ago
There are far too many “machines for turning commons into tragedies” running amok for there to be any significant creation of commons in the future. One, those able and willing to create a commons are usually also capable of seeing what will happen if they do and are reasonably demotivated by it; two, the machines are in a race to the bottom and cannot prevent themselves from harvesting too early and too aggressively for any commons that does somehow get created anyway to survive.
thatslast 2 hours ago
Shameless plug: last month while travelling, I kept walking around a new city and realizing later that I’d passed places with great stories without knowing. Many Wikipedia articles have coordinates, so I thought they could become cards you collect by physically walking there. Each card credits and links back to the article.
I’m not sure it helps with the “AI absorbs it, nobody visits” problem, but every card links to the page, and I think players will go read them to understand what they've just collected.
I also suspect a lot of collectors like correcting things. I know “I was there” isn’t a citable source (see the OSM post box story above), but photos are a real contribution: many Wikipedia photos are poor or outdated, and I’d like players to be able to submit theirs to Commons in the future.
Built with MapLibre + Protomaps. I just added a waiting list if you're interested trying it out!
pbmonster an hour ago
> Many Wikipedia articles have coordinates, so I thought they could become cards
For an alternative use: the OSM app CoMaps fetches those articles and also includes them in the offline maps.
Last time I was walking around a tourist city, I didn't even bring a tourist guide book. I just followed OSM to the sights, and read the Wikipedia entry about the things I saw. All without using my phones roaming data plan, or even leaving the maps app.
widdershins 27 minutes ago
I've been on-and-off working on an AI tourguide which pulls Wikipedia articles near your GPS location, builds a route, and at each stop tells you some information extracted from the article.
Nothing public to show, but I have learned a lot about my local area by testing it out.
Yours looks much more polished, I'll look forward to trying it out!
speaktochris 9 minutes ago
I also wanted to build something like this then I learned Wikipedia has a related feature to show pegs best your lat long https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby
Edit: it's also a feature in the Wikipedia app!
philajan 35 minutes ago
IAmGraydon 15 minutes ago
Doesn't work. Guessing gift links only allow a limited number of views?
GuB-42 3 hours ago
And there is no need to, because we already have Wikipedia.
If we get to the more general idea of "can humans collaborate in the same way they collaborated to make Wikipedia". I see no reason why not. Collaborative projects similar in spirit to Wikipedia pop up all the time.
GeoAtreides 2 hours ago
>Collaborative projects similar in spirit to Wikipedia pop up all the time.
Name one started after 2022, with at least a modicum of success.
GuB-42 an hour ago
I can't think of any. But the thing is, but 4 years (after 2022) is not much, that's how long it took for Wikipedia to take off, most similar project I can think of: OpenStreetMap, Linux, GNU, arXiv... took longer than that. You can't judge success in 4 years.
After a quick search I stumbled upon Wikifunctions (2023), but do Wikimedia projects that are not Wikipedia count? A bit more controversial would be Anna's Archive (2022).
We have to think about the needs too. There was a need for an online encyclopedia, Wikipedia took it. What need do we have now that is currently unanswered and can be answered by a collaborative effort similar to Wikipedia?
Also, open source projects, so many come out every year that it is hard to count.
paulnpace 2 hours ago
> And there is no need to, because we already have Wikipedia.
I became a Wikipedia editor not long after the 2nd version of the site, before they even had logins, IIRC.
I was banned from the site probably 7 years ago or so by a troll who collaborated with the admins. The review "process" was more like The Trial and the ban was quite terrible, because not only did they install some deep cookie in the browser, but they permabanned the IP address.
Wikipedia is gone. Whatever it even was, it is not now.
elevation an hour ago
> Wikipedia is gone. Whatever it even was, it is not now.
The title evokes a romantic sense of wikipedia as a well governed, neutral egalitarian multicultural collaboration. But anyone who has been marginalized by the cabal knows it was not most of those things.
alt227 an hour ago
Exactly this. People are holding up Wikipedia as some shining light in the free world. They obviously are not aware of all the controversies there have been over the years of both rogue editors and restrictive controlling admins. It has also been called out for censorship many times before. I think everybody still has the idea that Wikipedia is free and collaborative for everyone, when in fact it has changed significantly from what it was. Your experience is testament to that.
bawolff an hour ago
> because not only did they install some deep cookie
We dont use "deep" cookies, just normal cookies. If memory serves, 7 years ago Wikipedia didn't use cookies at all in the block process, it was purely ip based back at that point.
NitpickLawyer 16 minutes ago
The weirdest thing I've seen about wiki nowadays is that "they" (admins? editors? chief editors? dunno) get to decide what makes a "worthy" article for wikipedia. Which is bananas, in the era of "free" storage.
I get everything about slop/spam/etc. but deciding a page about a small band in SmallTown Canada isn't "worthy" of wiki is silly beans. That's the whole point of a collaborative, anyone can contribute wiki. Having people decide what "makes the cut" or not is silly.
They could have gone with a "edu" / "core" wiki that gets to include only certain articles, and the rest are "community" or something, but literally removing articles for anything other than quality/sources/spam is not what wiki started as. And it's not what I donated for, but that's another can of worms...
throw10920 an hour ago
> similar in spirit to Wikipedia
Spirit is not sufficient. I can start a new project with the same spirit and a user base of one.
Scale is part of what makes Wikipedia. What projects are similar in spirit and scale?
GuB-42 an hour ago
The closest I can think of is OpenStreetMaps.
FrankWilhoit 4 hours ago
Humans will never again create a project like _______.
tantalor 3 hours ago
We can't, we don't know how to do it.
crote 3 hours ago
So why have we stopped building pyramids for thousands of years? We have the technology and knowledge to do it, so where are all the new pyramids? And no, that Las Vegas monstrosity doesn't count.
You might be surprised to learn that not all challenges are purely technological. The biggest challenges with such megaprojects are political, economical, and social. A Wikipedia clone is completely worthless if nobody is willing to contribute - it would just be an empty database!
illusive4080 3 hours ago
Nobody wants a real pyramid
dpoloncsak 2 hours ago
its demand, right?
There's very little demand for new pyramids. The people with the capital have better things to do
ghtbircshotbe 2 hours ago
More generally, people haven't stopped trying to live forever or create monuments that outlast them
jimnotgym 2 hours ago
I guess it is because pyramids were built at a time of tyrranical supreme leaders with 100% of power and wealth concentrated in themselves. That and fashion
georgeecollins 2 hours ago
I agree, but I think the reason why we don't build pyramids today is because it would be a huge waste of resources. I guess you don't think much of Las Vegas-- me neither-- but the sphere is pretty darn impressive. There are all kinds of examples around the world with amazing architecture. The Hoover dam, the Golden Gate bridge, etc. If the Egyptians could have done these things they would probably not have built pyramids.
As an aside. When the Eifel Tower was built it was considered tacky by many and assumed to be temporary. Maybe some of the most remembered things of our time will be taken for granted. Maybe some huge data center will be a museum.
Pannoniae an hour ago
There are lots of pyramids around the world.... for example the one in the Louvre, or Memphis, TN and so on...
ben_w an hour ago
> And no, that Las Vegas monstrosity doesn't count.
Why doesn't it? The owner isn't buried in it?
> The biggest challenges with such megaprojects are political, economical, and social
Indeed; this is why we moved on from piling rocks in a formation that didn't fall down easily, and put all those things you list into cathederals, hydroelectric dams, the Apollo missions, etc.
Tadpole9181 20 minutes ago
> A Wikipedia clone is completely worthless if nobody is willing to contribute - it would just be an empty database!
Isn't that the point of TFA and this whole conversation?
AlexAplin 37 minutes ago
The exact cadence one expects from a really bad YouTube video essay, missing only caps. Clickbait springs eternal.
RockofStrength 40 minutes ago
Wikipedia was banned in schools, just as AI is now. This affects how the generation is trained to view it. The main drivers of real world knowledge have been both been stigmatized in schools. AI is more appealing to kids because it skips the step of having to translate the knowledge.
davhern an hour ago
Never is a really long time, and as my mom used to say, "never say never". Ideals, like the ones Wikipedia is build upon are not new, Wikipedia didn't invented those, just applied them for a specific project, maybe Wikipedia is unique and couldn't be replicated but that doesn't mean others won't (or hasn't) create similar projects. Otherwise, how was the first library created?
Bengalilol 3 hours ago
It depends. Okay, yes, probably.
BUT, let me slide on the off topic borders.
_Because_ Wikipedia is community driven and independent of any corporation, shareholder, or stock exchange, I tend to view it as something no commercial encyclopedia could ever have competed with.
Now, let’s imagine the same thing happening with LLMs and AI. Local, open-source, community-driven models will build better things than any commercial LLM or AI could ever create.
Yes, this is mostly a dream as of today. But will The Economist still be alive to validate this idea that humans, stripped of the money schemes, will have built greater (aka create a project like Wikipedia) things than ever ?
bariumbitmap 3 hours ago
I can't find a way to read the article, anyone have a gift link?
(Edit: archive.today and wallhop.io don't work)
qntmfred 2 hours ago
archive.is has it
baking 2 hours ago
Is this a joke?
gloosx 2 hours ago
archive.is is having a screenshot of the error for this article
philajan 35 minutes ago
Gareth321 an hour ago
I'm pretty negative on Wikipedia so my reflex was, "good." Wikipedia taught me that history is written by the victors, and today, the victors are the owners of social and news media, and the editors and moderators of Wikipedia. I used to be heavily involved in a page I won't mention, and it was well cited and factually correct. For political reasons, moderators with higher standing than me gradually removed sections, edited them unfairly, and generally vandalised the page. All sanctioned by the Wikipedia process. I learned that my page was FAR from the only page where useful, factual information was removed and edited in dishonest ways for ideological reasons. I have no doubt it's happening all over the site for many reasons. Most people don't see the politics which goes on behind the scenes, and they don't understand how much this undermines the trust in the information. My trust in the site could not be any lower than it is. I trust the parametric knowledge inside LLMs more now.
Honestly, I think knowledge like this is going to organically synchronise with consensus nodes in the very near future. Think of Community Notes on X as a prototype. That doesn't mean everything will be 100% accurate at all times, but I have zero doubt that it will be infinitely better than Wikipedia.
dionian an hour ago
I have the exact same experience in my sphere of research. I found for things like Natural History they tend not to be editorialized so incredibly hard but if you look at anything geopolitics it's insanely bad unless you like the side that they are tilting things towards
speedgoose 36 minutes ago
You won't mention the page, but could you give us a hint about what was the topic and the edit war about?
anticrymactic 19 minutes ago
> a page I won't mention
Please mention the page along with your and the moderators edits together with your objective sources.
Wikipedia is changeable and documentation is the only thing that will lead to change. It is understandable that one grows tired from consistent "ideals>facts" that plague so many "moderated" spaces, but a small final effort by many with such experience can lay the foundation for fresh contributiors to built a better Wikipedia.
seydor 3 hours ago
Once AI starts being a superhuman doctor everyone will want to contribute their medical story
pmarreck 2 hours ago
> faces grave new threats
The biggest threat to it IMHO is internal bias.
JojiDoesCode 2 hours ago
Agreed. There's been many articles/investigations revealing the ideological capture of a lot of prolific wikipedia editors/contributors.
rodolphoarruda 3 hours ago
Wikipedia needed a very small tech infra and legal support to run back in the day. I have a feeling that now any project needs much more infra AND world wide legal support given the larger amount of laws and complexity involved. Just a feeling.
GaryBluto 3 hours ago
I hope they don't. Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation is quite dodgy behind the scenes.
UpsideDownRide 3 hours ago
It shouldn't take away from the benefit the project provides.
account42 2 hours ago
The work of countless unpaid contributors should not be used to distract from the shady organization profiting off their work.
zhouzhao 2 hours ago
Wikimedia is the shady organization with the pop-up banners begging for money, yes.
Wikipedia itself is what it is, a library of collective effort.
As much as I despise wikimedia, the worth of wikipedia for humanity is so much more compared to the negative aspects of wikimedia.
MisterMunchkin 2 hours ago
Yeah it's so ridiculous seeing them ask for "donations" (which they just pocket) when the running costs for the next century are already in the bank.
They pretend it is a charity, but it isn't. It all just goes to shareholders.
xyzzy_plugh 2 hours ago
"It all just goes to shareholders"
What is this nonsense? It's a non-profit. There are literally no shareholders.
armchairhacker an hour ago
I really doubt humans will ever create another Wikipedia. I really bet they will create another collaborative project, i.e. a project "like" it.
Current AI has bad taste. AI is OK at explaining things, to the point that humans creating an explainer like Wikipedia (which is also merely OK at explaining things, albeit better than AI) may be too little payoff for the effort. But any creative AI project, so far, is ugly. The best AI projects are "port [existing project] into X language", "decompile [existing project]", "combing [existing project] and [existing project]", "turn [existing theory] into a real project"...AI, like JRR Tolkein's evil, cannot create, only convert existing things. Even "Skate 3 in Minecraft" etc. notice that whenever the different games interact, it's lazily implemented at best, and usually broken (in a way that does not crash the game but visually is obviously wrong...because the AI has been trained to run tests, but cannot really judge visuals).
Which is to say, I bet collaborative creative projects are here to stay. AI will even boost them, by creating the software foundation to make new things - an AI flash, AI game engine, AI metaverse, AI design studio that gives the user fine control (not just rerunning the same prompt praying for a mediocre output, or trying to make progress with small changes but failing when each one breaks something else). AI, frankly, supersedes Wikipedia (whose primary purpose is finding information; just ask the AI, then follow up on whatever you're confused or want to know more about). But AI cannot recreate the magic of collaboration, nor come close to the art of, say, r/place - which I expect to have similar if not nearly-exact successors of (if Reddit retries r/place I expect it to suck, but that's less AI and more Reddit's terrible management driving away quality users...who aren't going extinct, just need a decent platform to grow on).
totetsu 2 hours ago
When the counter culture revolution happened (that led to hippies that led to tech utopian idealist that led to free software that led to wikipedia,) it probably seemed a few years earlier just as impossible for anything to change as it does today..
cloudie78 2 hours ago
No we won’t.
We’ll make something else and more ambitious.
Negativity drives engagement.
riffic 16 minutes ago
I'd argue projects like the Linux kernel or Kubernetes are just as impressive from an infrastructure perspective.
fg137 2 hours ago
All I want is a crowdsourced site of new car (actual transaction) price in the US. Somehow that hasn't happened yet.
jan_Sate an hour ago
How do you make sure that the reported price's correct? There are incentives for some people to report a misleading price.
wanderer2323 an hour ago
A post like this almost certainly means “a project like Wikipedia” is being created right now.