the old Encyclopedia Britannica.

No one uses this.

You’ve got dozens of alternative Wiki competitors with their own rarified communities of editors and contributors.

No one uses them.

You’ve got subject-specific Wikis for a thousand different fandoms, hobbies, and crafts.

Fandom has a grip on this space, unfortunately, and that's under Wales too. Yes, I know there are community alternatives, but their traffic/SEO is small in comparison.

But the idea that tens of millions of curious people and subject-experts are just going to endure a vacuum? Come on.

They absolutely will.

They already have!

Look at the rest of the internet. Literally every space, every niche, every congregation of experts has rotted away, and these "curious people and subject-experts" are clingimg to big social media toxic spaces because it's the default.

It’s a very English-language and Euro-History oriented source of truth for tens of millions of online nerds. If it gets subsumed or shut down or otherwise undermined by western-aligned governments, I might suggest that the problem will not be an absence of Wikipedia but the presence of a malignant surveillance-enabled censorship bureaucracy.

You're speaking of an internet that, for the bulk of humanity, doesn't exist anymore. It is all but gone. That's what I'm saying.

Maybe a few million nerds would create new Wikipedias, but the billions of other people on their phones and tablets would almsot never see it.

And that is dangerous for society. Wikipedia's sheer critical mass is a huge monkey wrench in "soft" censorship, and for all its faults, every bit Wikipeida is delegitimized is a fascist dream-come-true.

And I hear a lot of people talking like that popularity isn't important. There's this sort of "old internet" attiude like we can just archive it and keep to ourselves. What does everyone else matter?

Well. Without Wikipedia putting the braKES on loss of freedoms in our IRL lives, we may lose the ability to do that.