Every time someone visits Wikipedia they make exactly $0. In fact, it costs them money. Are people still contributing and/or donating? These seem like more important questions to me.
yeah, i drop a $20-25 donation yearly.
Alternative for DuckDuckGo:
https://noai.duckduckgo.com/?q=%25s
Edit: Lemmy/Voyager formats this string with 25 at the end. Remove the 25 & save it as a browser search engine
There's a certain irony in a website that caused a decline in visitors to primary sources complaining about something new causing a decline in visitors to its tertiary sources
I mean, there's levels to this. If I'm looking for information, having a summary rather than a highly technical primary source can be very useful. Wikipedia cites its sources, and (ideally) has summaries made by groups of people familiar with the subject and following consistent and detailed publicly available style guides. Wikipedia isn't running ads, and is not for profit.
When an AI summarizes these primary sources, or even summarizes Wikipedia, you get none of that. AI does not reliably cite sources (ones not made for it will just generate a convincing looking response, making up sources whole cloth. Ones made to cite sources will often not actually cite the ones they used, and still can make up sources more rarely). It can't reliably summarize things accurately, as it doesn't understand anything, especially not terms that have different meanings depending on the technical context. There's no group of people reviewing and revising. There's no incredibly detailed style guide. All these AI are explicitly for profit (the amount of self hosted out there is negligible and those are much less of a problem), and almost every one of the companies running them have openly spoken about future plans to try and seamlessly weave advertisements into them. Most importantly, there's no guarantee that what it gives you will even be true.
I sympathize with Wikipedia here because I really like the platform. That being said, modernize and get yourself a new front end. People don't like AI because of it's intrusiveness. They want convenience. Create "Knowledge-bot" or something similar that is focused on answering questions in a more meaningful way.
Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors
FWIW:
Wikipedia:Reference desk
Interesting. I had never heard about this. Could still use a lot of sprucing up.
IIRC, they expect people to first try to find the answers themselves—perhaps they could check out a few WP articles—no "Who's the Secretary of the Department of Interior" or similar questions;
though my big (perhaps only) problem is that a question only stands for a while—maybe a few days or week or so—before it's archived. In some of the forums (non-WP) of about 20 years ago, one could answer questions asked months, maybe years, earlier that are still relevant.
Still, I've gotten a few good answers to the few questions I posted on it.
Oh I didn't mean change the current setup. Create a standalone tool that better uses the wiki framework so people can access it in a different way, that's all.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
