Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors (404media.co)
- Reference: 0179813316
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/10/17/0931209/wikipedia-says-ai-is-causing-a-dangerous-decline-in-human-visitors
- Source link: https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-says-ai-is-causing-a-dangerous-decline-in-human-visitors/
> The Wikimedia Foundation said that this poses a risk to the long term sustainability of Wikipedia. "We welcome new ways for people to gain knowledge. However, AI chatbots, search engines, and social platforms that use Wikipedia content must encourage more visitors to Wikipedia, so that the free knowledge that so many people and platforms depend on can continue to flow Sustainably," the Foundation's Senior Director of Product Marshall Miller said in a blog post. "With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work."
[1] https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-says-ai-is-causing-a-dangerous-decline-in-human-visitors/
AI for search (Score:5, Insightful)
The worst part of AI for search, is when you click through to the linked reference page, you often find information that directly contradicts what the AI summary is telling you. Absolute garbage!
Re: (Score:2)
It's Wikipedia... somebody probably changed the content since it was scraped.
Google as well (Score:2)
I'm surprised that Alphabet has done as well as they have in the era of LLMs. They're as much an AI company as anyone in big tech, but I've always heard that search is they lynchpin of Google, and LLMs must have decimated that.
Re: (Score:2)
Google is completely untrustworthy when it comes to politics. I stopped even trying.
Example: Some crazies claimed that there were no rapes as part of the October 7th, attack. I saw plenty of pictures of it back then. Even widely shared images are now completely gone.
If you lie to people, they stop listening.
Re: (Score:2)
Apparently Google's customers haven't yet figured out that advertising on the web no longer works (if it ever did).
Why the web might need "Web 3.0" to survive (Score:1)
The whole discussion around Web 3.0 is based around building blockchain-based payment into web browsers, and frankly, that might save huge swaths of the human-generated internet. Paywalls will be efficient, easy to make and decentralized. Think Brave's reward programs, but with actual USD, Euro, etc. by sending stable coins over low-cost networks like Solana and XRPL.
Regardless, the overarching problem the web faces now is that AI is actively consuming human-generated content and completely replacing it.
My downloaded copy is reducing my traffic (Score:2)
Kiwix + the ~105GB downloadable version of Wikipedia is fast & always available and doesn't produce a footprint on the interwebs.
To sum it up (Score:2)
Wikipedia has a significant problem with biases. So does anything written by anybody or anything. I have not found the biases to be egregiously bad. Far from it. They seem pretty predictable.
Wikipedia is, in general, accurate on the facts, as long as the topic is not controversial and political.
AI summaries are, in general, of questionable accuracy. I trust them to give me links to sources that might be valuable, and that is it.
AI summaries have significant bias problems. They reflect the biases of th
Dangerous? (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Re: (Score:2)
Every time I do a search, the very first hit is always the AI summary, which basically steals what it says from Wikipedia. I am not at all surprised that Wikipedia traffic is down.
Re: (Score:1)
You call it "leftist", I call it "fact". The conservative slant is always going to get things wrong.