Wikipedianon

Wikipedia is existentially threatened by AI, which does the same thing but better.

> most users of AI products do not click the links to Wikipedia, choosing instead to accept machine-generated outputs without further verification. If this practice continues, readership on Wikipedia will continue to decline.

This is the same mechanism by which Wikipedia drained readers from news outlets and academic papers that it cites for information.

I play the tiniest violin in the world for Wikipedia editors that now suffer from the same thing they did to the news media.

I know of most of them, at this point. I was heavily involved in that segment of Wikipedia including Sockpuppet Investigations.

The pro-Israel ones have been around for decades. Icewhiz, NoCal100, etc. They are easy to spot because they are tightly regimented and run a volume game of many accounts. They are obviously billing by the hour to a nation-state level actor that is not demanding a clear ROI on their investment and is instead using shitty KPIs.

There are also commercial sock farms. They are easy to spot because their income is "clients that want Wikipedia articles and don't qualify for one". Any account who spends all their time writing articles on small market cap companies without news coverage is a paid shill.

They are meaningless to target because Wikipedia has a bureaucratic process called "Articles for Creation" where these shills can submit the same crap endlessly for years and bill the client for time spent without impacting the encyclopedia.

From a brief skim, the list includes pretty much all active Arbitration Enforcement (AE) admins.

For those not in the loop, AE is the main mechanism to enforce civility and neutrality in contentious areas (obvious stuff like Israel-Palestine, American Politics, but also India-Pakistan, casteism, etc etc). It removes editors that are obviously only on the site to astroturf a specific belief relating to a globally controversial topic.

This requires painstaking review of one's conduct and is the main reason Wikipedia is not astroturfed in the same way Reddit or other discussion forums are.

If the strike goes forward, Wikipedia will have a massive realignment towards whatever political groups can amass the most accounts agreeing with them.

Grokipedia would unironically become more neutral in a year.

It's not a good idea for common languages like German or English or French.

But it is a great idea for indigenous languages that aren't in the training data but many people speak, which was the original purpose.

I am hopeful that it'll create synthetic training data for those groups.

Most articles on notable AND interesting subjects have already been written and are of a high quality.

"notability" means there are peer-reviewed/editorially controlled articles on the topic.

So, if I wanted to write an article on Gas Town, I couldn't. It got a lot of technical blogs and Arxiv preprints written about it by experts, but it won't be notable.

> What's the relevance? Wikipedia contributors aren't employed by Wikipedia. Their work is volunteered, and nobody asks them to do it.

Yet, there's tons of people that love having control over articles and what people see. I was one of them.

It's exciting seeing news outlets quote your arguments in an onwiki dispute, or paraphrase an article that you wrote. Or having millions of people look at an article. It's much easier than starting a blog.

That's the English Wikipedia community in a nutshell. The WMF knows it's an issue but can't do anything about it.

There isn't enough work anymore in a monopolized but declining market. A shrinking pie forces cliquey political slugfests. It happened to IBM and can happen to StackOverflow/Wikipedia.

I hate it now. There's so much doxxing and meanness. There's also sizable contingents of propagandists in anything controversial. Most famously, pro-Israel Icewhiz, who creates hundreds of sockpuppets and harassed people IRL, but now more recently r/Palestine's sock farm. There's similar farms in trans issues or India-Pakistan.

The saddest part is that Wikipedia's original purpose was unbiased copyleft-style free knowledge.

LLMs have the potential to democratize access to knowledge more than any other technology. But they are an existential threat to editors that previously did this deep research manually and served as gatekeepers with the attendant social status.

As a result, there's a vitriolic hatred of any attempt to integrate LLMs into Wikipedia. Even if it's open-weights stuff running locally.

So, Google will continue to eat Wikipedia alive with AI summaries.

I hope Wikipedia is replaced by something AI-native run by a non-profit that has the interests of readers at heart.

There shouldn't be any interface admins as such. There should be an enforced review process for changes to global JavaScript so stuff like this can't happen.

I'm sure there are Google engineers who can push changes to prod and bypass CI but that isn't a normal way to handle infra.

This is half true, because Wikipedia admins had the ability to edit sitewide JavaScript until 2018.

A certain number of "community" admins maintain that right to this day after it was realized this was a massive security hole.