Some English Wikipedia (enwiki) editors are striking. They are predominantly non-technical that are forced to maintain their own shadow IT-style infrastructure that Wikimedia (nonprofit owners of Wikipedia) doesn't provide. It is very difficult to be a productive editor without custom tooling at this point.

The reason why is because the laid off team maintained the Community Wishlist, the main way for editors to feature request for "professional" solutions.

The Wikimedia Foundation also deweighted popularity as a metric for tackling feature requests on the Community Wishlist. This pisses off enwiki as the largest editor base.

From the WMF's perspective, though, enwiki is a cash cow on the BCG matrix.[1] It has been in seemingly terminal decline for over a decade[2], accelerated by LLMs, yet still drives the majority of donations/clicks.

As a result, WMF prioritizes investing in emerging markets over enwiki. This means outreach to indigenous languages in the Global South and developing supporting infrastructure. e.g. "Abstract Wikipedia" which aims to use a language-neutral syntax that can be automatically translated into any language.

These currently form a tiny segment of the editor population but have much larger potential TAM and are growing. So it's the correct strategy even if it pisses off editors.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth%E2%80%93share_matrix

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_is_Wikipedia_los...

▲ bawolff 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> As a result, WMF prioritizes investing in emerging markets over enwiki. This means outreach to indigenous languages in the Global South and developing supporting infrastructure. e.g. "Abstract Wikipedia" which aims to use a language-neutral syntax that can be automatically translated into any language.

I'd disagree that there is a causal relationship here. I think most of the outreach to indigneous languages has more to do with politics and ideology than anything else (Wikimedia sees itself as a global movement to collect all knowladge. Can't exactly claim that if its all english).

As for abstract wikipedia. I think that is more a moonshot project driven by people wanting to make the next wikidata. I suspect a major part of support for it is that they can use alternative sources of funding for it (grants).

▲ dmurray an hour ago | parent [-]

The "abstract Wikipedia" just seems like a solved problem with LLMs.

However sceptical of "AI" you are, "give me the information on this page in my preferred language" is the kind of task they excel at. (I won't use the word translate). It wouldn't even require prioritising the English Wikipedia: any agent today could one shot a task like "check the Wikipedia pages in all languages for X, summarize the results and note any disagreements between them".

	▲	Wikipedianon 10 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	dotancohen 11 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		`> give me the information on this page in my preferred language` I'm sure that works great for European languages and other languages with huge corpus. Those are not the target languages of the program in question.
	▲	bawolff 24 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Abstract wikipedia is taking a symbolic AI approach instead of an LLM or other statistical approach. The hope is (as i understand it) that this will provide reliability, predictability and better extend to languages that don't have a large corpus of text to train things on. Personally i think its a bit of a wild bet, that seems especially surprising in the modern context. Guess we'll have to see if it pans out.

▲ tensegrist 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It is very difficult to be a productive editor without custom tooling at this point

this is extremely reminiscent of the stackexchange situation

▲ thaumasiotes 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>> Why is Wikipedia losing contributors

Perhaps because their message to new contributors is a consistent "stop trying to make corrections, and go away"?

▲

b65e8bee43c2ed0 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

pretty much. if anything, tragically losing the current cabal of ~~commissars~~ editors might make wikipedia great again.

▲

Wikipedianon 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

▲

thaumasiotes 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> There isn't enough work anymore in a monopolized but declining market.

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

A lot of people do ask them not to do it.

▲

Wikipedianon 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> 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.

▲

thaumasiotes 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Ok, but what are you saying in "there isn't enough work anymore"? What is "work"? How much is there? Enough for what?

▲

Wikipedianon an hour ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	20after4 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This gets at one of the biggest flaws in Wikipedia, IMO. I think the notability standard is way too strict and gives way too much weight to main stream media sources as the blessed arbiters of what is notable.

▲

briandear 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It would be great if editors had some kind of terms limits to avoid the WikiMafia stuff we commonly see.

	▲	20after4 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Given that editors are pseudo-anonymous, there are some limitations on enforcing this. Sure you could term-limit a given account but the same person could have several accounts. I know sock puppets are not technically allowed but it's not entirely possible to prevent without sacrificing the anonymity of account ownership.