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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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 19 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.

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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 16 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.