This is cute, but kind of an example of Wikipedia's off-mission bloat. It irks me that they constantly fundraise when most of it is not needed for Wikipedia proper, but rather used for initiatives people know less about and may not fund if they knew.
I don't begrudge them the odd party, anniversary, meetup.
And some of their subprojects are a great idea and could go much further -- it'd be fantastic to have a Wikipedia atlas, for example. The WikiMiniAtlas on geolocated articles is nice but it could be so much better.
But as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:CANCER it's a huge concern that they're blowing money pretty much at the rate they get it, when they should be saving it for the future, and be pickier and choosier about what they're funding at any given time.
That is a nice start, a rendering of GIS wikidata. Perhaps ask Wikimedia Foundation for funding :)
What I'd like to see is a more intimate marrying of OSM data and Wikipedia data. For example, if I go to zoom level 12 centred on London, UK on your page, there are about 80 text labels on the OSM layer itself. At minimum this is going to need OSM vector tiles. I'd expect to be able to click any of the OSM labels for the corresponding Wikipedia article, as well as adding in POIs for articles that don't have corresponding OSM links. And then you need OSM rendering style rules about which POIs you show at each zoom level, based on whether labels will run into each other or not.
The problem right now is that the WikiMiniAtlas treats all things, whether large areas or individual POIs, as POIs.
i feel like that's a bit silly, the other projects are listed on the donation page (https://donate.wikimedia.org/wiki/FAQ) and tbh you are unlikely to be donating to the wikimedia foundation without being aware of (at least some of?) the rest
Honestly, most of the other projects get almost none of the resources (other then maybe wikidata and commons, but both of those are directly used by wikipedia)
I wonder whether the emergence of a single, true Wikipedia competitor would actually put an end to this never-ending fundraising criticism (since people could simply donate to the competitor as a form of protest)
Projects like Wikipedia never have meaningful competition, because the social dynamics invariably converge to a single platform eating everything else.
Wikipedia is already dead, they just don't know it yet. They'll get Stackoverflowed.
The LLMs have already guaranteed their zombie end. The HN crowd will be comically delusional about it right up to the point where Wikimedia struggles to keep the lights on and has to fire 90% of its staff. There is no scenario where that outcome is avoided (some prominent billionaire will step in with a check as they get really desperate, but it won't change anything fundamental, likely a Sergey Brin type figure).
The LLMs will do to Wikipedia, what Wikipedia & Co. did to the physical encyclopedia business.
You don't have to entirely wipe out Wikipedia's traffic base to collapse Wikimedia. They have no financial strength what-so-ever, they burn everything they intake. Their de facto collapse will be extremely rapid and is coming soon. Watch for the rumbles in 2026-2027.
Wikipedia is not even in the game you are describing here. Wikipedia does not need billions of users clicking on ads to convince investors in yet another seed. They are an encyclopedia, and if fewer people will visit, they will still be an encyclopedia. Their costs are probably very strongly correlated with their number of visitors.
This. I'm really bothered by the almost cruel glee with which a lot of people respond to SO's downfall. Yeah, the moderation was needlessly aggressive. But it was successful at creating a huge repository of text-based knowledge which benefited LLMs greatly. If SO is gone, where will this come from for future programming languages, libraries, and tools?
This always feels to me like, an elephant in the room.
I’d love to read a knowledgeable roundup of current thought on this. I have a hard time understanding how, with the web becoming a morass of SEO and AI slop - with really no effort being put into to keeping it accurate - we’ll be able to train LLMs to the level we do today in the future.
You talk about news here like it's some irrefutable ether LLMs can tap into. Also I'd think newspapers and scientific papers cover extremely little of what the average person uses an LLM to search for.
Scott did have a lot of really thoughtful articles, but its also true he become much less rational and much more identity based on his reasoning over the last 3-5 years.
It’s not mysterious and amorphous. We have seen the results with social media for what? 15 years now? This is a known issue with clear parallels. And health data is way riskier to have floating around.
I have chronic back pain that everyone knows about. It's not a privacy issue for people to know about it, why would it be? Genuinely don't understand how that gives a shadowy cabal of information brokers leverage over me.
That's obviously a take from someone who never suffered chronic pain. If you have a life-long mystery illness that doctors don't care about, obviously you're going to give your data to ChatGPT Health because at least, it looks like it's listening...
You have no clue what my medical history is and I will not be sharing it. Clearly you have an axe to grind. You refuse to try and actually discuss this topic without assuming you have the high ground that you’re depending on to spike any attempt at conversation.
How do you measure productivity? Profit per employee has never been higher, probably, as PE and other rent-seeking leeches (residency caps) have wrapped their fingers around the throat of the industry.
Positive outcomes per patient is probably also higher, due to research and technology advances. So many lives saved that would have been written off just a decade or two ago (e.g. spina bifida).
But I agree with you that there’s a hypothetical universe where seeking healthcare as an American doesn’t suck, I just don’t know if “productive” is the right word to describe it.
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