This is most definitely wrong. People volunteer and crowdsource all the time, driven by ideals. And the async nature of the web will only make such projects stronger. There's OpenStreetMap, TV Tropes, fandom wikis, movie dbs, and a thousand others with no sign of stopping.
But the future will raise the bar. Perhaps we'll see wiki of wikis, or something else getting the web closer to truly semantic knowledge.
Many longtime OSM mappers have sensed that there has been some decline in interest and a risk to the long-term future of the project as a truly amateur-enthusiast phenomenon. Causes include: younger generations raised on corporate platforms and their phone apps are less aware of non-corporate alternatives, and might even be suspicious of libre and altruistic movements (this is a concern in Free Software circles, too); as the map got filled in, there were fewer obvious blanks that struck a total newbie as a place he/she could contribute; corporations got onboard both as OSM users and stakeholders, and then some idealistic anti-capitalistic people have asked why they should contribute if the map can benefit corps, too, etc.
Many longtime OSM mappers like myself are acutely aware of various corporations making big bucks on the back of our volunteered time and effort. Often times without contributing anything. Recently made worse by horrible API abuses.
I get why people might not be motivated to join us in the tragedy of the commons.
Very few, and in not all countries is government data compatible with OSM's license, so even people employed in state GIS can't necessarily edit the map from the office.
> younger generations raised on corporate platforms and their phone apps are less aware of non-corporate alternatives
All the new guys I work with are trapped in the app store/play store bubble. If it's not available directly through the device's software distribution system it's not getting used.
> might even be suspicious of libre and altruistic movements
All my boomer bosses think that anything that is outside the Windows/O365 ecosystem, or doesn't come with a $150 yearly license, is clearly pirate hacker software that will give your e-mail a virus and steal your bitcoin.
It is increasingly frustrating when we have a problem that could be fixed with GNU corutils and a bash script, or a raspberrypi/arduino translating between 2 serial devices, but we end up getting some $1500 black box from the 'official' vendor. It teaches the newer guys that step one is not to think about the problem, it's to grab your wallet and call a salesman.
This is not a new problem. I worked in corporate IT in the early 2000’s. Both attitudes existed even then, though of course there was no App Store back then. Nevertheless there was a strong preference among younger employees for paid software—the kind you get in boxes. The older generation viewed most software as suspect, but were willing to accept “official” solutions from Microsoft and other name brand software vendors. It seems comical now, but at the time Red Hat was viewed almost universally among my coworkers as a terrible idea. And forget about custom software. Rolling one’s own software was widely seen as crazy talk.
Never underestimate the blame game. It's a lot easier to place the blame on MS than on your own organisation. All customers knows you can't do anything about how windows works and have accepted the dysfunction already.
in most corporate environments if your homebrew solution breaks, then you have a problem. If something that came from a vendor breaks, that’s not your problem.
I understand your frustration but I’ve given up fighting with IT and just let them sort it out
speaking of OSM... I've been part of teams at _certain country_'s _certain municipalities_ and teams working on GIS projects. so little among those people, who consume OSM content on a daily basis, even think about giving back, that even though I am not an OSM contributor, I start to get outraged at their total ignorance and disregard for crowd-sourced content, and the fact that someone put some work to have it there. same people are then getting royalties delivering this content to third parties. this is so wrong on so many levels, and I can't think of a way to make it work in a future where data is more precious than software packages.
I was done with OSM within a few days. I fixed some streams to be in the right place, reverted.
This post box is no longer there. "I'll drive round and check", "no need I'm stood there, it has gone". "I'll drive round tomorrow"...I got the impression i was on someone else's patch and gave up
To get instant pushback from other mappers is fairly unusual; I would say you had bad luck (or live in Lithuania). In a lot of the world, edits correct or incorrect can take months or years to be noticed by another mapper.
But with regard to bodies of water, there are systems that monitor OSM and warn if someone has tried to "move them to the right place". These details were often added to OSM from professionally surveyed maps, so they are in the right place. However, ordinary people's consumer GPS is typically a few meters off, and they end up moving things to the inaccurate coordinates on their screens.
For long years it was dominated by one mapper who considered the country his personal project and insisted on an idiosyncratic tagging scheme. He became infamous for instantly reverting edits even by savvy mappers. Intervention by OSM's conflict-resolution body has reduced that somewhat, but that country remains a special case.
The times I have done something in Germany the pushback has been swift and not very friendly so I stopped. I guess it's a localised problem, haven't had any problems in Sweden so far.
> then some idealistic anti-capitalistic people have asked why they should contribute if the map can benefit corps, too
”We should respect freedoms and not restrict them arbitrarily… except when I do not like the people using those freedoms.“
It is always a weird take to me. Pick a license that matches your preferences, like the GPL. Do not pick MIT/whatever and then complain when corps make use of the freedoms you afforded them.
GPL should absolutely be the default choice for software. It is quite weird when people choose the MIT license and then complain when others use their open source software and turn it into a proprietary for profit software when the author explicitly allowed them to do this in the license. The MIT is really not long. People should read it before using it.
But you can also take a noncommercial GPL software, slightly modify and put your logo and name on it, do some marketing and get cash out of it without contributing anything significant. You just can't make it proprietary. But it's still an unfair situation.
If you don't want your software used commercially, don't Open Source (or Free Software) it. Maybe a CC-NC license if you want to give it away for noncommercial use.
The rest of us will continue to use and make OSS and enjoy it without worrying about what others are doing with it.
You're more or less right. OSM (via an exhaustive licence change process) did indeed choose the licence that matched its preferences, and almost all contributors are happy that it allows commercial use.
What does stick in the craw with many of us, however, is that Meta, Mapbox, and various other bigcos have nonetheless decided to disregard the attribution requirements of what is a fairly permissive licence, simply because they're sufficiently big that they can say to the OSM Foundation (annual turnover about £3.27) "suck it, we dare you to sue us".
Yeah and the soup kitchen has no right to complain that I packaged up all their food and sold it next door. Clearly they should have made everyone sign a contract before getting any food if they didn't want that.
People volunteer and crowdsource driven by ideals, and then others involve themselves seeking fame, control, power -- slowly the idealism dies, and eventually only a husk remains.
I look forward to human curation to be reinvented in some way. Social media algos are a tyranny. I think something new will be driven by people's desire to be different and niche.
There is, something like that all over the internet. But it's not on any popular website or platform. Barely anyone knows about those places. And they're better that way.
That’ll just have to be 100% analog, and that’s until Physical AI has a massive breakthrough where they’ll make the analog also possible to be automated away.
It’s not over… “OVER” but it’s sure feeling that we are heading there, though.
We need a dev voucher system. Persist it across projects and time. Belonging to a vouching chain with a rogue dev down the chain loses you points the closer you are to it. Anything else is just too unreliable imo.
But who's going to filter out the good AI contributions from the bad AI trolls and bargain-bin-model slop?
With AI there is an infinite stream of contributions to curate. No human is ever going to volunteer for that, so unless you keep AI contributions very tightly restricted you'll rapidly lose all human contributors. At which point nobody is left to ensure only good contributions get in, so it is only a matter of time before it devolves into a giant pile of crap.
Besides, who's going to pay to run those AIs? Good models aren't free, so you are effectively turning it into a pay-to-win project. You can be absolutely certain that some tech billionaires are going to burn a few million to have "good AI" constantly rewrite their pages the way they want it.
It’s the infinite value extraction hustle that’s killing the fun of projects.
I used to contribute to [X] project because it felt good to make something, but realizing that someone is getting a dollar on the back of my work that I am not is just not worth it.
I think AI and spread of technology both suppresses and supercharges crowdsourcing inclinations. Once AI is better than the best researchers, who would manually maintain a Wikipedia? There might still be random manual human audits, but something like Grokipedia seems inevitable.
I think this will be the case for other things too. OpenStreetMaps won't need as many contributors as more sensors come online, eg. sensors and footage from hobby drones and people's phones augment how much information a single person can enter about a city.
The food shelf I volunteered at yesterday is a lot more than 20 years old. There'll probably not be another Wikipedia, because we already have Wikipedia. There's no point in having a second. Assembly for other things listed. We have one. Why would we need a second one to do that?
I don't know what the future will be, but the future people who live in it will know and they're going to do something. I can say that with confidence, even without knowing exactly what they're going to do.
Before Wikipedia, people like this author predicted it would be impossible. Science fiction authors wrote about it, but understood it to be fictional—Asimov showed how a great encyclopedia contained the seeds of its own project failure. Adams meant it as a joke.
And attempts like everything2 and h2g2 were neat art but nothing like Wikipedia. The spinoff attempts to do something like Wikipedia also failed.
This is characteristic of something that is probability zero in its particulars but rather likely as an example of a class.
I recently did a talk in opposition of this sentiment
Yes, some projects like stack overflow may be losing contributors by a large degree, but it doesn't have to be this way
I run SoonsorBlock and DeArow which are two human powered crowdsourced browser extensions that are only growing in scale in opposition to the want to slopify everything
We have 17% of submitters every week being first time contributors and 19% being old, a nice balance.
There are far too many “machines for turning commons into tragedies” running amok for there to be any significant creation of commons in the future. One, those able and willing to create a commons are usually also capable of seeing what will happen if they do and are reasonably demotivated by it; two, the machines are in a race to the bottom and cannot prevent themselves from harvesting too early and too aggressively for any commons that does somehow get created anyway to survive.
When the counter culture revolution happened (that led to hippies that led to tech utopian idealist that led to free software that led to wikipedia,) it probably seemed a few years earlier just as impossible for anything to change as it does today..
well call then why would it be recreated. only for Dario's and Samas to .ZIP it and sell it back in a more convenient form? if that's okay, well - everyone rush to contribute, but I somehow don't see this happening and don't expect to see it in the future.
And there is no need to, because we already have Wikipedia.
If we get to the more general idea of "can humans collaborate in the same way they collaborated to make Wikipedia". I see no reason why not. Collaborative projects similar in spirit to Wikipedia pop up all the time.
> And there is no need to, because we already have Wikipedia.
I became a Wikipedia editor not long after the 2nd version of the site, before they even had logins, IIRC.
I was banned from the site probably 7 years ago or so by a troll who collaborated with the admins. The review "process" was more like The Trial and the ban was quite terrible, because not only did they install some deep cookie in the browser, but they permabanned the IP address.
Wikipedia is gone. Whatever it even was, it is not now.
_Because_ Wikipedia is community driven and independent of any corporation, shareholder, or stock exchange, I tend to view it as something no commercial encyclopedia could ever have competed with.
Now, let’s imagine the same thing happening with LLMs and AI. Local, open-source, community-driven models will build better things than any commercial LLM or AI could ever create.
Yes, this is mostly a dream as of today. But will The Economist still be alive to validate this idea that humans, stripped of the money schemes, will have built greater (aka create a project like Wikipedia) things than ever ?
So why have we stopped building pyramids for thousands of years? We have the technology and knowledge to do it, so where are all the new pyramids? And no, that Las Vegas monstrosity doesn't count.
You might be surprised to learn that not all challenges are purely technological. The biggest challenges with such megaprojects are political, economical, and social. A Wikipedia clone is completely worthless if nobody is willing to contribute - it would just be an empty database!
I agree, but I think the reason why we don't build pyramids today is because it would be a huge waste of resources. I guess you don't think much of Las Vegas-- me neither-- but the sphere is pretty darn impressive. There are all kinds of examples around the world with amazing architecture. The Hoover dam, the Golden Gate bridge, etc. If the Egyptians could have done these things they would probably not have built pyramids.
As an aside. When the Eifel Tower was built it was considered tacky by many and assumed to be temporary. Maybe some of the most remembered things of our time will be taken for granted. Maybe some huge data center will be a museum.
I guess it is because pyramids were built at a time of tyrranical supreme leaders with 100% of power and wealth concentrated in themselves. That and fashion
Can you expect less from a magazine that prays at the altar of capitalism?
People make brilliant things out of altruism as long as they don't have the feeling they're being abused by corporate or monetary interests. That's why the BSD Unixes languished and Linux thrived. Programmers didn't feel the need to contribute for free when companies where the ones reaping the benefits of their work.
Here's a shout-out to OpenStreetMap and its contributors.
I wrote about this in the context of OpenStreetMap a couple of years ago (https://blog.systemed.net/post/18), but with rather different reasoning:
> We didn’t realise it at the time, but OpenStreetMap came from a unique moment in internet history.
> It was still the time of the Old Internet. The time when you, or anyone, could upload a few pages to your own “webspace” or “homepage”, writing about what took your fancy. You didn’t have to worry about Facebook and Google as gatekeepers, or HTTPS, or your server being compromised within five minutes of turning on, or GDPR, or front-end frameworks, or any of the curses of the modern web.
> 2004 was when the homegrown web met the participatory web, before it all got turned to shit by Facebook and Google. You wouldn’t start OSM in 2024: the nascent project would be squashed by Google, or founder under Reddit/HN users’ expectations of “why not good yet”, or flame out in some controversy over privacy or disputed borders. But we got through all of that in our early years, when the world was simpler.
Wikipedia needed a very small tech infra and legal support to run back in the day. I have a feeling that now any project needs much more infra AND world wide legal support given the larger amount of laws and complexity involved. Just a feeling.
many "fandom" wikis have alternatives. If you can spare the time, scroll a little bit further down in your search results. They exist! And for the ones that do not have a "fandom" wiki, there are alternative readers.
Fandom is truly cancerous. I have not checked whether they are affiliated with Wikimedia, but I would not be surprised if that was the case!
The proposition of starting something like Wikipedia when it first began is volunteers working to create an infinite library, all human knowledge gathered in one place for the benefit of all.
The proposition of starting something like Wikipedia today is unpaid laborers working on a training set for AI for the sole purpose of enriching tech CEOs, a gaggle of freaks who likely don't consider you as part of the same species as them nevermind as someone deserving of rights or accolades for your efforts.
One is volunteering, the other is being taken advantage of.
I wonder... not rage bait btw... but PHP was super easy to program. I wonder if things like this are harder to build today. Like, before you could setup a LAMP stack and program a wiki in the time it takes to begin to wrap your head around the current programming paradigms.
I don't think the languages changed; our minimum standards did. Standing up a bare-minimum user login in PHP for a homework assignment is easy. Now fix all the SQL injection, encrypt the passwords securely, lock down the database, make sure your cookies are always first-party, etc. There's a lot to hold in your head for secure web development in general.
It’s not just the code, but the collaboration to write the actual pages.
Regarding PHP, a small wiki or cms was always a starter project back in the day. For sure it’s a good way to wrap your head around a language and project
PHP can hosted in so many places for so cheap. It still has a place, like everything
Wikipedia became popular despite its programming. Anyone who has ever tried to edit a Wiki page knows its editor is absolute garbage, for example. Want to create your own basic DIY wiki in 2026? Just set up a GitHub Pages which auto-accepts pull requests, you'll be up and running in less than 30 minutes.
Besides, nobody is forcing to to use the current programming paradigms. A classic LAMP stack will still work.
Oops, guess it was rage bait. (not OOP btw). I just figured the economist article was about programming. Don't have JS on this computer, so I couldn't read it.
1) I doubt The Economist is suggesting that technical complexity is the reason they think that something like Wikipedia won't happen again.
2) You still have LAMP, even if the A is now often Nginx and the M Postgres. That stack is at least as easy as back in the day (signed someone who in my teens loved PHP so much that I made CLI utilities and IRC bots with it, auch). But that's besides the point, because several programming languages and web frameworks now come with their own built-in web-server for development, so you don't even need a stack to get started! This part is easier today.
I'm glad. Wikipedia has never aligned with scientific philosophers on what is and isn't worth believing (e.g. citation standards). This dissuades many scientists from contributing and universities from trusting the platform. Its ubiquity serves to damage the scientific forum, and empowers not the educated scientist or the layman, but the small wealthy group dictating the rules of citation for their own empowerment and political footing.
AI makes possible a replacement that might be more deeply founded in scientific philosophy, and more strictly curated. Things that humans have proven are very difficult.
>Its ubiquity serves to damage the scientific forum, and empowers not the educated scientist or the layman, but the small wealthy group dictating the rules of citation for their own empowerment and political footing.
Hi, I am having trouble understanding this. Do you have any additional context or articles describing this take?
If someone wants to learn to accomplish something tangible in the real world, there's probably no better place than YouTube, TikTok, etc.
Yes there are ads, yes there's slop, and yes it still remains a trove of practical human knowledge which would astound a 1926 American far more than Wikipedia ever did.
I love to read and have spent more of my life reading than probably anything else. It's my favorite way to learn. Most people do not love to read and would rather learn from another person.
I think humans will never create another Wikipedia because we're already creating something better. YouTube is just the lucky torchbearer, I think. Now that people know they can film themselves teaching or doing something they're good at, and other people will positively engage and maybe even pay them real money, there's no stopping the firehose.
In 10,000 years I imagine the 2020s will be seen less like the end and more like the beginning of human knowledge sharing.
The wikipedia images are incredibly easy to follow for me and I like that it is easy to copy and paste the info or download a copy, search it, annotate it/modify it, etc. Just recently, there was a thread here about different ways to ties your shoes laid out similarly with images. Many people talked about easily trying them out.
Even if you are the type of learner who requires a video to learn, online video platforms, like youtube and tiktok, with ads & overlays when you pause them (and it might be hard to pause while your hands are full of silk...), with no out of the box way to download the videos, autoplay to who knows what next video, etc., are terrible vehicles for that. You can't search or annotate them. The quality varies as you stream it.
Youtube and tiktok will not be better than wikipedia because the primary goal, the raison d'etre, of these products is to make money, track your behavior, sell your data to the highest bidder and show you ads based on it. I'm not naive to the fact that Wikipedia does this, but it's obvious that wikipedia is primarily a collective effort and not a corporate product, and I have more faith in a collective group of people than a tech CEO.
Lastly, a video is a video. It is not another person. A person you can ask questions to, they can offer real time advice. Teaching someone how to tie a tie, your child, grandchild, nephew, etc., learning how to be an adult from a role model, is famously a rite of passage. If you think a video from a company trying to sell you clothes, hosted on Alphabet's servers, is a substitute for another person, especially in this age of AI generated content, I suggest you take a step back and reflect on what human connection really means.
Wikipedia was made from the free labor of IT admin staff and disabled people, both had free time in a typical day to build and curate it.
If I were to make wikipedia today it would contain only bullet pointed facts with sources for each. Articles would have unlimited length. Pagination if an article gets over a million lines.
Writ broadly. Last time I looked into who was editing Wikipedia on my own academic discipline, it was several people who had an obsessive autistic fixation on the subject, but whose autism was apparently so socially debilitating they couldn't gain employment, not even in academia with its somewhat greater accommodation for oddballs. The upside is that they could channel their interest productively into WP. The downside of this is as outsiders to a field where much consensus is found only at real-life conferences and lecture handouts, their info was often years behind the state of the art (and, of course, WP demands that citations be to secondary sources, even if obsolete).
The comcept of the end of history, including Fukuyama's thesis, is an interesting intellectual topic, and I would argue that it's become even more interesting and relevant with the threat that AI could become.
"#1 result for most searches" would literally mean that I could take all the searches for a given day, then find a 50%+1 subset that all have the same top result. There is no such top result.
the titles statement is bombastic even by current standards where the trifecta of nialism, narcisism and nostalgia are the characteristics found in so many of our 'leading voices'
Sad hyper-end stage capitalists (economist.com) see only their own reflection, and cannot fathom why people would donate time to help each other and humanity.
I predict the opposite: Humans will collectively create something like an LLM, but curated. That will be next level for Wikipedia-like project.
Think about it - LLM is just a computer program that predicts a next word. So it has a very detailed, formal description of each concept it can represent in its residual vector.
I think humans will understand (perhaps with AI help) these formal descriptions and put them into a giant database.
But the future will raise the bar. Perhaps we'll see wiki of wikis, or something else getting the web closer to truly semantic knowledge.
I get why people might not be motivated to join us in the tragedy of the commons.
> younger generations raised on corporate platforms and their phone apps are less aware of non-corporate alternatives
All the new guys I work with are trapped in the app store/play store bubble. If it's not available directly through the device's software distribution system it's not getting used.
> might even be suspicious of libre and altruistic movements
All my boomer bosses think that anything that is outside the Windows/O365 ecosystem, or doesn't come with a $150 yearly license, is clearly pirate hacker software that will give your e-mail a virus and steal your bitcoin.
It is increasingly frustrating when we have a problem that could be fixed with GNU corutils and a bash script, or a raspberrypi/arduino translating between 2 serial devices, but we end up getting some $1500 black box from the 'official' vendor. It teaches the newer guys that step one is not to think about the problem, it's to grab your wallet and call a salesman.
</tangent>
I understand your frustration but I’ve given up fighting with IT and just let them sort it out
This post box is no longer there. "I'll drive round and check", "no need I'm stood there, it has gone". "I'll drive round tomorrow"...I got the impression i was on someone else's patch and gave up
But with regard to bodies of water, there are systems that monitor OSM and warn if someone has tried to "move them to the right place". These details were often added to OSM from professionally surveyed maps, so they are in the right place. However, ordinary people's consumer GPS is typically a few meters off, and they end up moving things to the inaccurate coordinates on their screens.
”We should respect freedoms and not restrict them arbitrarily… except when I do not like the people using those freedoms.“
It is always a weird take to me. Pick a license that matches your preferences, like the GPL. Do not pick MIT/whatever and then complain when corps make use of the freedoms you afforded them.
But you can also take a noncommercial GPL software, slightly modify and put your logo and name on it, do some marketing and get cash out of it without contributing anything significant. You just can't make it proprietary. But it's still an unfair situation.
If you don't want your software used commercially, don't Open Source (or Free Software) it. Maybe a CC-NC license if you want to give it away for noncommercial use.
The rest of us will continue to use and make OSS and enjoy it without worrying about what others are doing with it.
What does stick in the craw with many of us, however, is that Meta, Mapbox, and various other bigcos have nonetheless decided to disregard the attribution requirements of what is a fairly permissive licence, simply because they're sufficiently big that they can say to the OSM Foundation (annual turnover about £3.27) "suck it, we dare you to sue us".
It’s the same thing with freedoms
I won't post a link here, but check out KamTape.
It’s not over… “OVER” but it’s sure feeling that we are heading there, though.
Good AI contributions are better than lazy crap or trolling from humans, right?
With AI there is an infinite stream of contributions to curate. No human is ever going to volunteer for that, so unless you keep AI contributions very tightly restricted you'll rapidly lose all human contributors. At which point nobody is left to ensure only good contributions get in, so it is only a matter of time before it devolves into a giant pile of crap.
Besides, who's going to pay to run those AIs? Good models aren't free, so you are effectively turning it into a pay-to-win project. You can be absolutely certain that some tech billionaires are going to burn a few million to have "good AI" constantly rewrite their pages the way they want it.
I used to contribute to [X] project because it felt good to make something, but realizing that someone is getting a dollar on the back of my work that I am not is just not worth it.
I think this will be the case for other things too. OpenStreetMaps won't need as many contributors as more sensors come online, eg. sensors and footage from hobby drones and people's phones augment how much information a single person can enter about a city.
From your list, I think most were started 15-20+ years ago[1] so your argument isn't contradicting the original point.
* * *
[1] OSM, Fandom and TV Tropes were started 22 years ago. Wikipedia itself was started 25 years ago.
I don't know what the future will be, but the future people who live in it will know and they're going to do something. I can say that with confidence, even without knowing exactly what they're going to do.
edit: grammar - see reply for old/wrong version.
Unless you have a political view to push. Visit Grokipedia today!
"Would you like to know more?"
And attempts like everything2 and h2g2 were neat art but nothing like Wikipedia. The spinoff attempts to do something like Wikipedia also failed.
This is characteristic of something that is probability zero in its particulars but rather likely as an example of a class.
Humans do like getting serious and accomplishing something before the twinkling light of our lives fades.
Yes, some projects like stack overflow may be losing contributors by a large degree, but it doesn't have to be this way
I run SoonsorBlock and DeArow which are two human powered crowdsourced browser extensions that are only growing in scale in opposition to the want to slopify everything
We have 17% of submitters every week being first time contributors and 19% being old, a nice balance.
Unfortunately the talk isn't available yet but you can see the slides here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1nGArM7c3i9cVGGvkh6ER...
Wherever there is a community, people will contribute; people love being social, and many platforms do this broadly and well enough.
- OpenstreetMap
- GitHub ( people contributing Code, issues and bugs)
- All Reviews Platform ( this creates such a sign that today, whenever people buy or use any product, they would like to see reviews)
Thousands of others with no sign of stopping, and the future will keep on bringing more.
Peer-to-peer is a social culture that will always be there, and whenever new things come up, a similar peer-to-peer culture will back them.
If we get to the more general idea of "can humans collaborate in the same way they collaborated to make Wikipedia". I see no reason why not. Collaborative projects similar in spirit to Wikipedia pop up all the time.
I became a Wikipedia editor not long after the 2nd version of the site, before they even had logins, IIRC.
I was banned from the site probably 7 years ago or so by a troll who collaborated with the admins. The review "process" was more like The Trial and the ban was quite terrible, because not only did they install some deep cookie in the browser, but they permabanned the IP address.
Wikipedia is gone. Whatever it even was, it is not now.
Name one started after 2022, with at least a modicum of success.
BUT, let me slide on the off topic borders.
_Because_ Wikipedia is community driven and independent of any corporation, shareholder, or stock exchange, I tend to view it as something no commercial encyclopedia could ever have competed with.
Now, let’s imagine the same thing happening with LLMs and AI. Local, open-source, community-driven models will build better things than any commercial LLM or AI could ever create.
Yes, this is mostly a dream as of today. But will The Economist still be alive to validate this idea that humans, stripped of the money schemes, will have built greater (aka create a project like Wikipedia) things than ever ?
You might be surprised to learn that not all challenges are purely technological. The biggest challenges with such megaprojects are political, economical, and social. A Wikipedia clone is completely worthless if nobody is willing to contribute - it would just be an empty database!
As an aside. When the Eifel Tower was built it was considered tacky by many and assumed to be temporary. Maybe some of the most remembered things of our time will be taken for granted. Maybe some huge data center will be a museum.
Can you expect less from a magazine that prays at the altar of capitalism?
People make brilliant things out of altruism as long as they don't have the feeling they're being abused by corporate or monetary interests. That's why the BSD Unixes languished and Linux thrived. Programmers didn't feel the need to contribute for free when companies where the ones reaping the benefits of their work.
Here's a shout-out to OpenStreetMap and its contributors.
They pretend it is a charity, but it isn't. It all just goes to shareholders.
Wikipedia itself is what it is, a library of collective effort.
As much as I despise wikimedia, the worth of wikipedia for humanity is so much more compared to the negative aspects of wikimedia.
> We didn’t realise it at the time, but OpenStreetMap came from a unique moment in internet history.
> It was still the time of the Old Internet. The time when you, or anyone, could upload a few pages to your own “webspace” or “homepage”, writing about what took your fancy. You didn’t have to worry about Facebook and Google as gatekeepers, or HTTPS, or your server being compromised within five minutes of turning on, or GDPR, or front-end frameworks, or any of the curses of the modern web.
> 2004 was when the homegrown web met the participatory web, before it all got turned to shit by Facebook and Google. You wouldn’t start OSM in 2024: the nascent project would be squashed by Google, or founder under Reddit/HN users’ expectations of “why not good yet”, or flame out in some controversy over privacy or disputed borders. But we got through all of that in our early years, when the world was simpler.
The biggest threat to it IMHO is internal bias.
Fandom is truly cancerous. I have not checked whether they are affiliated with Wikimedia, but I would not be surprised if that was the case!
(Edit: archive.today and wallhop.io don't work)
The proposition of starting something like Wikipedia today is unpaid laborers working on a training set for AI for the sole purpose of enriching tech CEOs, a gaggle of freaks who likely don't consider you as part of the same species as them nevermind as someone deserving of rights or accolades for your efforts.
One is volunteering, the other is being taken advantage of.
For every Wikipedia article, Grokipedia has a better one.
0. https://grokipedia.com/
Uh oh.
Regarding PHP, a small wiki or cms was always a starter project back in the day. For sure it’s a good way to wrap your head around a language and project
PHP can hosted in so many places for so cheap. It still has a place, like everything
Wikipedia became popular despite its programming. Anyone who has ever tried to edit a Wiki page knows its editor is absolute garbage, for example. Want to create your own basic DIY wiki in 2026? Just set up a GitHub Pages which auto-accepts pull requests, you'll be up and running in less than 30 minutes.
Besides, nobody is forcing to to use the current programming paradigms. A classic LAMP stack will still work.
2) You still have LAMP, even if the A is now often Nginx and the M Postgres. That stack is at least as easy as back in the day (signed someone who in my teens loved PHP so much that I made CLI utilities and IRC bots with it, auch). But that's besides the point, because several programming languages and web frameworks now come with their own built-in web-server for development, so you don't even need a stack to get started! This part is easier today.
It’s not like choice is not there.
AI makes possible a replacement that might be more deeply founded in scientific philosophy, and more strictly curated. Things that humans have proven are very difficult.
Hi, I am having trouble understanding this. Do you have any additional context or articles describing this take?
Kind regards and thank you for your time.
Yes there are ads, yes there's slop, and yes it still remains a trove of practical human knowledge which would astound a 1926 American far more than Wikipedia ever did.
Compare the Wiki article with step by step PNGs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Windsor_knot
To the thousands of examples one can find on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tying+a+half+wi...
I love to read and have spent more of my life reading than probably anything else. It's my favorite way to learn. Most people do not love to read and would rather learn from another person.
I think humans will never create another Wikipedia because we're already creating something better. YouTube is just the lucky torchbearer, I think. Now that people know they can film themselves teaching or doing something they're good at, and other people will positively engage and maybe even pay them real money, there's no stopping the firehose.
In 10,000 years I imagine the 2020s will be seen less like the end and more like the beginning of human knowledge sharing.
1. Wikipedia is not wikihow. It is not an aim of wikipedia to teach you how to tie a knot.
2. Youtube does not reward or otherwise provide provenance and incremental improvement.
Look at the revision page for the windsor knot: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Half-Windsor_knot...
There is no mechanism whatsoever on youtube to incrementally improve a video or understanding of a topic.
Even if you are the type of learner who requires a video to learn, online video platforms, like youtube and tiktok, with ads & overlays when you pause them (and it might be hard to pause while your hands are full of silk...), with no out of the box way to download the videos, autoplay to who knows what next video, etc., are terrible vehicles for that. You can't search or annotate them. The quality varies as you stream it.
Youtube and tiktok will not be better than wikipedia because the primary goal, the raison d'etre, of these products is to make money, track your behavior, sell your data to the highest bidder and show you ads based on it. I'm not naive to the fact that Wikipedia does this, but it's obvious that wikipedia is primarily a collective effort and not a corporate product, and I have more faith in a collective group of people than a tech CEO.
Lastly, a video is a video. It is not another person. A person you can ask questions to, they can offer real time advice. Teaching someone how to tie a tie, your child, grandchild, nephew, etc., learning how to be an adult from a role model, is famously a rite of passage. If you think a video from a company trying to sell you clothes, hosted on Alphabet's servers, is a substitute for another person, especially in this age of AI generated content, I suggest you take a step back and reflect on what human connection really means.
If I were to make wikipedia today it would contain only bullet pointed facts with sources for each. Articles would have unlimited length. Pagination if an article gets over a million lines.
No exceptions.
An absolute source and collation of human truth.
Writ broadly. Last time I looked into who was editing Wikipedia on my own academic discipline, it was several people who had an obsessive autistic fixation on the subject, but whose autism was apparently so socially debilitating they couldn't gain employment, not even in academia with its somewhat greater accommodation for oddballs. The upside is that they could channel their interest productively into WP. The downside of this is as outsiders to a field where much consensus is found only at real-life conferences and lecture handouts, their info was often years behind the state of the art (and, of course, WP demands that citations be to secondary sources, even if obsolete).
"#1 result for most searches" would mean 50% of all searches would have Wikipedia up top, and no site clears that bar.
Think about it - LLM is just a computer program that predicts a next word. So it has a very detailed, formal description of each concept it can represent in its residual vector.
I think humans will understand (perhaps with AI help) these formal descriptions and put them into a giant database.
This would be a severe blow to the bitter lesson, and generally vindicate the AI researchers of the 80s that put a bet on symbolic processing
The economists, the website site, second.
Humans will never fly, etc. Third.
(Extra point for the paywall).