Wikipedia, the online nonprofit encyclopedia, laid out a simple plan to ensure its website continues to be supported in the AI era, despite its declining traffic.
I don’t get it though… Why would any company use this when Wikimedia also offers a download of the entirety of Wikipedia, for free?
Maybe it’s because if the AI companies don’t know, then they can hopefully get a little money from them?
You think AI companies care what they scrape. Their system is set up to scrape anything it can get.
From skimming that linked page, I think that this download perhaps doesn’t include recent pages? Because in the section talking about enterprise stuff, it mentions the paid API for recent articles
It seems you’re right, I’m just dumb and didn’t read the article I linked
honestly, this will only work if the AI companies were actually ethical which… they’re not known to be.
In the age of AI slop that you can’t trust, Wikipedia use is going down??
People think they can trust the slop, is the thing. If they even think so far ahead, they probably think that an answer that exists on wikipedia will just be provided by the AI, saving them the time to search for it themselves. I’ve heard more than one horror story of ChatGPT use in particular backfiring on someone who somehow legitimately thought it was just another form of search engine, and didn’t verify the information provided.
Kind of funny: When Wikipedia was new, people often said that you couldn’t trust information on it because anyone could have written it, even if they were unqualified, biased, or deliberately deceptive. I guess that’s still true today, but with the advent of automated misinformation generators, the Wiki almost seems authoritative in comparison.
Can confirm, I’ve been a Wikipedia zealot the entire time and people really do seem to have accepted it. If you ignore what else makes them cheer, it’s a huge victory.
Yeah, when I was at school in the early 00s we were specifically banned from referencing Wikipedia as a source because it was seen as untrustworthy.
Which is ridiculous, everybody knows that the reason you should be banned from referencing Wikipedia as a source is because an encyclopedia is not a source
Uh, it’s a tertiary source. It’s still a source, just not one you should be directly citing. They’re great for finding other sources though.
Paid API…
Wikipedia = Reddit
Wikipedia (or the Wikimedia Foundation) is mostly driven by donations and volunteers, unlike Reddit…
Also, scraping every page on Wikipedia is incredibly heavy, especially compared to things like downloading a compressed copy of the entire site through torrents.
