this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2025
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“With fewer visits to Wikipedia, fewer volunteers may grow and enrich the content, and fewer individual donors may support this work.”

Archived version: https://archive.is/20251017020527/https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-says-ai-is-causing-a-dangerous-decline-in-human-visitors/

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[–] Eq0@literature.cafe 138 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Personally, I have been moving the opposite way. There are so many bullshit websites, wading through them is a pain. Instead, I directly jump to Wikipedia

[–] IndustryStandard@lemmy.world 1 points 18 hours ago

I have moved the opposite way. I am noticing so much propaganda on Wikipedia that I would rather avoid it.

For example, this page, which is clearly written by Zionist bots, but somehow has edit protection.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_Monitor

[–] gary@piefed.world 23 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Same! I have Wikipedia pinned as the first search result on Kagi if there's an entry

[–] lena@gregtech.eu 3 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I was thinking of sharing a kagi duo plan with my dad, is it worth it? I currently use ecosia

[–] TheHobbyist@lemmy.zip 3 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 23 hours ago)

I have been using it for about a year. There is zero advertisement anywhere. No sponsored posts. Just pure search. And they give you quite some good tools to derank or delist websites for you to define your own quality of search results, it's very effective. They also go the extra mile of de-ranking websites with many trackers as that apparently correlates with SEO which normally doesn't track with result quality. It's a very refreshing take on the web. I love it :)

Edit: they also have an extension which allows you to search while being logged out using tokens which improves privacy, in case you want to go the extra mile.

[–] gary@piefed.world 3 points 1 day ago

I think so! I'm pretty sure they still give you 100 free searches to try it out, might be worth test driving before you pay for it. From what I understand it's mostly Google on the back end with Kagi's own algorithm. My favorite part about it is being able to rank how the results sort themselves based on sites you want to see more or less of, and some other pretty powerful filters. I definitely think it's worth a shot if you're curious.

[–] MehBlah@lemmy.world 23 points 1 day ago (1 children)

AI creating more poor thinkers is how I read this. Its like that outer limits episode where everyone is hooked up to all the answers mentally and one guy can't have the implant. In the end he is the only who can find his own answers.

[–] J92@lemmy.world 3 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

I've had this thought about heaven before. Like I assume you don't go in with whatever limitations there are on your brain in your earthly form, which means the people that died longest ago will have this almost unapproachable level of knowledge, and it feels like that everyone would get to that level across eternity. Then what? It would be a space filled with everyone that knows everything. Would you even be you anymore? Wouldn't it all be boring?

(I don't believe in heaven)

[–] krooklochurm@lemmy.ca 1 points 21 hours ago

Like almost every religious concept heaven falls apart almost immediately with even the slightest bit of scrutiny.

[–] xxce2AAb@feddit.dk 40 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Well, you won't ever be losing me, WP.

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 46 points 1 day ago

We got WordPress's number one fan here.

[–] RVGamer06@sh.itjust.works 1 points 22 hours ago
[–] rbn@sopuli.xyz 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] xxce2AAb@feddit.dk 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I'll be honest with you: I have absolutely no idea how to interpret that in this context.

[–] GTKashi@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Vanilla guess: WP = Winnie the Pooh.

[–] xxce2AAb@feddit.dk 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)
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[–] AbeilleVegane@beehaw.org 4 points 1 day ago

WP interpreted as "Winnie the Pooh" instead of "Wikipedia"?

[–] ExtremeDullard@piefed.social 47 points 1 day ago

More proof that AI ruins everything - if it was needed.

[–] taiyang@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago

It's like the search summary problem, only worse. Before, people lost traffic already cause Google would try to answer the question with a snippet from your site; however, LLMs (or at least ChatGPT) are trained on Wikipedia, because it's available data. With Reddit being first, Wikipedia being the second largest source of facts they used (at least, according to statista).

Side note, you're not even supposed to source facts from Reddit or Wikipedia, they're better for finding other sources. It's like a game of telephone, at the tertiary source you're getting even less accurate information. It's just oh so stupid the direction end users are herded towards.

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day ago (3 children)

My view of the danger is that people are sourcing facts from AI instead of Wikipedia. Not worried about volunteers, they're not going anywhere.

[–] IndustryStandard@lemmy.world 1 points 18 hours ago

They would be getting the same misinformation.

[–] m532@lemmygrad.ml 4 points 1 day ago

Both are not a source. Both can lead you to a real source.

[–] Revan343@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 day ago
[–] hotdogcharmer@lemmy.zip 16 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

I cancelled my donations to wikipedia since the WMF announced they'd be using AI, and they gave me a really milquetoast bullshit response when I emailed them. Can't trust such a precious, collaborative, human effort as Wikipedia to a bunch of anti-human robofuckers. 🤷‍♂️

[–] TheBlindPew@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Correct me if im wrong, but haven't they since gone back on AI integration, and are no longer planning any, after backlash from their contributors?

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[–] m33@lemmy.zip 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

AI scrapers don't make donations

[–] PoliteDudeInTheMood@lemmy.ca 1 points 14 hours ago

I use Gemini for my web searches now. But still donate to the WMF. In most cases I just want an answer with the least amount of bullshit. Even using Startpage to get Google results without Google bullshit, it's annoying. My wife demands sources, and Gemini will provide those as well.

[–] De_Narm@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's a problem across the board. Assuming AI does establish itself, all it's training data dries up and we basically stagnate.

Also, in this weird inbetween phase until it is actually good, we've already generated so much bullshit that AI trains on the hallucinations of other AIs.

[–] Lexxly@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

As some point we will train it on live data similar to how human babies are trained. There's always more data.

[–] FaceDeer@fedia.io 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

And the AIs themselves can generate data. There have been a few recent news stories about AIs doing novel research, that will only become more prevalent over time.

[–] 8uurg@lemmy.world 2 points 22 hours ago

Though, a big catch is that whatever is generated needs to be verified. The most recent story I've seen was the AI proposing the hypothesis of a particular drug increasing antigen presentation, which could turn cold tumors (those the immune system does not attack) into hot tumors (those the immune system does attack). The key news here is that this hypothesis was found to be correct, as an experiment has shown that said drug does have this effect. (link to Google's press release)

The catch here is that I have not seen any info on how many hypotheses were generated to find this correct hypothesis. It doesn't have to be perfect: research often causes a hypothesis to be rejected, even if proposed by a person rather than AI. However signal-to-noise is still important for how game changing it will be. Like in this blogpost it can fail to identify a solution at all, or even return incorrect hypotheses. You can't simply use this data for further training the LLM, as it would only degrade the performance.

There needs to be a verification and filtering first. Wikipedia has played such a role for a very long time, where editors reference sources, and verify the trustworthiness of these sources. If Wikipedia goes under because of this, either due to a lack of funding or due to a lack of editors, a very important source will be lost.

[–] otter@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 day ago

What about non-human visitors?

[–] Formfiller@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] Lexxly@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 day ago

For me, it depends what year it is

[–] Outdoor_Catgirl@hexbear.net 7 points 1 day ago

It's been the goolge search results ai are mostly just ripping text from wikipedia

[–] ClathrateG@hexbear.net 6 points 1 day ago

Well maybe if there wasn't a huge banner bugging me for 3.50 like the lock ness monster at the top of every article people wouldn't need to use LLMs to get the useful info /s

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