alt Hacker NewsHumans will never again create a project like Wikipedia
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I’m going to argue that YouTube is a lot like Wikipedia.
Sure, it has ads. The business models are different. There may be less moderation and thus more garbage. But it’s mostly volunteer work. And it’s got a massive amount of knowledge, from arcane facts to highly practical educational content. The good channels provide a table of contents, links and cite their sources in the description. It’s a community effort, which has spawned communities of its own. It’s also been relatively stable in being that way for 20 years, which is remarkable.
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 SponsorBlock and DeArrow 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...
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.
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.
Wikipedia is unique in its own way, no question about it, and true. But calling a project like this can never be recreated is wrong.
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.
Shameless plug: last month while travelling, I kept walking around a new city and realizing later that I’d passed places with great stories without knowing. Many Wikipedia articles have coordinates, so I thought they could become cards you collect by physically walking there. Each card credits and links back to the article.
I’m not sure it helps with the “AI absorbs it, nobody visits” problem, but every card links to the page, and I think players will go read them to understand what they've just collected.
I also suspect a lot of collectors like correcting things. I know “I was there” isn’t a citable source (see the OSM post box story above), but photos are a real contribution: many Wikipedia photos are poor or outdated, and I’d like players to be able to submit theirs to Commons in the future.
Built with MapLibre + Protomaps. I just added a waiting list if you're interested trying it out!
Wikipedia was banned in schools, just as AI is now. This affects how the generation is trained to view it. The main drivers of real world knowledge have been both been stigmatized in schools. AI is more appealing to kids because it skips the step of having to translate the knowledge.
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.
Never is a really long time, and as my mom used to say, "never say never". Ideals, like the ones Wikipedia is build upon are not new, Wikipedia didn't invented those, just applied them for a specific project, maybe Wikipedia is unique and couldn't be replicated but that doesn't mean others won't (or hasn't) create similar projects. Otherwise, how was the first library created?
Humans will never again create a project like _______.
It depends. Okay, yes, probably.
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 ?
I can't find a way to read the article, anyone have a gift link?
(Edit: archive.today and wallhop.io don't work)
Once AI starts being a superhuman doctor everyone will want to contribute their medical story
Because...money, money, money!!
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.
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.
I really doubt humans will ever create another Wikipedia. I really bet they will create another collaborative project, i.e. a project "like" it.
Current AI has bad taste. AI is OK at explaining things, to the point that humans creating an explainer like Wikipedia (which is also merely OK at explaining things, albeit better than AI) may be too little payoff for the effort. But any creative AI project, so far, is ugly. The best AI projects are "port [existing project] into X language", "decompile [existing project]", "combing [existing project] and [existing project]", "turn [existing theory] into a real project"...AI, like JRR Tolkein's evil, cannot create, only convert existing things. Even "Skate 3 in Minecraft" etc. notice that whenever the different games interact, it's lazily implemented at best, and usually broken (in a way that does not crash the game but visually is obviously wrong...because the AI has been trained to run tests, but cannot really judge visuals).
Which is to say, I bet collaborative creative projects are here to stay. AI will even boost them, by creating the software foundation to make new things - an AI flash, AI game engine, AI metaverse, AI design studio that gives the user fine control (not just rerunning the same prompt praying for a mediocre output, or trying to make progress with small changes but failing when each one breaks something else). AI, frankly, supersedes Wikipedia (whose primary purpose is finding information; just ask the AI, then follow up on whatever you're confused or want to know more about). But AI cannot recreate the magic of collaboration, nor come close to the art of, say, r/place - which I expect to have similar if not nearly-exact successors of (if Reddit retries r/place I expect it to suck, but that's less AI and more Reddit's terrible management driving away quality users...who aren't going extinct, just need a decent platform to grow on).
> faces grave new threats
The biggest threat to it IMHO is internal bias.
I'm pretty negative on Wikipedia so my reflex was, "good." Wikipedia taught me that history is written by the victors, and today, the victors are the owners of social and news media, and the editors and moderators of Wikipedia. I used to be heavily involved in a page I won't mention, and it was well cited and factually correct. For political reasons, moderators with higher standing than me gradually removed sections, edited them unfairly, and generally vandalised the page. All sanctioned by the Wikipedia process. I learned that my page was FAR from the only page where useful, factual information was removed and edited in dishonest ways for ideological reasons. I have no doubt it's happening all over the site for many reasons. Most people don't see the politics which goes on behind the scenes, and they don't understand how much this undermines the trust in the information. My trust in the site could not be any lower than it is. I trust the parametric knowledge inside LLMs more now.
Honestly, I think knowledge like this is going to organically synchronise with consensus nodes in the very near future. Think of Community Notes on X as a prototype. That doesn't mean everything will be 100% accurate at all times, but I have zero doubt that it will be infinitely better than Wikipedia.
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..
No we won’t.
We’ll make something else and more ambitious.
Negativity drives engagement.
A post like this almost certainly means “a project like Wikipedia” is being created right now.
All I want is a crowdsourced site of new car (actual transaction) price in the US. Somehow that hasn't happened yet.
maybe we dont need a wiki. we needed one when search couldnt summarise anything. now it can, and wikipedia becomes the sources nobody clicks
I hope they don't. Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation is quite dodgy behind the scenes.
I refuse to read articles with provably wrong/clickbait titles.
No one will contribute because AI will slurp it up and serve it for free immediately.
I think all those famdoms, main wikipedia etc should be backed up in multiple archives and should be provided to as many libraries for offline read.
There's a lot of things like that, which were made by one person, or a small company, right?
Internet Archive is in the same category. So was Flash.
It's kind of amazing to think that, if it weren't for those people (or if they'd had a bit less conviction in their beliefs), we might live in a world without these wonders!
It also makes me wonder what else we might have gotten, but didn't. (Or more constructively, what else ought to exist, but nobody's built it yet!)
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.
There's that, but also economists are most often wrong then right on their forecasts.
nor GNU, nor Linux. This is the truth.
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.
They don't need to. Wikipedia proved decentralization and community moderation works.
Next problem. The article hints at it, but the paywall is my immediate concern.
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.
"project like Wikipedia" is so vague I'm sure it is already being written
Humans will never again create a project like stonehenge.
Yeah, like my wrist watch beeps when it's the solstice, why would I carry all that rock?
Everyone believes that the people before them were morons and that the greats of their youth represent a golden age lost forever to the sands of time. It's almost like there isn't any reason to be teaching inductive proofs because they ain't applying it.
I personally hope that the world won't ever create a publication like the Economist again.
What a BS sentiment but I guess if money is the only goal in life, then what doesn't make a direct profit isn't worth doing. So yes, if money is the only measure of whether something is worth doing or not, then Wikipedia won't be recreated since the volunteers contributing are not doing it for the money.
Not with that attitude!
Is Wikipedia about sharing knowledge, or do I miss something
Without even reading the article - seems to ignore the probability of a reset of civilization through nuclear war, climate change, pandemic or a Gibson "jackpot".
the phrase 'Humans will never again...' is just enough to signal one not to continue reading anything in this article.
How many decades do we need to go back where the consensus on a wikipedesque project would be "Humans will never create anything like that!" ?
Not with this attitude.
maybe the headline is not a statement but a demand
AI would need projects like this to harvest human knowledge so...
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.