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.

It’s also not a new belief. I remember all of the skepticism about Wikipedia being possible when it was a new idea.

What’s interesting is that most younger people I interact with now have a better idea of what’s possible through crowdsourced collaboration than older people. In the tech world, people who grew up with crowdsourced sites have seen the end state of Stack Overflow and its moderation, or they’ve seen enough controversies around Wikipedia edit wars where controversial topics become battlegrounds to see which moderators can wield the site’s rules more effectively to revert edits they don’t want on the page. On a long enough timeframe, community projects are at high risk of turning into fiefdoms for power hungry moderators.

The younger people grow up seemingly seeing the same things, but having a different experience about what it means. Talk to any younger generation gamer and they’ll have stories about Discord or Minecraft communities collapsing under power tripping moderators. But in the newer world where internet resources are cheap and now that LLMs can help migrate things, they may have established a new Discord or moved the community to a new game server by the end of the week. Their favorite game emulator or other project may have been forked 4 times already and the community will move to another fork again at the first signs of the new maintainer not doing what they like.

There are two critical points for a wikipedia level project:

1. the culture of sharing your work 2. the sense of usefulness and purpose

I'm not sure the newest generation share the 1, but in any case LLM companies destroy the 2.

Why would you thanklessly work for free and for the community if your work is pillaged and sold for a lot of money by AI companies before the project even reaches a critical mass ?!

> and a thousand others with no sign of stopping.

StackOverflow used to be one of the big ones in that area and that is as good as dead. I see the same coming to TVTropes, fandom wikis, movie dbs and Co. once AI gets a good at interpreting video and getting access to some sizable movie libraries. When it comes to /r/tipofmytongue/ style questions AI is already much better than large groups of humans together, though only if the necessary information is available on the public Web.

Lack of access to content outside the Web is really what is hampering progress so far, but that could go away very quickly whenever any of the big players decides to let AI run wild on whatever libraries they have.

As for humans, I just don't see how they could compete. Wikipedia took decades to write, millions of volunteers and Grokipedia (despite being a bit of an unmaintained mess) caught up to its article count in a few months. On top of that comes that all those projects aim for a neutral POV, which is very non-human to begin with and only going to benefit AI.

However, it's now operationally much harder to make sure that the contributors actually are humans.

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.

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.

This seems to be an article which didn't fact check itself.

Wikis by article count:

Wikipedia: 65 million (English: 7.2 million)

Baidu Baike: 30 million

Hudong Baike: 15 million

Namuwiki: 8.7 million

Fandom: 40 million

In fact, the Everquest 2 wiki dwarfs the Yongle encyclopedia at ~400k articles.

I'm guessing that most commenters here didn't read the article, and the headline itself was abridged by omitting the word "quite" in "quite like". The article isn't saying that nothing vaguely shaped like Wikipedia will ever be created again. It's saying that there will probably be no room for a similar human-written effort because the internet is morphing into something not conductive to having human-curated websites in the first place:

"AI’s absorption of Wikipedia means that more people than ever are reading its content. Yet it also means that fewer people are visiting the site itself. When a Wikipedia link is suggested by a search engine, nearly a tenth of users click through. When Wikipedia is cited by an LLM, the clickthrough rate is only 0.33% (and not all credit their sources)."

Individuals may keep blogging out of the force of habit or to cater to narrow / walled-garden audiences, but there aren't that many people you can attract to a planetary-scale project with the pitch of "let's edit a training dataset for OpenAI together". We're taking away the motivation of trying to make something useful and good.

Some folks are saying that AI will only accelerate the creation of future Wikipedias, and that's obviously missing the point. Yes, there might be Grokipedia-style entities, probably a number of them.

Wikitree is also fascinating, to me at least! :)

> movie dbs, and a thousand others with no sign of stopping.

They do show signs of stopping.

totally with you, we are still on the way find the best way to work with AI, way too early to jump into another"we are cooked" conclusion

The real test is the creation rate for those projects.

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.

Just because a lot of people still do it doesn’t mean it isn’t declining.

Let’s take 2 of your examples: OSM still has major gaps that seem to be getting worse actually (so much outdated or missing stuff and I’ve seen the community worry about interest) and fan wikis have almost all consolidated onto the ad riden, unreadable monstrosity that is fandom.

adding arrstack to this

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.

Totally agree, with AI it feels like we will actually accelerate that or be able to take on more ambitious projects as per the things you mentioned, its been a laborious effort by mankind. Now imagine we really want to do open maps, communication, even search. There are all sorts of possible ways we can do some large scale crowdsourced effort and its probably going to be realtime news e.g video streaming live events on an open platform not owned by corporations. Where there is no misinformation. No one can lie to us, we can see it happening.