Christophe, the fundamental metric introduced in your essay is an
obvious case of apples vs. oranges: "Internet users" is defined in your
sources as the number of people who have used the Internet at least once
in the past three months, while "Wikimedia page views" is a different
measure—in order to compare the two (let alone, *subtract* as you have
done) there would have to be a clear way to relate the number of
pageviews represented by each Internet user, which is a huge unknown.
The "contributor concentration risk" looks like an invalid application
of an investment banking concept, which is relevant to monopoly and
monopsony conditions but not to hundreds of thousands of active
editors. It makes no sense to invent a new metric when well-understood
metrics such as "editor retention" already do the job.
Then, the dream motivating your essay seems to be that we urgently need
to participate in the AI ecosystem, by complementing AI-generated text
with human fact-finding? I can't follow the thread here, but I suggest
you just write your ideas without couching them in an alarmist narrative
and a miasma of dubious pseudostatistics. As it is now, this essay fits
nicely into the "paradigm shift" genre of rhetoric fueling the AI bubble.
Personally, I would agree that our movement needs to diversify and I
would like to see that done by devolving control and resources to the
communities doing the writing. Streamlining the content to better plug
"truth" into AI is not a vision I will subscribe to.
Regards,
Adam Wight
On 1/10/26 12:40 AM, Christophe Henner wrote:
Hey everyone,
I struggled with the object, the most honest one would be "Last exit
before irrelevance" but that would be a bit violent.
So, Wikipedia turns 25 next week. I've been here for over twenty of
those years, including stints chairing Wikimedia France and the
Foundation Board. And honestly? I'm worried. Scared to be honnest.
Over the last years, I've been regularly crunching data and sharing on
different channels my worries. But in the last few weeks I decided to
make a much more structured "essay" of my findings
Since 2016, the internet nearly doubled in size.
Our page views? Down. New editor sign-ups? Down 36%.
The people keeping this thing running are working harder than ever,
but there are fewer of them every year.
I wrote it all up: the numbers, what I think went wrong, what I think
we need to do about it. Fair warning: it's long, it's opinionated, and
some of it will probably make you mad.
*Here it is: *https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now
I'm not trying to be doom and gloom for the sake of it. I genuinely
believe we have maybe two years to make some hard calls about AI,
about money, about who we're actually serving. After that, the window
closes and we become irrelevant.
Could be wrong. Hope I am. But I'd rather we have this argument now
than wish we had later. Well I'd rather we had this argument two or
four years ago, but now we will make do.
Read it, tell me where I'm off base. Let's argue and debate. That's
what talk pages are for, right?
PS: Foundation board mailing list is bcc'ed, change cannot happen
without their commitment. And fast.
--
Christophe
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