Hoi,
The leeches are going to pay for access to Wikimedia data. They get their
own access freeing up bandwidth so the negative impact for users and
editors will go away.
Thanks.
GerardM
On Fri, 16 Jan 2026 at 16:34, The Cunctator <[email protected]> wrote:
> The failure to protect Wikipedia's copyleft makes this decline pretty
> unavoidable. Wikipedia has benefited from a collaborative/parasitic
> relationship with Google et al for a long time but now the extractive
> corporations don't need (or believe they need) the human labor, so they are
> going to keep throttling Wikipedia.
>
> The Wikipedia Foundation needs to reconsider its approach to letting the
> intellectual property of the editors be exploited - nay, encouraging the
> theft.
>
> On Fri, Jan 16, 2026, 7:02 AM Adam Wight <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> 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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