Hoi,
So a beautification aspiration of some Wikipedians has done our project
important damage. Inflexibility prevented a work around .. Given that many
people moved to MDWiki it is a total loss of service and a total loss for
what we aim to stand for. When English Wikipedians tout their community,
they forget the people who they lost for Wikipedia because of their
oppressive need for conformity. The last English Wikipedia article I wrote
was considered advertisement. It was only about one of the biggest global
(not Western) companies who provides solar panels, batteries and service.
The company is Africa/India based..
Community is both our most valuable asset and it is also what makes people
turn away from editing Wikipedia.
Thanks,
Gerard
On Tue, 20 Jan 2026 at 22:33, James Heilman <[email protected]> wrote:
> Gerard the issues around translation were that some on English
> Wikipedia do not want references in the leads of articles and are
> removing them. We generally just translate the leads, so need
> references present there. So we tried to move these English leads to a
> workspace on EN WP (there was no content in non EN on EN WP). These
> workspaces were deemed an inappropriate use of EN WP and deleted. We
> thus moved to MDWiki.org and are much happier there as it also solved
> other issues such that we can use somewhat less technical language to
> make translation easier.
>
> J
>
> On Tue, Jan 20, 2026 at 1:15 AM Gerard Meijssen
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > Hoi.
> > When the Wikimedia Foundation was run as a company, it would consider
> what our key performance indicators (KPI) are. It would be done in order to
> improve our business. Our business is to share in the sum of all knowledge.
> Our content is freely licensed so it is perfectly fine for the leeches of
> this world to keep their knowledge base up to date. The Wikimedia
> Foundation provides both them and us a great service as they are providing
> a dedicated service to get at our data. Our benefit is that there is now
> more bandwidth for us and our public.
> >
> > Important is that in "sharing the sum of all knowledge" we have our main
> objective. That is not open for discussion. The sum of all knowledge is not
> found in any project. The Arabic Wikipedia knows more about Egyptian
> politicians than the English Wikipedia, the French Wikipedia knows more
> about Francophone countries than the English Wikipedia. I made that
> observation but as an organisation there is this bias that "there can be
> only one". When James complains about translations, imho he is wrong when
> he expects room for translations in the English Wikipedia; translations
> find their place in the Wikipedias that are in that other language. There
> is a place for translations from English and it is not in the English
> Wikipedia.
> >
> > When the traffic of the Wikipedias is considered, more and more traffic
> is generated by the "other" Wikipedias. This is where we grow. Consequently
> it could/should be a Foundation KPI to have all of them share in the sum of
> all knowledge. All arguments from English Wikipedians are not relevant; it
> is not their Foundation and it is not their concern. When as a consequence
> fewer resources are available for developing the English Wikipedia, any
> arguments for more resources from the English Wikipedia demonstrate a bias
> that is hard to justify. Particularly as the coverage of the sum of all
> knowledge is fractured because much of what we know is in our "other"
> projects.
> >
> > NB What would happen when Mr Trump bans Wikipedia. Are we viable when
> our US assets no longer are available to us?
> > Thanks,
> > GerardM
> >
> >
> >
> > On Mon, 19 Jan 2026 at 07:10, James Heilman <[email protected]> wrote:
> >>
> >> One of the big issues that is missed by Christophe is just how
> unfriendly many parts of our movement have become. Much of the community
> working on articles about roads split off to their own Wiki as folks were
> unable to compromise around what is acceptable here. Many medical editors
> either quit or split to mdwiki as allowing space for translation into other
> languages was not something certain folks here were willing to accept and
> things became unpleasant.
> >>
> >> Some want to keep WP narrower in scope and this will keep it smaller.
> Thankfully the right to fork is clearly founded in US law following the
> Internet Brands lawsuit. And our movement is able to innovate both outside
> Wikipedia and even outside the WMF. Folks are free to innovate around AI
> using our material already for example. And likely could get some movement
> funds to support this work.
> >>
> >> J
> >>
> >>
> >> Sent from Gmail Mobile
> >>
> >> On Sun, Jan 18, 2026 at 18:00 Steven Walling <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> On Sat, Jan 17, 2026 at 10:55 PM Leinonen Teemu via Wikimedia-l <
> [email protected]> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> I really enjoy this discussion.
> >>>>
> >>>> As it is the latency between human curiosity and insight(s),
> Wikipedia is losing out to AI chatbots.
> >>>>
> >>>> The key in the AI chatbots is the UI, which feeds your curiosity by
> imitating human-to-human dialogue.
> >>>>
> >>>> Would it be possible to build something like this to Wikipedia, too?
> I would love to have ”chat” with Wikipedia.
> >>>>
> >>>> Teemu
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> It is 100% possible. There are free and open source models we could
> build on, without creating a dependency on AI companies or doing anything
> that tries to replace human editing and authorship. I bet a lot of data
> scientists and AI researchers would love to help us.
> >>>
> >>> Building our own model would likely be a prohibitively expensive idea,
> but there are techniques for applying existing models to search a specific
> source of data i.e. only answer from Wikipedia. This is being done today by
> almost every existing company with a database they/their users want to chat
> with.
> >>>
> >>> Overall I would guess that the Foundation feels scared to propose this
> because many people dislike AI on principle for various reasons, and it
> might look like they are following a trend started by for-profit companies
> that are reusing Wikipedia content with zero attribution, to the
> Cunctator’s point about copyleft. (I have considered starting a civil class
> action suit by editors against OpenAI and other foundation model providers
> for violating Creative Commons terms.)
> >>>
> >>> A lot of the search problems that exist in Wikipedia are fairly basic,
> or at least don’t require AI chat to fix. For instance, we handle typos
> (like if you misspell Liechtenstein) very poorly, or otherwise searching
> for anything that isn’t the exact name of an article (if you search “Halti
> mountain” it will not show you the article for “Halti”, the tallest
> mountain in Finland, nor “List of mountains in Finland”). It makes me sad
> that we are the backbone of Google’s knowledge graph and AI models, but
> have made no serious attempt to do the obvious thing which is at least try
> and see if we could build such things based only on our content and with
> appropriate human control/safety in mind.
> >>>
> >>> This has been a good discussion in response to a usefully
> thought-provoking essay by Christophe. Many good points previously raised.
> >>>
> >>> Overall, I think Christophe was right to sound the alarm and demand
> greater urgency. I started editing as a teenager. I am now middle aged, and
> I want Wikipedia to be around and bigger/better when I am dust. We must
> replace ourselves with a larger, more thriving community if the project is
> to survive and grow. You might argue with Christophe’s data analysis, but
> it is not a good sign when I feel guilty that I can’t make time to do
> English Wikipedia admin things, because the admin pool has been shrinking
> on our largest project.
> >>>
> >>> Not all our problems are technological of course, nor do all of them
> require the WMF to fix. This is perhaps the one quibble I have with the
> essay—we are not so totally dependent on the Foundation. It just depends
> what we want to do, who is interested, and can we form a consensus.
> >>>
> >>> Steven Walling
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>>
> >>>> Lähettäjä: Ori Livneh <[email protected]>
> >>>> Päivämäärä: sunnuntaina, 18. tammikuuta 2026 klo 0.21
> >>>> Vastaanottaja: Wikimedia Mailing List <
> [email protected]>
> >>>> Aihe: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call (essay)
> >>>>
> >>>> On Fri, Jan 16, 2026 at 1:35 AM Erik Moeller <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> A huge reason readers may prefer AI summaries, even if inaccurate, is
> >>>> to get to an answer more quickly (the same reason Wikipedia itself
> >>>> outperformed other information sources even when its quality was still
> >>>> very uneven.)
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> Yes. It's latency. It was always latency. "Wiki" means quick.
> >>>>
> >>>> Wikipedia made the sum of human knowledge (or its arithmetic mean,
> anyway) accessible near you: in your home, in your backpack, in your
> pocket, on your person. It shortened the distance from question to answer
> by abstracting the trip to the library or bookshelf, the time spent poring
> over the table of contents, and the wait for the newspaper to arrive, for a
> new textbook edition, or for the translation to appear in your language.
> >>>>
> >>>> For performance engineers like me, Wikipedia's "end-to-end latency"
> is the time between a reader clicking a link and the article fully
> rendering on their device. For many years, I believed the key to
> Wikipedia's continued relevance was shaving milliseconds off this number by
> tuning Wikimedia's code and infrastructure.
> >>>>
> >>>> But true end-to-end latency is not measured between server and
> browser, but between curiosity and insight. And it turns out that network
> and code latency contribute only modestly to that number. The milliseconds
> it takes for Wikimedia's servers to transmit an article to your device are
> dwarfed by the time you need to wrack your brain for the right terms to
> query, locate the relevant section of the article, interpret its meaning,
> and relate it to your question.
> >>>>
> >>>> Wikipedia improved on Britannica's end-to-end latency by several
> orders of magnitude. Modern AI is now doing the same to Wikipedia. I can
> describe to Gemini what I want to know using vague, imprecise, or even
> incorrect terms, and it tells me what I might be thinking of, using my
> language: not merely the language listed in my Babel userbox, but terms I
> understand that relate to concepts I already know and are appropriate to my
> level of understanding.
> >>>>
> >>>> At its worst, AI generates hallucinated, sycophantic slop. But at its
> best, it is an interface to human knowledge that is not merely
> incrementally faster than browsing Wikipedia, but categorically faster.
> >>>>
> >>>> I think the key to ensuring the future knowledge infrastructure
> remains free and open is to once again beat closed, commercial platforms on
> latency, ideally by an order of magnitude or more. This is possible, if you
> again consider true end-to-end latency and the invisible factors that
> contribute to it, like the time it takes to distinguish truth from
> falsehood, and information from manipulation.
> >>>>
> >>>> I'm not sure Wikimedia should lead the charge. Even if their
> relevance is fading somewhat, the projects are an immense trove of value
> for humanity. Any rash effort to remake them from within is likely to
> destroy more value than it creates. But there is plenty of room out there
> for new things.
> >>>>
> >>>> I'm glad to see you experimenting in this space, Eric.
> >>>> _______________________________________________
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> >>>
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> >>
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>
> --
> James Heilman
> MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
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