Let's take a little bit of perspective: People don't read Encyclopedias. They never did. People look up things in Encyclopedias. Historically, they bought them, even with some fancy wardrobes designed for showcasing the status of being an encyclopedia-owner, but very few people took the time to actually read the encyclopedia itself.
People don't read Wikipedia, mainly because it's impossible to read all of it. We have done the largest knowledge project in the History of the Humanity. We should be proud of that, but we can't expect anyone to read all of it in a lifetime. Most of our visits were for searching for short facts, like what's the actor in this series, when was born Jane Doe and doing small research on a topic they just watched on TV. There were a few that actually read the topics, researched, fell into rabbit holes and appreciated the whole thing they were reading. Now this very casual fact search comes from LLMs, Google Search and even Wikidata powered knowledge boxes. So, the peak of visits we had in the past is having that information in other ways, mostly from us. Indirectly. There's a decline, and it's going to be worse in the future, and we must wake up, as the topic of this message claims. There are communities doing it, innovating with multimedia, interactivity, new audiences, or storytelling. There are communities rejecting it. The problem is if the WMF BoT is going to wake up and take the risks that some communities are already taking or just reject any innovation. There are many paths to take, and we won't agree on which is the good one, but doing nothing is not the best one. Have a nice weekend, Galder ________________________________ From: Gerard Meijssen via Wikimedia-l <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, June 5, 2026 1:14 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List <[email protected]> Cc: Gerard Meijssen <[email protected]> Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Re: Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call (essay) Hoi, When the numbers drop, there is a need for another public. For me YouTube is an inspiration to work on Wikidata information.. I blogged about how it can gain us a different public.. https://ultimategerardm.blogspot.com/2026/06/watching-informative-youtubes-with.html Thanks, On Fri, 5 Jun 2026 at 09:08, Christophe Henner via Wikimedia-l <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Hi this is my irregular email to try to get more widespread reactions and engagement and discussion from volunteers to board of trustees. On global mobile traffic, after a -6.83% between May 2025 and May 2024, we're shattering records with a nice -18.27% between 2026 and 2025. Oh yes, data may be dirty. So let's say it's even half of that it's still a -10%. "Christophe why are you not using Desktop data": historically desktop data has proven quite unreliable for many reasons (and this week the chinese wikipedia desktop outburst is surprising and makes desktop data hard to read (on top of other outbursts). So when we start playing with the -10% to 20% year over year, shall we start mobilizing? Or we just all grab mojitos and virgin mojitos and look at the collapse? Oh hey if it wasn't clear before, the one body that can muster ressources to mobilize our movement is the board of trustees. Every day we are not mobilizing is your decision. Every day you are not engaging publicly in those decision is your decision. Every day... I could make a long list you get the idea. Right now the legacy you're building is a -20% trend leading to collapse legacy. I know this is hard to read, I know this may trigger a defensive reaction. But time for tiptoeing around topics and problems is long gone. We need swift and radical and unifying actions. If we are to go through this situation we need collective action not inaction. -18.27% YoY on mobile : https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal|bar|2021-11-07~2026-06-05|(access)~mobile-app*mobile-web+agent~user|monthly<https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/all-projects/reading/total-page-views/normal%7Cbar%7C2021-11-07~2026-06-05%7C(access)~mobile-app*mobile-web+agent~user%7Cmonthly> -- Christophe On Tue, 5 May 2026 at 10:26, Tomasz Ganicz via Wikimedia-l <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: This is what almost all universities around the world are doing but in professional way.The issue is that regular teaching needs regular time commitment of qualified teachers which is hard to organize on voluntary model. Also in order to maintain minimal quality of teaching you need a system of checking teachers qualifications and skills. Tomek "Polimerek" Ganicz http://pl.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Polimerek http://www.ganicz.pl/poli/ pon., 4 maj 2026, 15:22 użytkownik Felipe Schenone via Wikimedia-l <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> napisał: Hi! As we know, Wikimedia's mission isn't to build an encyclopedia (that's Wikipedia's mission) but rather "a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge". Perhaps the new landscape will slowly strip Wikipedia of its leading role in the Wikimedia movement, and perhaps (hopefully) some other project will take over. I agree with Chris in that our core strength is our community, and I also agree with James in that writing tertiary sources is becoming outdated. How can we keep striving for our vision, while making the most of our strength (the community) but through a project that doesn't involve writing tertiary sources? Here's an idea: Wikiversity could become so much more than what it currently is. It could become a real "online university", multilingual and global, where real-time courses with real humans are taught (as well as the asynchronous courses that already exist today). And not just courses, but eventually entire university programs that award real degrees. I'm sure our community is filled with excellent teachers, academics and experts that could lead such courses in many languages, as well as many others that could support them in other ways (answering questions, preparing reading material, exercises, exams, etc). We'd need to develop and integrate some software like Zoom or Meet, and much more, of course, but that's beyond the point, as we could start with existing software now, and develop better tools as we go along. Humans teaching humans, would be a good summary of the idea. I could digress for a while, but I might be delusional, so I'll stop here. However, if anyone supports or would like to talk, I'd be happy to continue on-wiki (User:Sophivorus). Cheers! On Mon, May 4, 2026 at 7:47 AM AcDc CluvR via Wikimedia-l <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Hi Christophe. Tnx for writing this! I used to be member of the board, chapter, moderator, arbitration committee ... User Dolledre on some wiki's, mostly nl.wiki. In my opinion crawling 'our' data should not be so darn easy for AI models. Willing to block them by hand if they keep hallucinating on 'our' data. Interrogating like 4 of them daily, mainly on how they work. Do know how to lead them towards total confusion. Even if Wikipedia could develop the best AI code in the world, we would still be sharing it. It's the paradox to sweat out till humanity is either hallucinating as a whole either returning till mental sanity. Kind regards. D. PS: Want a free image of a fox eating a banana in my kitchen? ;-) Op za 10 jan 2026 om 00:41 schreef Christophe Henner <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>: 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 _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/[email protected]/message/X3SQ2WA7QF2XS56XV2EOPDPUZ6UQPCR4/ To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/[email protected]/message/TYXFRDYSUH3WUYM5P4MADNQI42NZXWTX/ To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/[email protected]/message/UD4JDQEN5P24GA7DYIWMB5NKVO5MCO2Y/ To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/[email protected]/message/DIGXAKYMSR56ETXSHKSG6CIONMEM56RU/ To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/[email protected]/message/WJ6VRJAZTRYTPPN44K2NSHBO5WSWLGBF/ To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>
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