I'm not sure how useful my perspective is on this one, I'm a monolingual
Brit who doesn't use AI myself, and while I have used a smartphone to take
pictures on Commons I suspect over 99.99%, maybe 99.999% of my global edits
have been PC or tablet based rather than from a smartphone.

As Christophe has pointed out, AI is taking our audience. I'd add that we
have had community growth issues for more than a decade, partly because for
smartphone users we are almost a broadcast medium. Optimising the mobile
platform, and to some extent new skins on the PC platform, for readers
rather than editors seems to have been WMF strategy for more than a decade.
It succeeded in keeping our audience for a while, but at the price of
restricting community growth and making us ever more dependent on aging PC
users in the global north.

In a more growth oriented model we would recruit readers to become editors
by incrementally changing their user experience, adding more useful editing
features as they edit more.

What I'm not sure is how much the deprioritising of Wikipedia content in
favour of AI is a side effect of the big tech companies investing in AI, or
to what extent there are operators out there who see us as either a
competitor or as a challenge to their alternative facts. I suspect it is a
bit of all three.

Part of the solution is going to revolve around copyright. Both in terms of
the WMF, or some other collective representation of Wikimedians, reminding
AI operators of the SA and BY implications of CC-BY-SA. But also for the
future, our potential role as a bridge between paywalled sites and the free
parts of the internet. There are still publications out there that employ
journalists and don't give away their content for free. Those of us who
have subscriptions to such publications give Wikipedia an advantage over AI
content, that advantage isn't going to go away soon, and could increase if
the WMF and Chapters invest more in the Wikipedia library and similar
routes to make good offline sources available to Wikimedians. As a side
effect of this, I think we should do more outreach to the publishing
industry as to what our criteria are for something to be considered a
reliable source, and what changes certain sites would need to do for some
or all of their content to meet our standards.

One of the advantages that AI has or can have over us is in talking a
language that people understand. I remember in the 2009 Strategy discussion
talking about following the Chinese Wikipedia system and making American
English, Canadian English, Indian English and English as different views of
one Wikipedia. I don't know if that would also work for Portugal and Brazil
and other languages that have become semi detached. But it is one change we
could fairly easily make. A more difficult one is reading ages. Apologies
to other languages if this is just an English thing, but I get the
impression that EN Wiki is written for a reading age that only a small
minority of even native English speakers have achieved, whilst AI at least
tries to be understood by anyone with a day to day fluency in English.
Lowering the reading age of our content, especially of the lede, would be a
lot of work, but it is the sort of work that we could explain at U3A events
or retirement fairs. We've long needed an alternative entry level tasks as
typos and vandalism get ever rarer on Wiki.

There is a bigger cultural change to the movement that we need to start
preparing for. Since the earliest days of the project, long before I got
involved, our first level divide has been by language. As AI translation
improves, we need to be aware that some barriers are coming down, we may
find ourselves organising more by subject area, or find that some of our
sources are reliable in their host language and less so when mirrored into
other languages. Before Wikidata I was involved in some cross wiki working
with the death anomaly project. I predict that this is going to be a growth
area for us as we start getting  criticism for different language versions
of Wikipedia covering the same event from radically different perspectives.

We are living in interesting times.

WereSpielChequers (ˈdʒɒnəθən
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/English>)
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