On 7/11/2026 10:43 AM, Alex Stinson via Wikimedia-l wrote:
*Interfaces are cheap, informed curators are expensive*
Agentic AI, Coding tools and LLMs are making the cost of new
interfaces /extremely cheap, /so cheap that I am commissioning a
complex knowledge repository for a fraction of the cost and time it
would take otherwise. Interface projects like WikiProject Med's
offline medical Wikipedia App, which used to take several months of
highly specialized software development, can now be spun up in a long
weekend with a Claude Code Max subscription. Sage's tool is a perfect
example of this: perfect for a small market of users, unlikely to be a
"headline" Wikimedia tactic for getting in front of users, because
Youtube and AI search interfaces already do this exact thing.
What is not cheap for all of the other platforms (and is often paid
for by ads), but which we have in abundance, is motivated humans who
can continue curating the knowledge (and more than 25 years of
experiments on facilitating knowledge equity focused gap filling). The
questions we need to address are:
* Do the curators understand the future of distribution to other
humans we need to be building for across multiple future internet
scenerios?
* Do the curation practices serve diverse forms of access
(languages, geographies, topics) from that distribution?
* Do the curators understand demand and how curation choices affect
distribution to that demand?
These three questions all implicitly require some kind of training and
education for curators, on matters not directly affecting curation
activity. Our volunteers are motivated, yes, but what motivates is the
curation they enjoy, not necessarily tangential considerations. People
contribute because "I see a typo", "I'm collecting bits of trivia in
this space", "This leaves out a key fact", or "That's just flat wrong",
and the wiki makes them all (relatively) easy to fix. For us, it's
"cheap" as in we've lowered the investment required to participate. Some
curators will be willing to invest additional engagement on big-picture
issues, so it may nevertheless be helpful to offer such training, but
there's still investment cost on both sides and I do not see it moving
the needle when focusing on the competitive landscape.
* Can we recruit the next generation of curators who don't "assume"
that the pageview metric is the reason we contribute?
I question whether that assumption is in fact prevalent. Even in the
world of professional media, those paid to curate or generate content
often resist the implications, whether out of principled beliefs or
because they fear impact to their livelihood. This conversation has
emphasized such metrics because those participating care about reaching
a broader audience. But in terms of what motivates curation at a basic
level, once it is established that there is some audience out there, I
don't know that the order of its magnitude matters all that much.
Audience demand results in more information to curate and more space in
which to work, and I think that motivates equally with reach if not
more. People may find it as satisfying to work on en:Wedding of Taylor
Swift and Travis Kelce, even though en:Taylor Swift and en:Travis Kelce
undoubtedly have higher pageviews.
To use the wheat production infographic as another illustration,
personally I care less about the interface behavior than what I could do
to help better curate. Suppose I had information about how much wheat
Sudan produced in 2011 (currently "no data"), or wanted to address the
anachronistic use of present-day national boundaries going back all the
way to 1961? Where would I even start? Otherwise, maybe it increases the
visual appeal of one article a bit, and we could even reproduce that
across a bunch of articles, but we'd also be throwing up massive
barriers to maintenance.
What we most need is to simplify, to make it easier for volunteers to
steer in the direction we would like them to go. Then they can
self-select according to what meets their interests. I believe the
success of Wikidata so far - "success" in the sense that its potential
aligns more with "early Wikipedia" than "early Wikiversity" - is in
large part because it provides a vast new space for curation, and has
been integrated in a way that makes it easy for those interested to go
and participate, while it is simultaneously easy to ignore for those who
are less interested.
--Michael Snow
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