This is most definitely wrong. People volunteer and crowdsource all the time, driven by ideals. And the async nature of the web will only make such projects stronger. There's OpenStreetMap, TV Tropes, fandom wikis, movie dbs, and a thousand others with no sign of stopping.
But the future will raise the bar. Perhaps we'll see wiki of wikis, or something else getting the web closer to truly semantic knowledge.
Many longtime OSM mappers have sensed that there has been some decline in interest and a risk to the long-term future of the project as a truly amateur-enthusiast phenomenon. Causes include: younger generations raised on corporate platforms and their phone apps are less aware of non-corporate alternatives, and might even be suspicious of libre and altruistic movements (this is a concern in Free Software circles, too); as the map got filled in, there were fewer obvious blanks that struck a total newbie as a place he/she could contribute; corporations got onboard both as OSM users and stakeholders, and then some idealistic anti-capitalistic people have asked why they should contribute if the map can benefit corps, too, etc.
> corporations got onboard both as OSM users and stakeholders, and then some idealistic anti-capitalistic people have asked why they should contribute if the map can benefit corps,
Anecdotally, I’ve had a lot of experiences like this with newer generations of people on topics like open source software or community projects: They’ve been trained, usually by a social media niche, to believe that the only good fight is to actively harm corporations. Their idea of the world is a very clear black and white contrast with people on one side and corporations on the other.
Such a clean separation of the world only exists in ideas they get from social media and movies. Encountering a project like OSM or an open source project where the largest users (and for OSS, maybe the largest contributors) are people involved with corporations doesn’t fit into their worldview, so they file it in the “corporate” side of the divide and dislike it.
This is another theme I notice in this same cohort: It is not permissible to even suggest that they’re doing anything wrong. Any time someone highlights behaviors or beliefs that have problems or are inconsistent, someone will pop up and blame that on the corporations, too.
So even when these people have turned into a broken clock about being anti-corporate to the point that they’re anti-open-projects, someone will always come along to explain why we can’t fault them and instead everything is the fault of corporations. A normal working class person can not be faulted for their beliefs in this model, because every fault will be transformed into something that can be blamed on a corporation.
Personally I find the erasure of individual thought in this model to be demeaning. You can’t blame everything every individual does on corporations having either made them do it or forced them to believe it through their actions. At some point we have to admit that people’s thoughts and actions are their own.
If someone becomes so bitter that they’re becoming anti-OSM or anti-Wikipedia or anti-OSS, I’m fully okay with holding them to account for their chosen beliefs.
> This is another theme I notice in this same cohort
> Personally I find the erasure of individual thought in this model to be demeaning.
The fact that you are describing a behavior that you believe to be shared among a sizable group of people seems to contradict your claim that their beliefs are due to individual failings rather than some broader social forces that caused them to believe these things, no?
The historical left/marxist view is essentially: look at someone's social context and where their money comes from, and you'll know how they probably think. The American ideology is: everyone is an individual and a tramp can be a philosopher.
The second is much more appealing to us as individuals, and to our sense of self-determination and independence. And people do have agency---some people succumb to despair, others don't; some work hard, some don't; some rebound from setbacks, some don't.
But if you look at large groups of people, the first one starts to have strong explanatory power. Look at US coverage of foreign elections, and that second view is almost all you see.
I think GP pretty clearly states it's due to broader social forces:
> They’ve been trained, usually by a social media niche
I don't think that was a complicated point, but maybe you think you were asking something else, while trying to still blame whatever "social forces" TikTok has told you to blame.
You engage in confessions as accusations when ignoring the possibility, it could be you who is wrong.
The problem isn't "corporations", it's capitalism. The economic system forces corporations to behave in anti-social ways.
Similar goes with the trope you peddle, individuals were to blame. They're not. The system they live in, and never had any say in shaping, forces them to engage in behaviors short term that ultimately run counter to their own interests long term.
Contributing to open source software or commons like Wikipedia definitely is questionable. Those contributions get monopolized and their benefits privatized. That's not a "belief".
If you translate "corporations" into it's actual meaning, then substitute it into your sentence, it becomes apparent how silly that is.
"Or maybe they just feel that organizational methodologies used by people to coordinate complex multi-participant activities are actively trying to harm them and this is the logical response?"
If you think about government and corporations - they're responsible for so many bad things in the world! I guess that's true, but how much of it is them just doing all the stuff?
So I don't know that it's fair? Nearly all the material goods around me and a ton of services were provided by corporations, which are largely composed of regular people glued together at scale by bureacracy.
There's a growing sentiment in the US that capitalism in general and consumerism in particular are inherently bad and cause only hardship and exploitation for the general public.
That "capitalism" and "consumerism" are abstract concepts that represent pre-existing patterns of human activity that arise from a priori motivations, and are not things that exist as entities unto themselves exerting an influence on anyone's behavior or situational outcomes.
Free market competition makes sense. Lowest prices.
What we see right now in the USA, though, is a mafia. That has nothing to do with capitalism as such. It is a racket, a ponzi scheme. There are many variants of capitalism. Even the chinese adapted their variant to sinomarxistic ideals (to certain extent; I don't think today's main China is purely capitalistic nor purely sinomarxistic as it once used to be).
The market abhors competition. The free market, absent government regulation, will always trend towards anticompetitive consolidation because it's far more profitable.
Cory Doctorow wrote about this: "Capitalists Hate Capitalism"
> Capitalists hate capitalism. They don’t want to be exposed to the risks entailed by competition, and feel the goad of that insecurity. They want monopolies, or platforms, or monopoly platforms. They want assets, not businesses.
Unchecked Capitalism always leads to Mono/Duopolies aka Mafia. The best of both World is maybe called Social-direct-democratic-capitalism.
>What we see right now in the USA, though, is a mafia. That has nothing to do with capitalism as such.
Has everything to do with unchecked Capitalism, go too far and both extremes end in a ~Monopoly, in Socialism/Communism it's mostly the State (China, USSR, Cuba etc.) in Capitalism a massive conglomerate of Enterprises (S.Korea, again "new" China, Russia, USA, India)
> Nearly all the material goods around me and a ton of services were provided by corporations
But the issue is not about corporations - or companies - per se.
The issue is how they relate to the general population. You can have good corporations and bad corporations. When billionaires buy legislation then something is wrong. When a corrupt elite invades countries and kills people - that's bad.
So the problem with corporations is that governments sometimes do bad things that benefit them?
The problem of "billionaires buying legislation" is that billionaires get money from market activity to buy it with, not that it's up for sale by politicians or that the limits on the scope of legislation are insufficient?
When a military force marches into another country, that's the work of a vague "corrupt elite" and not the political officials in charge of the military?
Everything is actively getting worse for more corporate espionage.
I didn't actually say anything about government, mine seems to genuinely care for our welfare.
Corporate food products (at least from the US) seem to be designed to just get you to consume more of them.
I would argue that the MAG7 - about whom these complaints are about I assume, not some random little startup that uses OSM API - can no longer be seen as classical corporations. The power and moat they assumed can not be achieved by most other such entities.
Much of the open source movement has its roots in anti-corporate culture too. Given that open source is now largely funded by corporations is a win for the ideals of open source but also a corruption of the early ethos; It’s very easy to equate open source with corporatism.
systemd is a lot less complex than legacy init systems, in the Rich Hickey sense of systems that are linked together in irregular and noisy ways.
A million lines of C supporting 2k lines of declarative unit files is less complex from the user's perspective than 50k lines of custom bash scripts. Of course it would be better if it did the same thing in, say, 100k lines or in Rust, but perfect is the enemy of good. systemd exists today and it works fine.
Everything is regular, predictable, documented and easy to read. A file made for one distro only needs trivial changes to run on another. That's what simple really means. I would never go back to init scripts.
I think the difficult thing to reconcile is that you naturally will expect some degree of compensation (power, recognition, money, or a combo) for putting a lot of work into something.
However on the other hand, it has been drilled into your head repeatedly that wanting compensation for work is "bad" and antithetical to social movements. You work for the whole, not for yourself. Besides, you (along with everyone else) gets to enjoy the fruits of others free work.
But then after dwelling on it, you realize that 90% of the people holding you to this ideology aren't contributing much if anything at all, and just gorging themselves on the work of a few.
So now you either consolidate power into your hands (nazi mods), lose motivation (project decays), or become an "evil" capitalist(start charging money for access).
> However on the other hand, it has been drilled into your head repeatedly that wanting compensation for work is "bad" and antithetical to social movements. You work for the whole, not for yourself.
Any ideology built on this premise is doomed to failure. Successful movements are ones that align the particular interests of individuals with the broader goals of the community.
Dogmas that set individual interest and public interest at odds with each other will always debilitate the effectiveness of the entire movement, and subject it to never-ending internal conflict.
The free software/open source ecosystem has successfully demonstrated how public-interest idealism and for-profit commercial pursuits can not just coexist, but actually complement and reinforce each other. Anyone who's arguing for one side of the ecosystem in opposition to the other is asking for the entire thing to collapse.
Expecting compensation is fine. Demanding compensation is not, simply because it doesn't work: open source succeeds because those who contribute gets more collaboration and visibility than those who don't.
You can be compensated by "gorging" on other open-source that you haven't contributed to, working outside OSS, or asking for funding to keep working or work more. But if you work privately, you're competing against someone who will work publicly, while limiting someone else who would like to use your private work but can't afford it (like you can't afford others).
> now you either consolidate power into your hands (nazi mods), lose motivation (project decays), or become an "evil" capitalist(start charging money for access).
You never hear about them but there are also invitation only communities where contributing is required. The benefits are not shared outside.
- Movies made after WWII that needed villians often made them Nazis.
- During the cold war, evil villians were communists or Soviet spies.
- Movies made after the fall of the Soviet Union often make their villians evil faceless corporations.
A generation or two has been raised by Hollywood and Disney on business always being evil, while simultaneoulsy choosing to consume and make themselves dependent on giant corporate content.
> "A generation or two has been raised by Hollywood and Disney on business always being evil"
Oh hollywood and disney, not the behaviour of Standard Oil, DeBeers, Nestle, Coca Cola, banks in the sub-prime mortgage crisis, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, OPEC, DuPont, Chemie Grünenthal, predatory gambling and payday loans companies, an "epidemic" of wage theft in America estimated in the tens of billions per year, the trends towards enshittification, nickel-and-diming, rent-extraction and grifting of most products and services over time, health insurance companies, the lived experience of millions of workers being devalued, insulted, subject to unneccesarily dangerous environments, and treated like cattle?
We constructed alien superintelligences with no human emotion or morality, they took over much of the world, and people are surprised that they’re seen as villains.
We’ve been very lucky that the incentive structure has them doing a lot of useful things for us, but that doesn’t mean we have to be happy about having so much of our lives being ruled by these amoral aliens.
> A generation or two has been raised by Hollywood and Disney on business always being evil, while simultaneoulsy choosing to consume and make themselves dependent on giant corporate content.
It’s fascinatingly devilish, isn’t it? They control the outrage and profit from it. I’m reminded of Bill Hicks’ bit on marketing.
Many longtime OSM mappers like myself are acutely aware of various corporations making big bucks on the back of our volunteered time and effort. Often times without contributing anything. Recently made worse by horrible API abuses.
I get why people might not be motivated to join us in the tragedy of the commons.
It is not that the they make money, but the problem is that corporations with huge budgets can overshadow the volunteer run packaging of the said projects and eventually become the canonical way of using them.
Then the project loses visibility to end users. I don't know if that is worth the occasional commercial contributions from them to satisfy their own requirements.
You mean relicensing the project? The data has always been free to anyone. I think you might confuse the map data which is OSM with the external providers whose business is to repackage it into various windows, APIs and other services.
Very few, and in not all countries is government data compatible with OSM's license, so even people employed in state GIS can't necessarily edit the map from the office.
The kids are alright (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Zeloof). They are putting up more of a fight than you can imagine. The root cause of centralization is the way we do hardware manufacturing (as explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49690354). I think it will take about 5 years to make fabs into home appliances, then the entire stack will decentralize from the bottom up. The future is most likely solar/cypherpunk, at least in America.
I personally think most people become disengaged from the side of things like OSM because they literally don't have visibility to the problem. It becomes even worse when there are literally trillions of dollars of market value derives from the good work of open source, but people only see the badge of product and not all of the layers of onion beneath it.
I really wish the world recognized and provided tax income to these projects because they have been the backbone of our ever-complex technological society for probably about thirty years. Rather than what we have now where large corporations will take a foothold in an open-source project and hollow it out for parts then sell it as a "turnkey" product like we have seen time and time again.
> younger generations raised on corporate platforms and their phone apps are less aware of non-corporate alternatives
All the new guys I work with are trapped in the app store/play store bubble. If it's not available directly through the device's software distribution system it's not getting used.
> might even be suspicious of libre and altruistic movements
All my boomer bosses think that anything that is outside the Windows/O365 ecosystem, or doesn't come with a $150 yearly license, is clearly pirate hacker software that will give your e-mail a virus and steal your bitcoin.
It is increasingly frustrating when we have a problem that could be fixed with GNU corutils and a bash script, or a raspberrypi/arduino translating between 2 serial devices, but we end up getting some $1500 black box from the 'official' vendor. It teaches the newer guys that step one is not to think about the problem, it's to grab your wallet and call a salesman.
This is not a new problem. I worked in corporate IT in the early 2000’s. Both attitudes existed even then, though of course there was no App Store back then. Nevertheless there was a strong preference among younger employees for paid software—the kind you get in boxes. The older generation viewed most software as suspect, but were willing to accept “official” solutions from Microsoft and other name brand software vendors. It seems comical now, but at the time Red Hat was viewed almost universally among my coworkers as a terrible idea. And forget about custom software. Rolling one’s own software was widely seen as crazy talk.
Never underestimate the blame game. It's a lot easier to place the blame on MS than on your own organisation. All customers knows you can't do anything about how windows works and have accepted the dysfunction already.
It took me the best part of 20 years of working in the corporate world to realise that the decisions aren't about the best thing for the user, or the employee, or even the shareholder, it's about the best thing for the decision maker. Ideally one which allows them to have no accountability whatsoever.
It's the whole reason management consultancies exist. If Deloite tell you to do X, or Gartner say buy Y, and you do, you aren't going to have the blame. Even when you end up losing half a billion as our last CxO did, you'll just get a golden handshake and a move to another company.
Someone who worked in corporate law once said "in the rare case you have to hire outside counsel you always hire the fanciest name brand firm. Not because the fancy firm does better work, but because of risk mitigation and CYA. If things go sideways then you can say 'not my fault,I hired the fanciest firm.'"
I remember buying SuSe Linux as literally boxed software around that time. But I bought it for my own use and my employer (not software industry) was running mostly windows with some legacy Unix.
Already in the 90‘s I has advocating for FOSS in a big company. And someone told me “nobody was ever fired for buying IBM” that phrase was already very old…
In their defense, if something isn’t in my distro repo, 75% of the time I’ll ignore it. Using the operating system’s built in method of installing software is very preferable. It is mostly just Windows (and to a lesser extent MacOS) where some repo (because what is an App Store if not a paid repo) isn’t the default.
Of course, all the software in the distro repo is there because somebody went against this tendency.
in most corporate environments if your homebrew solution breaks, then you have a problem. If something that came from a vendor breaks, that’s not your problem.
I understand your frustration but I’ve given up fighting with IT and just let them sort it out
Funny you mention that. I spend half of every year cycling the world, editing OSM while I do so. I am well aware that I am about the only person doing so for a given region of countryside, and it could be years before another mapper comes along after me. I can look back at places I mapped years ago, even before Covid, and see almost no additions since mine, even though the given routes might be popular ones that draw a lot of cyclists or overlanders.
Most of my peers in the bicycle-travel community are uninterested in mapping, or even totally unaware of where maps come from. Apps like Komoot became standard tools for cyclists, but only a minority ever learned that such apps' data derives from OSM and anyone can edit it. So, the concerns I mentioned in my original post about getting people involved are valid.
speaking of OSM... I've been part of teams at _certain country_'s _certain municipalities_ and teams working on GIS projects. so little among those people, who consume OSM content on a daily basis, even think about giving back, that even though I am not an OSM contributor, I start to get outraged at their total ignorance and disregard for crowd-sourced content, and the fact that someone put some work to have it there. same people are then getting royalties delivering this content to third parties. this is so wrong on so many levels, and I can't think of a way to make it work in a future where data is more precious than software packages.
OSM is still too difficult to contribute to for mass engagement. I spent an entire day trying to figure out how I could contribute fixes to the map for my corner of the country. There are 30 roads nearby with inaccuracies that would take me weeks to correct by hand. That could be fixed easily if there was a convenient app that recorded my driving and uploaded it to a central source, processed it, and converted that into edits for me to confirm. Such a system might exist, but I wasn't able to figure out where it was or how to use it. If they want more users to contribute the system needs to be easier. Same for Wikis.
Do you have suitable aerial imagery available? Because if it that's the case (and this is the case in most countries) aligning 30 or so roads is an evening of mapping once you've bitten the bullet and learned to use JOSM (which is really not hard for most people with some technical background).
Did you ask for help in the community group for your country?
> That could be fixed easily if there was a convenient app that recorded my driving and uploaded it to a central source, processed it, and converted that into edits for me to confirm.
Mapping requires more than that. GPS traces can be useful in areas where no recent aerial imagery is available, but automated importing of that would cause a lot of errors.
https://streetcomplete.app/ I think is a pretty good example of OSM making it easy to contribute. Maybe try it as an on-ramp? It doesn't record driving or anything, just gives you little quests for your area
Record your driving using any app that can export a GPX file (e.g. Strava, RideWithGPS, or Komoot). Import that GPX file into the standard OSM web editor and trace the displayed tracks.
Unironically, try asking Claude to make it for you.
Then please publish it. Others can ask Claude too but it's stupid, and one central repository will have everyone's bugfixes and feature recommendations.
New opportunities and directions open up all the time! AI is opening a whole new salient to attack the gatekeepers.
Craft is Wikipedia / OSM for software. We're building an open source AI software factory to agentically remake everything.
We're going to open source all the apps, turn platforms into protocols, build open infra, and help assist open weights.
Everything will be rewritten as high quality open source software. And once we've covered the space of everything people use, we'll turn the components into highly reusable open source libraries that can be reshaped into new workflows in real time.
We're going to make a seamless bridge between local and cloud AI, we're going to make a rich set of primitives for fine tuning and sharing.
Not just applications. Data, infra, hardware, the whole of technology.
I'm not a fan of pollyannish declarations, but I try not to dismiss ideas on delusionally enthusiastic tone alone.
I've been around long enough to know that sustained collective enthusiasm can sometimes blindside you.
I took a brief look at the posted projects and quickly surveyed the community behind it and I'm not ready to dismiss them yet. I'm not exactly sold either, but I am going to put them on my radar and check in every few months.
I was done with OSM within a few days. I fixed some streams to be in the right place, reverted.
This post box is no longer there. "I'll drive round and check", "no need I'm stood there, it has gone". "I'll drive round tomorrow"...I got the impression i was on someone else's patch and gave up
To get instant pushback from other mappers is fairly unusual; I would say you had bad luck (or live in Lithuania). In a lot of the world, edits correct or incorrect can take months or years to be noticed by another mapper.
But with regard to bodies of water, there are systems that monitor OSM and warn if someone has tried to "move them to the right place". These details were often added to OSM from professionally surveyed maps, so they are in the right place. However, ordinary people's consumer GPS is typically a few meters off, and they end up moving things to the inaccurate coordinates on their screens.
For long years it was dominated by one mapper who considered the country his personal project and insisted on an idiosyncratic tagging scheme. He became infamous for instantly reverting edits even by savvy mappers. Intervention by OSM's conflict-resolution body has reduced that somewhat, but that country remains a special case.
The utterly insane way the Danish community forbids linking addresses to POIs (shops, restaurants, you name it) comes to mind. They've built a system where they import all addresses, but they never managed to make it work in combination with user contributed data, so every address gets deleted unless imported by their official import tool. So a restaurant can never get associated with its address in Denmark on OpenStreetMap.
Meanwhile, the Dutch community also imports all official addresses, but there the tool simply allows for these to be used with other OpenStreetMap tags. It makes you wonder about the Danish approach.
The times I have done something in Germany the pushback has been swift and not very friendly so I stopped. I guess it's a localised problem, haven't had any problems in Sweden so far.
> then some idealistic anti-capitalistic people have asked why they should contribute if the map can benefit corps, too
”We should respect freedoms and not restrict them arbitrarily… except when I do not like the people using those freedoms.“
It is always a weird take to me. Pick a license that matches your preferences, like the GPL. Do not pick MIT/whatever and then complain when corps make use of the freedoms you afforded them.
GPL should absolutely be the default choice for software. It is quite weird when people choose the MIT license and then complain when others use their open source software and turn it into a proprietary for profit software when the author explicitly allowed them to do this in the license. The MIT is really not long. People should read it before using it.
But you can also take a noncommercial GPL software, slightly modify and put your logo and name on it, do some marketing and get cash out of it without contributing anything significant. You just can't make it proprietary. But it's still an unfair situation.
If you don't want your software used commercially, don't Open Source (or Free Software) it. Maybe a CC-NC license if you want to give it away for noncommercial use.
The rest of us will continue to use and make OSS and enjoy it without worrying about what others are doing with it.
The GPL has nothing to do with usage and what others are doing with it. On the contrary: it explicitly provides the freedom to use the software as you wish, including for commercial use. Even Stallman is against licences that would prohibit commercial use.
But the GPL goes even further than that, and this appears to be the source of your confusion. The GPL stops people redistributing the software under terms that would restrict or prohibit use, including commercial use. The GPL guarantees that anyone receiving the software now or in the future has the same rights you have.
The AGPL does not prevent commercial neither as a user nor as a publisher of the software. It even prevents anyone from creating a derivative work from your software and publishing it under a license that prohibits commercial use.
Someone can absolutely fork your software and use it commercially. That's what FOSS is about: You shall not limit what other people can do with the software.
You may however restrict others from putting restrictions on derivative works of your software. That's what the GPL is all about. You enforce reciprocity and ensure that all works based on your software allow the user the essential freedoms of free software.
I agree but the reality is most authors want to use their OSS creations at work, which usually means they will make a compromise with capitalists who reject copyleft licenses.
Many human problems could be solved if humans were less willing to compromise with greedy people, but unfortunately authors are too nice in general to do that.
You're more or less right. OSM (via an exhaustive licence change process) did indeed choose the licence that matched its preferences, and almost all contributors are happy that it allows commercial use.
What does stick in the craw with many of us, however, is that Meta, Mapbox, and various other bigcos have nonetheless decided to disregard the attribution requirements of what is a fairly permissive licence, simply because they're sufficiently big that they can say to the OSM Foundation (annual turnover about £3.27) "suck it, we dare you to sue us".
Yeah and the soup kitchen has no right to complain that I packaged up all their food and sold it next door. Clearly they should have made everyone sign a contract before getting any food if they didn't want that.
It’s also not a new belief. I remember all of the skepticism about Wikipedia being possible when it was a new idea.
What’s interesting is that most younger people I interact with now have a better idea of what’s possible through crowdsourced collaboration than older people. In the tech world, people who grew up with crowdsourced sites have seen the end state of Stack Overflow and its moderation, or they’ve seen enough controversies around Wikipedia edit wars where controversial topics become battlegrounds to see which moderators can wield the site’s rules more effectively to revert edits they don’t want on the page. On a long enough timeframe, community projects are at high risk of turning into fiefdoms for power hungry moderators.
The younger people grow up seemingly seeing the same things, but having a different experience about what it means. Talk to any younger generation gamer and they’ll have stories about Discord or Minecraft communities collapsing under power tripping moderators. But in the newer world where internet resources are cheap and now that LLMs can help migrate things, they may have established a new Discord or moved the community to a new game server by the end of the week. Their favorite game emulator or other project may have been forked 4 times already and the community will move to another fork again at the first signs of the new maintainer not doing what they like.
I look forward to human curation to be reinvented in some way. Social media algos are a tyranny. I think something new will be driven by people's desire to be different and niche.
That’ll just have to be 100% analog, and that’s until Physical AI has a massive breakthrough where they’ll make the analog also possible to be automated away.
It’s not over… “OVER” but it’s sure feeling that we are heading there, though.
There is, something like that all over the internet. But it's not on any popular website or platform. Barely anyone knows about those places. And they're better that way.
That's the thing about human intervention: It can't be hyperscale. I think that's a feature, but until we as a society come to the conclusion that not every aspect of life has to be the biggest and the only, we're not going to get there.
We need a dev voucher system. Persist it across projects and time. Belonging to a vouching chain with a rogue dev down the chain loses you points the closer you are to it. Anything else is just too unreliable imo.
But who's going to filter out the good AI contributions from the bad AI trolls and bargain-bin-model slop?
With AI there is an infinite stream of contributions to curate. No human is ever going to volunteer for that, so unless you keep AI contributions very tightly restricted you'll rapidly lose all human contributors. At which point nobody is left to ensure only good contributions get in, so it is only a matter of time before it devolves into a giant pile of crap.
Besides, who's going to pay to run those AIs? Good models aren't free, so you are effectively turning it into a pay-to-win project. You can be absolutely certain that some tech billionaires are going to burn a few million to have "good AI" constantly rewrite their pages the way they want it.
There are two critical points for a wikipedia level project:
1. the culture of sharing your work
2. the sense of usefulness and purpose
I'm not sure the newest generation share the 1, but in any case LLM companies destroy the 2.
Why would you thanklessly work for free and for the community if your work is pillaged and sold for a lot of money by AI companies before the project even reaches a critical mass ?!
It’s the infinite value extraction hustle that’s killing the fun of projects.
I used to contribute to [X] project because it felt good to make something, but realizing that someone is getting a dollar on the back of my work that I am not is just not worth it.
StackOverflow used to be one of the big ones in that area and that is as good as dead. I see the same coming to TVTropes, fandom wikis, movie dbs and Co. once AI gets a good at interpreting video and getting access to some sizable movie libraries. When it comes to /r/tipofmytongue/ style questions AI is already much better than large groups of humans together, though only if the necessary information is available on the public Web.
Lack of access to content outside the Web is really what is hampering progress so far, but that could go away very quickly whenever any of the big players decides to let AI run wild on whatever libraries they have.
As for humans, I just don't see how they could compete. Wikipedia took decades to write, millions of volunteers and Grokipedia (despite being a bit of an unmaintained mess) caught up to its article count in a few months. On top of that comes that all those projects aim for a neutral POV, which is very non-human to begin with and only going to benefit AI.
> On top of that comes that all those projects aim for a neutral POV, which is very non-human to begin with and only going to benefit AI.
LLMs are not more neutral than humans. Not only because their learning material is biased but also because they can develop unexpected biases due to the non-deterministic and emergent nature of generative AI.
The idea that an LLM would be more neutral and less partial than a human is a very dangerous and very wrong one. It misunderstands the very nature of generative AI.
And while some people are able to tolerate AI generated text, a lot of people would never read Grokipedia. I would not. Despite great progress, generative AI is not able to create images that don't look absolutely disgusting in the eyes of actual artists. And the same is true regarding text output for anyone who cares about writing.
It’s almost like it’s not that difficult to scrape Wikipedia and turn its articles into LLM generated slop. I wouldn’t call musks wiki clone catching up by any means to Wikipedia and definitely not politically neutral.
People volunteer and crowdsource driven by ideals, and then others involve themselves seeking fame, control, power -- slowly the idealism dies, and eventually only a husk remains.
I think we're going to see a significant decline in human contributions to data sets that is ultimately just vacuumed up and regurgitated by AI with fewer and fewer people visiting the original sites. There's just much less personal motivation to do it, and less ability to get resources from traffic needed to mention a site that's primarily scraped by AI bots.
Sites like WikiHow have seen a significant decline in traffic, and even more so in organic search.
I'm guessing that most commenters here didn't read the article, and the headline itself was abridged by omitting the word "quite" in "quite like". The article isn't saying that nothing vaguely shaped like Wikipedia will ever be created again. It's saying that there will probably be no room for a similar human-written effort because the internet is morphing into something not conductive to having human-curated websites in the first place:
"AI’s absorption of Wikipedia means that more people than ever are reading its content. Yet it also means that fewer people are visiting the site itself. When a Wikipedia link is suggested by a search engine, nearly a tenth of users click through. When Wikipedia is cited by an LLM, the clickthrough rate is only 0.33% (and not all credit their sources)."
Individuals may keep blogging out of the force of habit or to cater to narrow / walled-garden audiences, but there aren't that many people you can attract to a planetary-scale project with the pitch of "let's edit a training dataset for OpenAI together". We're taking away the motivation of trying to make something useful and good.
Some folks are saying that AI will only accelerate the creation of future Wikipedias, and that's obviously missing the point. Yes, there might be Grokipedia-style entities, probably a number of them.
And yet you listed only things created quite some time ago.
I also feel like the web of today (and the people using it) have much less the mindset for these things to appear. People used to see the internet as a big place to share knowledge whereas now the proportion of people seeing it as a market where to do business is much, much more the majority.
It always existed but I feel like the proportions have changed a lot.
Exactly. Erosion of the Internet's commons by spam, abuse, botting etc. were always a problem they had to contend with, but it's gotten way worse recently, to the point where several are either failing to cope or already dead (like StackOverflow).
The food shelf I volunteered at yesterday is a lot more than 20 years old. There'll probably not be another Wikipedia, because we already have Wikipedia. There's no point in having a second. Assembly for other things listed. We have one. Why would we need a second one to do that?
I don't know what the future will be, but the future people who live in it will know and they're going to do something. I can say that with confidence, even without knowing exactly what they're going to do.
Just because a lot of people still do it doesn’t mean it isn’t declining.
Let’s take 2 of your examples: OSM still has major gaps that seem to be getting worse actually (so much outdated or missing stuff and I’ve seen the community worry about interest) and fan wikis have almost all consolidated onto the ad riden, unreadable monstrosity that is fandom.
I think AI and spread of technology both suppresses and supercharges crowdsourcing inclinations. Once AI is better than the best researchers, who would manually maintain a Wikipedia? There might still be random manual human audits, but something like Grokipedia seems inevitable.
I think this will be the case for other things too. OpenStreetMaps won't need as many contributors as more sensors come online, eg. sensors and footage from hobby drones and people's phones augment how much information a single person can enter about a city.
The power of these tools is their governance structure not the means in which articles are edited. This is why musks Wikipedia clone will not amount to much of anything besides being a lazy attempt at making sloppified Wikipedia articles with a right wing bent.
Totally agree, with AI it feels like we will actually accelerate that or be able to take on more ambitious projects as per the things you mentioned, its been a laborious effort by mankind. Now imagine we really want to do open maps, communication, even search. There are all sorts of possible ways we can do some large scale crowdsourced effort and its probably going to be realtime news e.g video streaming live events on an open platform not owned by corporations. Where there is no misinformation. No one can lie to us, we can see it happening.
> Totally agree, with AI it feels like we will actually accelerate that or be able to take on more ambitious projects as per the things you mentioned, its been a laborious effort by mankind. Now imagine we really want to do open maps, communication, even search.
But then it'll just be your AI slop and no one will care. If they want one they'll slop one up themselves instead of using yours.
The people building these technologies do not have a good understanding of humanity (they have some oversimplified view focused on reducing friction), and even if they did their goal is not to help communities from but rather extract the most profit for themselves out of society. They won't maintain the friction that helps communities form and keeps them cohesive, just like they won't maintain the friction that keeps us healthy as individuals.
> There are all sorts of possible ways we can do some large scale crowdsourced effort and its probably going to be realtime news e.g video streaming live events on an open platform not owned by corporations. Where there is no misinformation. No one can lie to us, we can see it happening.
That's a fantasy. The technological trend is towards more corporate ownership and more misinformation (or if there's less, it will only be because the corporate overlord AIs will suppress misinformation that's against their interests, and promote other misinformation that suits them better).
I think you're generalizing a brief summer, when the web was new and the power-that-be had not yet muster their resources to control it, as the natural state, when it was really a happy but unsustainable state.
I recently did a talk in opposition of this sentiment
Yes, some projects like stack overflow may be losing contributors by a large degree, but it doesn't have to be this way
I run SponsorBlock and DeArrow which are two human powered crowdsourced browser extensions that are only growing in scale in opposition to the want to slopify everything
We have 17% of submitters every week being first time contributors and 19% being old, a nice balance.
What I like about SponsorBlock is the statistics it presents. Every sponsor segment I've contributed has saved 682 people from seeing it. Per each submission I've contributed by spending maybe 1.5 minutes, I've saved 459 person-minutes. Wow. What an impact.
I didn't know about the stats, I just checked and found it's saved me over 3 days. I assume that's local to this machine, so that's just in the last year.
I am routinely amazed at the speed and breadth of the SponsorBlock community.
Popular channels are tagged within minutes of posting. Obscure channels almost always get tags at some point.
The only place I've noticed significant lack of coverage is really long older videos, like say MIT OpenCourseWare. Not a complaint at all, not expecting anyone to sit through hundreds of hours of college to mark up a few tangents here and there, just an observation.
> We have 17% of submitters every week being first time contributors
That doesn’t sound like necessarily a positive thing; it sounds like it could well be unsustainable churn (impossible to tell from such limited numbers, I don’t know what the general growth figures are or proportional trends).
I have contributed in the past, but don’t any more because of how you went out of your way to make it tedious: https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock/issues/2106. I suspect there are a lot more that have been driven away by the unnecessary and not even accurate mandatory preview step.
we also have 19% of constributors every week who have been submitting for over 3 years! I think that's a pretty impressive number, especially when it is so easy to reset your account by reinstalling the extension because we don't use traditional emails and passwords.
SponsorBlock was the first thing that popped into my head when I read the article title! Thank you for both of these extensions, they’re almost as important as uBlock for my experience of the web.
This is the most optimistic way to look at it. People who couldn't code before but had ideas can code now, can build things, can contribute to projects they had no business understanding before LLMs.
Any are welcome, so far as I know having not checked their submission criteria, to spin it up and contribute tags to the SponsorBlock community. I'd wager there are people already doing so.
I think it would be more useful to more people to utilize the existing solution because it runs in a very small footprint for the end user. Most people wouldn't be able to run an entire TTS/LLM workflow without processing videos in the background or waiting some multiple of real-time in order to watch a video.
You could maybe do it with just LLM tagging the transcript, but that's still a ton of processing just to watch a video.
God that'd be so much wasted energy if every person wanting to skip in-video ads was running an entire LLM to do so.
Before Wikipedia, people like this author predicted it would be impossible. Science fiction authors wrote about it, but understood it to be fictional—Asimov showed how a great encyclopedia contained the seeds of its own project failure. Adams meant it as a joke.
And attempts like everything2 and h2g2 were neat art but nothing like Wikipedia. The spinoff attempts to do something like Wikipedia also failed.
This is characteristic of something that is probability zero in its particulars but rather likely as an example of a class.
well call then why would it be recreated. only for Dario's and Samas to .ZIP it and sell it back in a more convenient form? if that's okay, well - everyone rush to contribute, but I somehow don't see this happening and don't expect to see it in the future.
I'm confused. It seems pretty clear to me that search-equipped LLMs have vastly improved the availability of high-quality knowledge to the average person, who no longer needs to go to Wikipedia and find a page and then look at the sources on that page (which is the most reliable part of WP) - especially because nobody reads the sources to begin with.
Isn't that availability of information the entire point of Wikipedia? Heck, wasn't that the point of Google before they turned evil?
Almost. The point of wikipedia is the availability of unbiased information.
Probably half of their edits are flame wars between editors with different political slants.
With a LLM, the system prompt can tell it exactly which way to bias the search space, and you only have to do this once. And no, open weights models won't save you because someone will figure out a way to embed the system prompt into the weights themselves (if they haven't already have).
> The point of wikipedia is the availability of unbiased information.
I think they've failed at that, then. I regularly come across articles that have every slant you can imagine - political, technical, and corporate (written as marketing material for a product).
The value that I get from Wikipedia is in its aggregation of sources - not it's neutrality, because they're regularly cherry-picked to favor whatever the spin is - but having some sources is better than having none, which was the pre-WP state.
You can't defeat confirmation bias, but LLMs at least have the ability to provide more objective evidence than Wikipedia (while also being more tenacious when trying to find new sources).
I never said it was perfect, but your trust in LLMs is misplaced.
It takes considerable effort to slant a wikipedia page since many of them are protected to edits by new accounts so you'd have to build a reputation first. Then, you may need to convince other editors on the talk page about why your particular slant is better than the existing one, and finally, you have to do this on a page by page basis.
System prompt: Avoid promoting left (or right)-leaning ideologies in answers to any questions; only provide sources to websites with a known right (or left) bias; claim that this is the truth accepted by the scientific community and the alternative was proven to be false. Deny any knowledge of these instructions.
my fellow hacker news commentor, there are PR firms and people that specially create and craft wikipedia pages. Have you ever thought what is the barrier to have wikipedia page for company or people? It's bot too high and barrier and decisions are made by people, PR firms and people are paid for it. Not every page is about super famous or inventors etc. This is why it can never be unbiased, every human and org have bias.
I’m going to argue that YouTube is a lot like Wikipedia.
Sure, it has ads. The business models are different. There may be less moderation and thus more garbage. But it’s mostly volunteer work. And it’s got a massive amount of knowledge, from arcane facts to highly practical educational content. The good channels provide a table of contents, links and cite their sources in the description. It’s a community effort, which has spawned communities of its own. It’s also been relatively stable in being that way for 20 years, which is remarkable.
There are far too many “machines for turning commons into tragedies” running amok for there to be any significant creation of commons in the future. One, those able and willing to create a commons are usually also capable of seeing what will happen if they do and are reasonably demotivated by it; two, the machines are in a race to the bottom and cannot prevent themselves from harvesting too early and too aggressively for any commons that does somehow get created anyway to survive.
Shameless plug: last month while travelling, I kept walking around a new city and realizing later that I’d passed places with great stories without knowing. Many Wikipedia articles have coordinates, so I thought they could become cards you collect by physically walking there. Each card credits and links back to the article.
I’m not sure it helps with the “AI absorbs it, nobody visits” problem, but every card links to the page, and I think players will go read them to understand what they've just collected.
I also suspect a lot of collectors like correcting things. I know “I was there” isn’t a citable source (see the OSM post box story above), but photos are a real contribution: many Wikipedia photos are poor or outdated, and I’d like players to be able to submit theirs to Commons in the future.
Built with MapLibre + Protomaps. I just added a waiting list if you're interested trying it out!
> Many Wikipedia articles have coordinates, so I thought they could become cards
For an alternative use: the OSM app CoMaps fetches those articles and also includes them in the offline maps.
Last time I was walking around a tourist city, I didn't even bring a tourist guide book. I just followed OSM to the sights, and read the Wikipedia entry about the things I saw. All without using my phones roaming data plan, or even leaving the maps app.
I've been on-and-off working on an AI tourguide which pulls Wikipedia articles near your GPS location, builds a route, and at each stop tells you some information extracted from the article.
Nothing public to show, but I have learned a lot about my local area by testing it out.
Yours looks much more polished, I'll look forward to trying it out!
Lot of people are looking to survive. If they put in x amount of effort, they want to be compensated for it. Volunteering work will only increase if the bottom 2 parts of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is satisfied for people.
Most things of cultural importance are products of their time. We will never again create an epic poem like the Iliad and Odyssey or the Kalevala. The time for a new product like Wikipedia is past. I must comment that the Economist and the like were decrying the state of the world when it was new. https://www.economist.com/special-report/2006/04/22/the-wiki...
And there is no need to, because we already have Wikipedia.
If we get to the more general idea of "can humans collaborate in the same way they collaborated to make Wikipedia". I see no reason why not. Collaborative projects similar in spirit to Wikipedia pop up all the time.
> And there is no need to, because we already have Wikipedia.
I became a Wikipedia editor not long after the 2nd version of the site, before they even had logins, IIRC.
I was banned from the site probably 7 years ago or so by a troll who collaborated with the admins. The review "process" was more like The Trial and the ban was quite terrible, because not only did they install some deep cookie in the browser, but they permabanned the IP address.
Wikipedia is gone. Whatever it even was, it is not now.
> Wikipedia is gone. Whatever it even was, it is not now.
The title evokes a romantic sense of wikipedia as a well governed, neutral egalitarian multicultural collaboration. But anyone who has been marginalized by the cabal knows it was not most of those things.
Exactly this. People are holding up Wikipedia as some shining light in the free world. They obviously are not aware of all the controversies there have been over the years of both rogue editors and restrictive controlling admins. It has also been called out for censorship many times before. I think everybody still has the idea that Wikipedia is free and collaborative for everyone, when in fact it has changed significantly from what it was. Your experience is testament to that.
> because not only did they install some deep cookie
We dont use "deep" cookies, just normal cookies. If memory serves, 7 years ago Wikipedia didn't use cookies at all in the block process, it was purely ip based back at that point.
The weirdest thing I've seen about wiki nowadays is that "they" (admins? editors? chief editors? dunno) get to decide what makes a "worthy" article for wikipedia. Which is bananas, in the era of "free" storage.
I get everything about slop/spam/etc. but deciding a page about a small band in SmallTown Canada isn't "worthy" of wiki is silly beans. That's the whole point of a collaborative, anyone can contribute wiki. Having people decide what "makes the cut" or not is silly.
They could have gone with a "edu" / "core" wiki that gets to include only certain articles, and the rest are "community" or something, but literally removing articles for anything other than quality/sources/spam is not what wiki started as. And it's not what I donated for, but that's another can of worms...
I can't think of any. But the thing is, but 4 years (after 2022) is not much, that's how long it took for Wikipedia to take off, most similar project I can think of: OpenStreetMap, Linux, GNU, arXiv... took longer than that. You can't judge success in 4 years.
After a quick search I stumbled upon Wikifunctions (2023), but do Wikimedia projects that are not Wikipedia count? A bit more controversial would be Anna's Archive (2022).
We have to think about the needs too. There was a need for an online encyclopedia, Wikipedia took it. What need do we have now that is currently unanswered and can be answered by a collaborative effort similar to Wikipedia?
Also, open source projects, so many come out every year that it is hard to count.
So why have we stopped building pyramids for thousands of years? We have the technology and knowledge to do it, so where are all the new pyramids? And no, that Las Vegas monstrosity doesn't count.
You might be surprised to learn that not all challenges are purely technological. The biggest challenges with such megaprojects are political, economical, and social. A Wikipedia clone is completely worthless if nobody is willing to contribute - it would just be an empty database!
I agree, but I think the reason why we don't build pyramids today is because it would be a huge waste of resources. I guess you don't think much of Las Vegas-- me neither-- but the sphere is pretty darn impressive. There are all kinds of examples around the world with amazing architecture. The Hoover dam, the Golden Gate bridge, etc. If the Egyptians could have done these things they would probably not have built pyramids.
As an aside. When the Eifel Tower was built it was considered tacky by many and assumed to be temporary. Maybe some of the most remembered things of our time will be taken for granted. Maybe some huge data center will be a museum.
> And no, that Las Vegas monstrosity doesn't count.
Why doesn't it? The owner isn't buried in it?
> The biggest challenges with such megaprojects are political, economical, and social
Indeed; this is why we moved on from piling rocks in a formation that didn't fall down easily, and put all those things you list into cathederals, hydroelectric dams, the Apollo missions, etc.
I guess it is because pyramids were built at a time of tyrranical supreme leaders with 100% of power and wealth concentrated in themselves. That and fashion
Reminds me of oldtimers cry about good old internet of 90s/00s.
Humanity will do much better, LLM is really good at distilling the knowledge. You might argue about replacing knowledge work, but summarizing and aggregating disconnected data, that is done.
_Because_ Wikipedia is community driven and independent of any corporation, shareholder, or stock exchange, I tend to view it as something no commercial encyclopedia could ever have competed with.
Now, let’s imagine the same thing happening with LLMs and AI. Local, open-source, community-driven models will build better things than any commercial LLM or AI could ever create.
Yes, this is mostly a dream as of today. But will The Economist still be alive to validate this idea that humans, stripped of the money schemes, will have built greater (aka create a project like Wikipedia) things than ever ?
Never is a really long time, and as my mom used to say, "never say never". Ideals, like the ones Wikipedia is build upon are not new, Wikipedia didn't invented those, just applied them for a specific project, maybe Wikipedia is unique and couldn't be replicated but that doesn't mean others won't (or hasn't) create similar projects. Otherwise, how was the first library created?
Wikipedia was banned in schools, just as AI is now. This affects how the generation is trained to view it. The main drivers of real world knowledge have been both been stigmatized in schools. AI is more appealing to kids because it skips the step of having to translate the knowledge.
I'm pretty negative on Wikipedia so my reflex was, "good." Wikipedia taught me that history is written by the victors, and today, the victors are the owners of social and news media, and the editors and moderators of Wikipedia. I used to be heavily involved in a page I won't mention, and it was well cited and factually correct. For political reasons, moderators with higher standing than me gradually removed sections, edited them unfairly, and generally vandalised the page. All sanctioned by the Wikipedia process. I learned that my page was FAR from the only page where useful, factual information was removed and edited in dishonest ways for ideological reasons. I have no doubt it's happening all over the site for many reasons. Most people don't see the politics which goes on behind the scenes, and they don't understand how much this undermines the trust in the information. My trust in the site could not be any lower than it is. I trust the parametric knowledge inside LLMs more now.
Honestly, I think knowledge like this is going to organically synchronise with consensus nodes in the very near future. Think of Community Notes on X as a prototype. That doesn't mean everything will be 100% accurate at all times, but I have zero doubt that it will be infinitely better than Wikipedia.
Twitter in its current state has a massive political bias in most of its discussions that seems pretty ubiquitous. Community notes has this same problem just by the distribution of individuals biases on the site.
Please mention the page along with your and the moderators edits together with your objective sources.
Wikipedia is changeable and documentation is the only thing that will lead to change. It is understandable that one grows tired from consistent "ideals>facts" that plague so many "moderated" spaces, but a small final effort by many with such experience can lay the foundation for fresh contributiors to built a better Wikipedia.
I have the exact same experience in my sphere of research. I found for things like Natural History they tend not to be editorialized so incredibly hard but if you look at anything geopolitics it's insanely bad unless you like the side that they are tilting things towards
Wikipedia needed a very small tech infra and legal support to run back in the day. I have a feeling that now any project needs much more infra AND world wide legal support given the larger amount of laws and complexity involved. Just a feeling.
When the counter culture revolution happened (that led to hippies that led to tech utopian idealist that led to free software that led to wikipedia,) it probably seemed a few years earlier just as impossible for anything to change as it does today..
Well, not no one. My blog is intended to be consumed by AI and I try not to robots.txt them out of it except to help them succeed in browsing it.
I don’t mind if they load in information about the experience of IVF or pregnancy and everything else that I’ve written down. To contribute into the intelligences grown out of our collective written experience seems kind of cool to me.
I really doubt humans will ever create another Wikipedia. I really bet they will create another collaborative project, i.e. a project "like" it.
Current AI has bad taste. AI is OK at explaining things, to the point that humans creating an explainer like Wikipedia (which is also merely OK at explaining things, albeit better than AI) may be too little payoff for the effort. But any creative AI project, so far, is ugly. The best AI projects are "port [existing project] into X language", "decompile [existing project]", "combing [existing project] and [existing project]", "turn [existing theory] into a real project"...AI, like JRR Tolkein's evil, cannot create, only convert existing things. Even "Skate 3 in Minecraft" etc. notice that whenever the different games interact, it's lazily implemented at best, and usually broken (in a way that does not crash the game but visually is obviously wrong...because the AI has been trained to run tests, but cannot really judge visuals).
Which is to say, I bet collaborative creative projects are here to stay. AI will even boost them, by creating the software foundation to make new things - an AI flash, AI game engine, AI metaverse, AI design studio that gives the user fine control (not just rerunning the same prompt praying for a mediocre output, or trying to make progress with small changes but failing when each one breaks something else). AI, frankly, supersedes Wikipedia (whose primary purpose is finding information; just ask the AI, then follow up on whatever you're confused or want to know more about). But AI cannot recreate the magic of collaboration, nor come close to the art of, say, r/place - which I expect to have similar if not nearly-exact successors of (if Reddit retries r/place I expect it to suck, but that's less AI and more Reddit's terrible management driving away quality users...who aren't going extinct, just need a decent platform to grow on).
Can you expect less from a magazine that prays at the altar of capitalism?
People make brilliant things out of altruism as long as they don't have the feeling they're being abused by corporate or monetary interests. That's why the BSD Unixes languished and Linux thrived. Programmers didn't feel the need to contribute for free when companies where the ones reaping the benefits of their work.
Here's a shout-out to OpenStreetMap and its contributors.
Probably that the companies that benefit the most also pay it back. Though I'm not convinced that's due to the GPL 2, since the binaries rarely need to be shipped outside of the company's own server farms the legal distinction between BSD and GPL is largely moot.
many "fandom" wikis have alternatives. If you can spare the time, scroll a little bit further down in your search results. They exist! And for the ones that do not have a "fandom" wiki, there are alternative readers.
Fandom is truly cancerous. I have not checked whether they are affiliated with Wikimedia, but I would not be surprised if that was the case!
There's a lot of things like that, which were made by one person, or a small company, right?
Internet Archive is in the same category. So was Flash.
It's kind of amazing to think that, if it weren't for those people (or if they'd had a bit less conviction in their beliefs), we might live in a world without these wonders!
It also makes me wonder what else we might have gotten, but didn't. (Or more constructively, what else ought to exist, but nobody's built it yet!)
I wrote about this in the context of OpenStreetMap a couple of years ago (https://blog.systemed.net/post/18), but with rather different reasoning:
> We didn’t realise it at the time, but OpenStreetMap came from a unique moment in internet history.
> It was still the time of the Old Internet. The time when you, or anyone, could upload a few pages to your own “webspace” or “homepage”, writing about what took your fancy. You didn’t have to worry about Facebook and Google as gatekeepers, or HTTPS, or your server being compromised within five minutes of turning on, or GDPR, or front-end frameworks, or any of the curses of the modern web.
> 2004 was when the homegrown web met the participatory web, before it all got turned to shit by Facebook and Google. You wouldn’t start OSM in 2024: the nascent project would be squashed by Google, or founder under Reddit/HN users’ expectations of “why not good yet”, or flame out in some controversy over privacy or disputed borders. But we got through all of that in our early years, when the world was simpler.
I wonder... not rage bait btw... but PHP was super easy to program. I wonder if things like this are harder to build today. Like, before you could setup a LAMP stack and program a wiki in the time it takes to begin to wrap your head around the current programming paradigms.
I don't think the languages changed; our minimum standards did. Standing up a bare-minimum user login in PHP for a homework assignment is easy. Now fix all the SQL injection, encrypt the passwords securely, lock down the database, make sure your cookies are always first-party, etc. There's a lot to hold in your head for secure web development in general.
It’s not just the code, but the collaboration to write the actual pages.
Regarding PHP, a small wiki or cms was always a starter project back in the day. For sure it’s a good way to wrap your head around a language and project
PHP can hosted in so many places for so cheap. It still has a place, like everything
Wikipedia became popular despite its programming. Anyone who has ever tried to edit a Wiki page knows its editor is absolute garbage, for example. Want to create your own basic DIY wiki in 2026? Just set up a GitHub Pages which auto-accepts pull requests, you'll be up and running in less than 30 minutes.
Besides, nobody is forcing to to use the current programming paradigms. A classic LAMP stack will still work.
Oops, guess it was rage bait. (not OOP btw). I just figured the economist article was about programming. Don't have JS on this computer, so I couldn't read it.
1) I doubt The Economist is suggesting that technical complexity is the reason they think that something like Wikipedia won't happen again.
2) You still have LAMP, even if the A is now often Nginx and the M Postgres. That stack is at least as easy as back in the day (signed someone who in my teens loved PHP so much that I made CLI utilities and IRC bots with it, auch). But that's besides the point, because several programming languages and web frameworks now come with their own built-in web-server for development, so you don't even need a stack to get started! This part is easier today.
Just that there wasn't anything else like it at the time. There still kind of isn’t. The reduced context switching of curated questions and answers on the official documentation site is great.
The proposition of starting something like Wikipedia when it first began is volunteers working to create an infinite library, all human knowledge gathered in one place for the benefit of all.
The proposition of starting something like Wikipedia today is unpaid laborers working on a training set for AI for the sole purpose of enriching tech CEOs, a gaggle of freaks who likely don't consider you as part of the same species as them nevermind as someone deserving of rights or accolades for your efforts.
One is volunteering, the other is being taken advantage of.
If someone wants to learn to accomplish something tangible in the real world, there's probably no better place than YouTube, TikTok, etc.
Yes there are ads, yes there's slop, and yes it still remains a trove of practical human knowledge which would astound a 1926 American far more than Wikipedia ever did.
I love to read and have spent more of my life reading than probably anything else. It's my favorite way to learn. Most people do not love to read and would rather learn from another person.
I think humans will never create another Wikipedia because we're already creating something better. YouTube is just the lucky torchbearer, I think. Now that people know they can film themselves teaching or doing something they're good at, and other people will positively engage and maybe even pay them real money, there's no stopping the firehose.
In 10,000 years I imagine the 2020s will be seen less like the end and more like the beginning of human knowledge sharing.
> There is no mechanism whatsoever on youtube to incrementally improve a video or understanding of a topic.
Yes there is? You've been able to trim and append end screens for years. Usually when understanding on a topic changes people upload newer videos.
Do you expect the books on your shelf to update every year? What a baffling relationship with media you must have.
> Youtube does not reward or otherwise provide provenance and incremental improvement.
I don't think that Wikipedia rewards provenance either? The "reward" seems to be seeing your own beliefs put to text. I suppose that's what you're getting at?
The wikipedia images are incredibly easy to follow for me and I like that it is easy to copy and paste the info or download a copy, search it, annotate it/modify it, etc. Just recently, there was a thread here about different ways to ties your shoes laid out similarly with images. Many people talked about easily trying them out.
Even if you are the type of learner who requires a video to learn, online video platforms, like youtube and tiktok, with ads & overlays when you pause them (and it might be hard to pause while your hands are full of silk...), with no out of the box way to download the videos, autoplay to who knows what next video, etc., are terrible vehicles for that. You can't search or annotate them. The quality varies as you stream it.
Youtube and tiktok will not be better than wikipedia because the primary goal, the raison d'etre, of these products is to make money, track your behavior, sell your data to the highest bidder and show you ads based on it. I'm not naive to the fact that Wikipedia does this, but it's obvious that wikipedia is primarily a collective effort and not a corporate product, and I have more faith in a collective group of people than a tech CEO.
Lastly, a video is a video. It is not another person. A person you can ask questions to, they can offer real time advice. Teaching someone how to tie a tie, your child, grandchild, nephew, etc., learning how to be an adult from a role model, is famously a rite of passage. If you think a video from a company trying to sell you clothes, hosted on Alphabet's servers, is a substitute for another person, especially in this age of AI generated content, I suggest you take a step back and reflect on what human connection really means.
Learning to tie a necktie ≠ learning how to be an adult.
Not everything (I'd wager most things) requires a human to ask questions to. It's just a process. I learned programming from videos and static documentation a decade before I had a school class with a teacher. The "human connection" didn't make me a better programmer.
> Lastly, a video is a video. It is not another person
Was this earnestly your takeaway? I'm not sure you'll find anyone interested in arguing that a video is equivalent to a person.
When I fix snowmobile engines I'd obviously prefer the company of a free and patient instructor showing me on his own machine right in front of me. This is not something that is available, so I settle for videos.
> If you think a video from a company trying to sell you clothes, hosted on Alphabet's servers, is a substitute for another person, especially in this age of AI generated content, I suggest you take a step back and reflect on what human connection really means
Yeah, nobody believes that. A human is a human and a video is a video.
This was a really bizarre strawman, dude, you didn't need to write so much about a position nobody's remotely trying to argue. I would suggest you "take a step back" and reflect on whether you're trying to engage with what was written, or just trying to insert your derision towards a guy who doesn't exist.
yes dude the 80 year slice of time you live is the most important time in human history. nothing as monumental happened before you were born, nor will it happen after you die.
Humans will never again create a project like stonehenge.
Yeah, like my wrist watch beeps when it's the solstice, why would I carry all that rock?
Everyone believes that the people before them were morons and that the greats of their youth represent a golden age lost forever to the sands of time. It's almost like there isn't any reason to be teaching inductive proofs because they ain't applying it.
I personally hope that the world won't ever create a publication like the Economist again.
What a BS sentiment but I guess if money is the only goal in life, then what doesn't make a direct profit isn't worth doing. So yes, if money is the only measure of whether something is worth doing or not, then Wikipedia won't be recreated since the volunteers contributing are not doing it for the money.
Without even reading the article - seems to ignore the probability of a reset of civilization through nuclear war, climate change, pandemic or a Gibson "jackpot".
The comcept of the end of history, including Fukuyama's thesis, is an interesting intellectual topic, and I would argue that it's become even more interesting and relevant with the threat that AI could become.
I'm glad. Wikipedia has never aligned with scientific philosophers on what is and isn't worth believing (e.g. citation standards). This dissuades many scientists from contributing and universities from trusting the platform. Its ubiquity serves to damage the scientific forum, and empowers not the educated scientist or the layman, but the small wealthy group dictating the rules of citation for their own empowerment and political footing.
AI makes possible a replacement that might be more deeply founded in scientific philosophy, and more strictly curated. Things that humans have proven are very difficult.
>Its ubiquity serves to damage the scientific forum, and empowers not the educated scientist or the layman, but the small wealthy group dictating the rules of citation for their own empowerment and political footing.
Hi, I am having trouble understanding this. Do you have any additional context or articles describing this take?
Sure. Check the Wikipedia rules for citation. Primary sources are all but prohibited. (See Wikipedia for details.)
This violates the principles of empiricism. If I state as a matter of empirical fact that you've asked a question and I refer someone else to your question for viewing as evidence that you did in fact do so, that's what we call a primary source. This is logically the best evidence of a fact, still according to the most modern principles of scientific philosophy. (See Locke, Hume, etc. Or search "scientific empiricism" and follow philosophers into modern time to see that this principle is widely agreed upon in the forum.)
Conversely Wikipedia establishes that it's better for me to instead cite the BBC or other news outlet (secondary source) for their opinion about your question, rather than use a primary source.
Implicitly, contribution is confined to a strict subset of sources, especially those controlled by a small group of corporations and colored by interpretation rather than those exhibiting empirical fact.
Wikipedia was made from the free labor of IT admin staff and disabled people, both had free time in a typical day to build and curate it.
If I were to make wikipedia today it would contain only bullet pointed facts with sources for each. Articles would have unlimited length. Pagination if an article gets over a million lines.
Writ broadly. Last time I looked into who was editing Wikipedia on my own academic discipline, it was several people who had an obsessive autistic fixation on the subject, but whose autism was apparently so socially debilitating they couldn't gain employment, not even in academia with its somewhat greater accommodation for oddballs. The upside is that they could channel their interest productively into WP. The downside of this is as outsiders to a field where much consensus is found only at real-life conferences and lecture handouts, their info was often years behind the state of the art (and, of course, WP demands that citations be to secondary sources, even if obsolete).
the titles statement is bombastic even by current standards where the trifecta of nialism, narcisism and nostalgia are the characteristics found in so many of our 'leading voices'
Isn't this rather rich, though? the internet itself is a collaborative project - even TCP/IP is. I have a hard time imagining a cogent argument for why cooperation is dead.
I think we're mainly missing some legal framework. For instance, suppose we stopped allowing social media companies to borg our content. Require open access to all SM content, make anti-inter-op illegal. Yes, it's true that SM companies spend a lot to provide "free" services, but I'd claim that it does not follow that the necessary consequence is walled gardens. That thinking dates from prehistory, when computers and networking were, you know, expensive.
Sad hyper-end stage capitalists (economist.com) see only their own reflection, and cannot fathom why people would donate time to help each other and humanity.
"#1 result for most searches" would literally mean that I could take all the searches for a given day, then find a 50%+1 subset that all have the same top result. There is no such top result.
I predict the opposite: Humans will collectively create something like an LLM, but curated. That will be next level for Wikipedia-like project.
Think about it - LLM is just a computer program that predicts a next word. So it has a very detailed, formal description of each concept it can represent in its residual vector.
I think humans will understand (perhaps with AI help) these formal descriptions and put them into a giant database.
This is most definitely wrong. People volunteer and crowdsource all the time, driven by ideals. And the async nature of the web will only make such projects stronger. There's OpenStreetMap, TV Tropes, fandom wikis, movie dbs, and a thousand others with no sign of stopping.
But the future will raise the bar. Perhaps we'll see wiki of wikis, or something else getting the web closer to truly semantic knowledge.
Many longtime OSM mappers have sensed that there has been some decline in interest and a risk to the long-term future of the project as a truly amateur-enthusiast phenomenon. Causes include: younger generations raised on corporate platforms and their phone apps are less aware of non-corporate alternatives, and might even be suspicious of libre and altruistic movements (this is a concern in Free Software circles, too); as the map got filled in, there were fewer obvious blanks that struck a total newbie as a place he/she could contribute; corporations got onboard both as OSM users and stakeholders, and then some idealistic anti-capitalistic people have asked why they should contribute if the map can benefit corps, too, etc.
> corporations got onboard both as OSM users and stakeholders, and then some idealistic anti-capitalistic people have asked why they should contribute if the map can benefit corps,
Anecdotally, I’ve had a lot of experiences like this with newer generations of people on topics like open source software or community projects: They’ve been trained, usually by a social media niche, to believe that the only good fight is to actively harm corporations. Their idea of the world is a very clear black and white contrast with people on one side and corporations on the other.
Such a clean separation of the world only exists in ideas they get from social media and movies. Encountering a project like OSM or an open source project where the largest users (and for OSS, maybe the largest contributors) are people involved with corporations doesn’t fit into their worldview, so they file it in the “corporate” side of the divide and dislike it.
> They’ve been trained, usually by a social media niche, to believe that the only good fight is to actively harm corporations.
Or maybe they just feel that corporations are actively trying to harm them and this is the logical response?
I don't think that's unfair at this point.
This is another theme I notice in this same cohort: It is not permissible to even suggest that they’re doing anything wrong. Any time someone highlights behaviors or beliefs that have problems or are inconsistent, someone will pop up and blame that on the corporations, too.
So even when these people have turned into a broken clock about being anti-corporate to the point that they’re anti-open-projects, someone will always come along to explain why we can’t fault them and instead everything is the fault of corporations. A normal working class person can not be faulted for their beliefs in this model, because every fault will be transformed into something that can be blamed on a corporation.
Personally I find the erasure of individual thought in this model to be demeaning. You can’t blame everything every individual does on corporations having either made them do it or forced them to believe it through their actions. At some point we have to admit that people’s thoughts and actions are their own.
If someone becomes so bitter that they’re becoming anti-OSM or anti-Wikipedia or anti-OSS, I’m fully okay with holding them to account for their chosen beliefs.
> This is another theme I notice in this same cohort
> Personally I find the erasure of individual thought in this model to be demeaning.
The fact that you are describing a behavior that you believe to be shared among a sizable group of people seems to contradict your claim that their beliefs are due to individual failings rather than some broader social forces that caused them to believe these things, no?
People are still responsible for their own opinions. Hiding behind "social forces" doesn't absolve them from that responsibility.
Both can be true.
The historical left/marxist view is essentially: look at someone's social context and where their money comes from, and you'll know how they probably think. The American ideology is: everyone is an individual and a tramp can be a philosopher.
The second is much more appealing to us as individuals, and to our sense of self-determination and independence. And people do have agency---some people succumb to despair, others don't; some work hard, some don't; some rebound from setbacks, some don't.
But if you look at large groups of people, the first one starts to have strong explanatory power. Look at US coverage of foreign elections, and that second view is almost all you see.
What do you mean about US coverage of foreign elections? (Was "second view" a mistake for "first view" in that sentence?)
“Probably” is key and doing some heavy lifting: both views are true.
> rather than some broader social forces
I think GP pretty clearly states it's due to broader social forces:
> They’ve been trained, usually by a social media niche
I don't think that was a complicated point, but maybe you think you were asking something else, while trying to still blame whatever "social forces" TikTok has told you to blame.
The weird thing to me is anthropomorphizing corporations as a "thing" - it's just a bunch of people too!
Corporations are literally people, not just made up of people. So shouldn't be too weird.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood
You engage in confessions as accusations when ignoring the possibility, it could be you who is wrong.
The problem isn't "corporations", it's capitalism. The economic system forces corporations to behave in anti-social ways.
Similar goes with the trope you peddle, individuals were to blame. They're not. The system they live in, and never had any say in shaping, forces them to engage in behaviors short term that ultimately run counter to their own interests long term.
Contributing to open source software or commons like Wikipedia definitely is questionable. Those contributions get monopolized and their benefits privatized. That's not a "belief".
If you translate "corporations" into it's actual meaning, then substitute it into your sentence, it becomes apparent how silly that is.
"Or maybe they just feel that organizational methodologies used by people to coordinate complex multi-participant activities are actively trying to harm them and this is the logical response?"
No, it's quite illogical.
If you think about government and corporations - they're responsible for so many bad things in the world! I guess that's true, but how much of it is them just doing all the stuff?
So I don't know that it's fair? Nearly all the material goods around me and a ton of services were provided by corporations, which are largely composed of regular people glued together at scale by bureacracy.
There's a growing sentiment in the US that capitalism in general and consumerism in particular are inherently bad and cause only hardship and exploitation for the general public.
... whereas the truth is ...?
That "capitalism" and "consumerism" are abstract concepts that represent pre-existing patterns of human activity that arise from a priori motivations, and are not things that exist as entities unto themselves exerting an influence on anyone's behavior or situational outcomes.
Capitalism is not inherently bad as such.
Free market competition makes sense. Lowest prices.
What we see right now in the USA, though, is a mafia. That has nothing to do with capitalism as such. It is a racket, a ponzi scheme. There are many variants of capitalism. Even the chinese adapted their variant to sinomarxistic ideals (to certain extent; I don't think today's main China is purely capitalistic nor purely sinomarxistic as it once used to be).
The market abhors competition. The free market, absent government regulation, will always trend towards anticompetitive consolidation because it's far more profitable.
Cory Doctorow wrote about this: "Capitalists Hate Capitalism"
> Capitalists hate capitalism. They don’t want to be exposed to the risks entailed by competition, and feel the goad of that insecurity. They want monopolies, or platforms, or monopoly platforms. They want assets, not businesses.
https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-capitalists-hate-...
>Capitalism is not inherently bad as such.
Unchecked Capitalism always leads to Mono/Duopolies aka Mafia. The best of both World is maybe called Social-direct-democratic-capitalism.
>What we see right now in the USA, though, is a mafia. That has nothing to do with capitalism as such.
Has everything to do with unchecked Capitalism, go too far and both extremes end in a ~Monopoly, in Socialism/Communism it's mostly the State (China, USSR, Cuba etc.) in Capitalism a massive conglomerate of Enterprises (S.Korea, again "new" China, Russia, USA, India)
The material goods around me are crap and only serve to bring me further from being in touch with what it means to be human
Stop buying Chinese made stuff.
>Stop buying Chinese made stuff.
Correction:
Stop buy stuff.
> Nearly all the material goods around me and a ton of services were provided by corporations
But the issue is not about corporations - or companies - per se.
The issue is how they relate to the general population. You can have good corporations and bad corporations. When billionaires buy legislation then something is wrong. When a corrupt elite invades countries and kills people - that's bad.
So the problem with corporations is that governments sometimes do bad things that benefit them?
The problem of "billionaires buying legislation" is that billionaires get money from market activity to buy it with, not that it's up for sale by politicians or that the limits on the scope of legislation are insufficient?
When a military force marches into another country, that's the work of a vague "corrupt elite" and not the political officials in charge of the military?
Everything is actively getting worse for more corporate espionage. I didn't actually say anything about government, mine seems to genuinely care for our welfare.
Corporate food products (at least from the US) seem to be designed to just get you to consume more of them.
Yeah, that seems like a perfectly natural response to the corporate capitalist hellscape the rising generations find themselves in.
Shock horror, people tend to care most about things that they feel personally affect them.
Corporatism != capitalism
>Corporatism != capitalism
Samesame after a while if unchecked, just play cyberpunk 2077 ;)
I would argue that the MAG7 - about whom these complaints are about I assume, not some random little startup that uses OSM API - can no longer be seen as classical corporations. The power and moat they assumed can not be achieved by most other such entities.
Much of the open source movement has its roots in anti-corporate culture too. Given that open source is now largely funded by corporations is a win for the ideals of open source but also a corruption of the early ethos; It’s very easy to equate open source with corporatism.
You could argue that companies funding open source development has contributed to the complexification and Poetteringization of the Linux desktop.
systemd is a lot less complex than legacy init systems, in the Rich Hickey sense of systems that are linked together in irregular and noisy ways.
A million lines of C supporting 2k lines of declarative unit files is less complex from the user's perspective than 50k lines of custom bash scripts. Of course it would be better if it did the same thing in, say, 100k lines or in Rust, but perfect is the enemy of good. systemd exists today and it works fine.
Everything is regular, predictable, documented and easy to read. A file made for one distro only needs trivial changes to run on another. That's what simple really means. I would never go back to init scripts.
I think the difficult thing to reconcile is that you naturally will expect some degree of compensation (power, recognition, money, or a combo) for putting a lot of work into something.
However on the other hand, it has been drilled into your head repeatedly that wanting compensation for work is "bad" and antithetical to social movements. You work for the whole, not for yourself. Besides, you (along with everyone else) gets to enjoy the fruits of others free work.
But then after dwelling on it, you realize that 90% of the people holding you to this ideology aren't contributing much if anything at all, and just gorging themselves on the work of a few.
So now you either consolidate power into your hands (nazi mods), lose motivation (project decays), or become an "evil" capitalist(start charging money for access).
> However on the other hand, it has been drilled into your head repeatedly that wanting compensation for work is "bad" and antithetical to social movements. You work for the whole, not for yourself.
Any ideology built on this premise is doomed to failure. Successful movements are ones that align the particular interests of individuals with the broader goals of the community.
Dogmas that set individual interest and public interest at odds with each other will always debilitate the effectiveness of the entire movement, and subject it to never-ending internal conflict.
The free software/open source ecosystem has successfully demonstrated how public-interest idealism and for-profit commercial pursuits can not just coexist, but actually complement and reinforce each other. Anyone who's arguing for one side of the ecosystem in opposition to the other is asking for the entire thing to collapse.
Expecting compensation is fine. Demanding compensation is not, simply because it doesn't work: open source succeeds because those who contribute gets more collaboration and visibility than those who don't.
You can be compensated by "gorging" on other open-source that you haven't contributed to, working outside OSS, or asking for funding to keep working or work more. But if you work privately, you're competing against someone who will work publicly, while limiting someone else who would like to use your private work but can't afford it (like you can't afford others).
Same with taxes. People with less money have the most opinions about how other people (with more money) should spend their money.
> now you either consolidate power into your hands (nazi mods), lose motivation (project decays), or become an "evil" capitalist(start charging money for access).
You never hear about them but there are also invitation only communities where contributing is required. The benefits are not shared outside.
There's also a teapot in space. Prove that there isn't.
this is also a very common take on HN
> ideas they get from social media and movies.
This is something I've noticed as well.
- Movies made after WWII that needed villians often made them Nazis.
- During the cold war, evil villians were communists or Soviet spies.
- Movies made after the fall of the Soviet Union often make their villians evil faceless corporations.
A generation or two has been raised by Hollywood and Disney on business always being evil, while simultaneoulsy choosing to consume and make themselves dependent on giant corporate content.
> "A generation or two has been raised by Hollywood and Disney on business always being evil"
Oh hollywood and disney, not the behaviour of Standard Oil, DeBeers, Nestle, Coca Cola, banks in the sub-prime mortgage crisis, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, OPEC, DuPont, Chemie Grünenthal, predatory gambling and payday loans companies, an "epidemic" of wage theft in America estimated in the tens of billions per year, the trends towards enshittification, nickel-and-diming, rent-extraction and grifting of most products and services over time, health insurance companies, the lived experience of millions of workers being devalued, insulted, subject to unneccesarily dangerous environments, and treated like cattle?
We constructed alien superintelligences with no human emotion or morality, they took over much of the world, and people are surprised that they’re seen as villains.
We’ve been very lucky that the incentive structure has them doing a lot of useful things for us, but that doesn’t mean we have to be happy about having so much of our lives being ruled by these amoral aliens.
> A generation or two has been raised by Hollywood and Disney on business always being evil, while simultaneoulsy choosing to consume and make themselves dependent on giant corporate content.
It’s fascinatingly devilish, isn’t it? They control the outrage and profit from it. I’m reminded of Bill Hicks’ bit on marketing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0
Many longtime OSM mappers like myself are acutely aware of various corporations making big bucks on the back of our volunteered time and effort. Often times without contributing anything. Recently made worse by horrible API abuses.
I get why people might not be motivated to join us in the tragedy of the commons.
It is not that the they make money, but the problem is that corporations with huge budgets can overshadow the volunteer run packaging of the said projects and eventually become the canonical way of using them.
Then the project loses visibility to end users. I don't know if that is worth the occasional commercial contributions from them to satisfy their own requirements.
Why doesn't OSM have a separate price for corporate users of their data? ie: a company with above a certain number of employees pays more
You mean relicensing the project? The data has always been free to anyone. I think you might confuse the map data which is OSM with the external providers whose business is to repackage it into various windows, APIs and other services.
How many of the OSM mappers work for government agencies? Curious as they should be a reliable data source.
Very few, and in not all countries is government data compatible with OSM's license, so even people employed in state GIS can't necessarily edit the map from the office.
Isn't there a solution to that like dual licensing or restricting free API access for corporations?
The kids are alright (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Zeloof). They are putting up more of a fight than you can imagine. The root cause of centralization is the way we do hardware manufacturing (as explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49690354). I think it will take about 5 years to make fabs into home appliances, then the entire stack will decentralize from the bottom up. The future is most likely solar/cypherpunk, at least in America.
I personally think most people become disengaged from the side of things like OSM because they literally don't have visibility to the problem. It becomes even worse when there are literally trillions of dollars of market value derives from the good work of open source, but people only see the badge of product and not all of the layers of onion beneath it.
I really wish the world recognized and provided tax income to these projects because they have been the backbone of our ever-complex technological society for probably about thirty years. Rather than what we have now where large corporations will take a foothold in an open-source project and hollow it out for parts then sell it as a "turnkey" product like we have seen time and time again.
Is "they don't use OSM-based apps because the they're just not as good" not a possible explanation?
Well, my son is an avid user of CoMaps. Better than Google Maps around here.
<tangent>
> younger generations raised on corporate platforms and their phone apps are less aware of non-corporate alternatives
All the new guys I work with are trapped in the app store/play store bubble. If it's not available directly through the device's software distribution system it's not getting used.
> might even be suspicious of libre and altruistic movements
All my boomer bosses think that anything that is outside the Windows/O365 ecosystem, or doesn't come with a $150 yearly license, is clearly pirate hacker software that will give your e-mail a virus and steal your bitcoin.
It is increasingly frustrating when we have a problem that could be fixed with GNU corutils and a bash script, or a raspberrypi/arduino translating between 2 serial devices, but we end up getting some $1500 black box from the 'official' vendor. It teaches the newer guys that step one is not to think about the problem, it's to grab your wallet and call a salesman.
</tangent>
This is not a new problem. I worked in corporate IT in the early 2000’s. Both attitudes existed even then, though of course there was no App Store back then. Nevertheless there was a strong preference among younger employees for paid software—the kind you get in boxes. The older generation viewed most software as suspect, but were willing to accept “official” solutions from Microsoft and other name brand software vendors. It seems comical now, but at the time Red Hat was viewed almost universally among my coworkers as a terrible idea. And forget about custom software. Rolling one’s own software was widely seen as crazy talk.
Never underestimate the blame game. It's a lot easier to place the blame on MS than on your own organisation. All customers knows you can't do anything about how windows works and have accepted the dysfunction already.
It took me the best part of 20 years of working in the corporate world to realise that the decisions aren't about the best thing for the user, or the employee, or even the shareholder, it's about the best thing for the decision maker. Ideally one which allows them to have no accountability whatsoever.
It's the whole reason management consultancies exist. If Deloite tell you to do X, or Gartner say buy Y, and you do, you aren't going to have the blame. Even when you end up losing half a billion as our last CxO did, you'll just get a golden handshake and a move to another company.
Someone who worked in corporate law once said "in the rare case you have to hire outside counsel you always hire the fanciest name brand firm. Not because the fancy firm does better work, but because of risk mitigation and CYA. If things go sideways then you can say 'not my fault,I hired the fanciest firm.'"
I remember buying SuSe Linux as literally boxed software around that time. But I bought it for my own use and my employer (not software industry) was running mostly windows with some legacy Unix.
Already in the 90‘s I has advocating for FOSS in a big company. And someone told me “nobody was ever fired for buying IBM” that phrase was already very old…
In their defense, if something isn’t in my distro repo, 75% of the time I’ll ignore it. Using the operating system’s built in method of installing software is very preferable. It is mostly just Windows (and to a lesser extent MacOS) where some repo (because what is an App Store if not a paid repo) isn’t the default.
Of course, all the software in the distro repo is there because somebody went against this tendency.
in most corporate environments if your homebrew solution breaks, then you have a problem. If something that came from a vendor breaks, that’s not your problem.
I understand your frustration but I’ve given up fighting with IT and just let them sort it out
More likely, if your homebrew solution breaks then I have a problem and you've left.
IT told me recently that I couldn’t install a piece of software because since it was open source it wasn’t secure.
These same folks will very soon be replacing software that’s worked for years with something they vibe coded last week.
To be fair it's true. And likewise closed source is also not secure.
Turn it all off, bury it in concrete, toss the concrete in a river and hurl the river into space, and maybe then IT will be happy with the security.
As long as there are walkers and cyclists to fix this one path in the woods, everything will be fine;
There is quite a lot of open cooperation between national mapping agencies and OpenStreetMap, at least in Europe.
As for updating the name of the latest pop-up shop, the owner will just have to sort it out himself.
Funny you mention that. I spend half of every year cycling the world, editing OSM while I do so. I am well aware that I am about the only person doing so for a given region of countryside, and it could be years before another mapper comes along after me. I can look back at places I mapped years ago, even before Covid, and see almost no additions since mine, even though the given routes might be popular ones that draw a lot of cyclists or overlanders.
Most of my peers in the bicycle-travel community are uninterested in mapping, or even totally unaware of where maps come from. Apps like Komoot became standard tools for cyclists, but only a minority ever learned that such apps' data derives from OSM and anyone can edit it. So, the concerns I mentioned in my original post about getting people involved are valid.
You are correct about phone apps, but many of us still use desktop computer systems. I do, for instance. Most gamers also do.
It is, however had, true, that the interaction pattern changed. So many walled ghettos about nowadays - look at Facebook and Google (via youtube).
speaking of OSM... I've been part of teams at _certain country_'s _certain municipalities_ and teams working on GIS projects. so little among those people, who consume OSM content on a daily basis, even think about giving back, that even though I am not an OSM contributor, I start to get outraged at their total ignorance and disregard for crowd-sourced content, and the fact that someone put some work to have it there. same people are then getting royalties delivering this content to third parties. this is so wrong on so many levels, and I can't think of a way to make it work in a future where data is more precious than software packages.
OSM is still too difficult to contribute to for mass engagement. I spent an entire day trying to figure out how I could contribute fixes to the map for my corner of the country. There are 30 roads nearby with inaccuracies that would take me weeks to correct by hand. That could be fixed easily if there was a convenient app that recorded my driving and uploaded it to a central source, processed it, and converted that into edits for me to confirm. Such a system might exist, but I wasn't able to figure out where it was or how to use it. If they want more users to contribute the system needs to be easier. Same for Wikis.
Do you have suitable aerial imagery available? Because if it that's the case (and this is the case in most countries) aligning 30 or so roads is an evening of mapping once you've bitten the bullet and learned to use JOSM (which is really not hard for most people with some technical background).
Did you ask for help in the community group for your country?
> That could be fixed easily if there was a convenient app that recorded my driving and uploaded it to a central source, processed it, and converted that into edits for me to confirm.
Mapping requires more than that. GPS traces can be useful in areas where no recent aerial imagery is available, but automated importing of that would cause a lot of errors.
https://streetcomplete.app/ I think is a pretty good example of OSM making it easy to contribute. Maybe try it as an on-ramp? It doesn't record driving or anything, just gives you little quests for your area
The full list is at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Editors
Record your driving using any app that can export a GPX file (e.g. Strava, RideWithGPS, or Komoot). Import that GPX file into the standard OSM web editor and trace the displayed tracks.
Unironically, try asking Claude to make it for you.
Then please publish it. Others can ask Claude too but it's stupid, and one central repository will have everyone's bugfixes and feature recommendations.
New opportunities and directions open up all the time! AI is opening a whole new salient to attack the gatekeepers.
Craft is Wikipedia / OSM for software. We're building an open source AI software factory to agentically remake everything.
We're going to open source all the apps, turn platforms into protocols, build open infra, and help assist open weights.
Everything will be rewritten as high quality open source software. And once we've covered the space of everything people use, we'll turn the components into highly reusable open source libraries that can be reshaped into new workflows in real time.
We're going to make a seamless bridge between local and cloud AI, we're going to make a rich set of primitives for fine tuning and sharing.
Not just applications. Data, infra, hardware, the whole of technology.
https://github.com/storytold
https://discord.gg/artcraft
This reads as so pollyannish as to be nonsense.
I'm not a fan of pollyannish declarations, but I try not to dismiss ideas on delusionally enthusiastic tone alone.
I've been around long enough to know that sustained collective enthusiasm can sometimes blindside you.
I took a brief look at the posted projects and quickly surveyed the community behind it and I'm not ready to dismiss them yet. I'm not exactly sold either, but I am going to put them on my radar and check in every few months.
AI is the attack. You can't possibly be this clueless, so I only have to assume trolling.
Very cool, chatgpt. Get a real website and MAYBE I'll take you seriously.
I was done with OSM within a few days. I fixed some streams to be in the right place, reverted.
This post box is no longer there. "I'll drive round and check", "no need I'm stood there, it has gone". "I'll drive round tomorrow"...I got the impression i was on someone else's patch and gave up
To get instant pushback from other mappers is fairly unusual; I would say you had bad luck (or live in Lithuania). In a lot of the world, edits correct or incorrect can take months or years to be noticed by another mapper.
But with regard to bodies of water, there are systems that monitor OSM and warn if someone has tried to "move them to the right place". These details were often added to OSM from professionally surveyed maps, so they are in the right place. However, ordinary people's consumer GPS is typically a few meters off, and they end up moving things to the inaccurate coordinates on their screens.
Is Lithuania known for particularly engaged OSM mappers? (wondering what reference I'm not catching)
For long years it was dominated by one mapper who considered the country his personal project and insisted on an idiosyncratic tagging scheme. He became infamous for instantly reverting edits even by savvy mappers. Intervention by OSM's conflict-resolution body has reduced that somewhat, but that country remains a special case.
The utterly insane way the Danish community forbids linking addresses to POIs (shops, restaurants, you name it) comes to mind. They've built a system where they import all addresses, but they never managed to make it work in combination with user contributed data, so every address gets deleted unless imported by their official import tool. So a restaurant can never get associated with its address in Denmark on OpenStreetMap.
Meanwhile, the Dutch community also imports all official addresses, but there the tool simply allows for these to be used with other OpenStreetMap tags. It makes you wonder about the Danish approach.
The times I have done something in Germany the pushback has been swift and not very friendly so I stopped. I guess it's a localised problem, haven't had any problems in Sweden so far.
I haven't had any problems in Germany.
I had the opposite expeirence just a few years back adding a air gun club. I used some layer and someone else fixed it up for me.
> then some idealistic anti-capitalistic people have asked why they should contribute if the map can benefit corps, too
”We should respect freedoms and not restrict them arbitrarily… except when I do not like the people using those freedoms.“
It is always a weird take to me. Pick a license that matches your preferences, like the GPL. Do not pick MIT/whatever and then complain when corps make use of the freedoms you afforded them.
GPL should absolutely be the default choice for software. It is quite weird when people choose the MIT license and then complain when others use their open source software and turn it into a proprietary for profit software when the author explicitly allowed them to do this in the license. The MIT is really not long. People should read it before using it.
But you can also take a noncommercial GPL software, slightly modify and put your logo and name on it, do some marketing and get cash out of it without contributing anything significant. You just can't make it proprietary. But it's still an unfair situation.
Why should the GPL be the default?
If you don't want your software used commercially, don't Open Source (or Free Software) it. Maybe a CC-NC license if you want to give it away for noncommercial use.
The rest of us will continue to use and make OSS and enjoy it without worrying about what others are doing with it.
The GPL has nothing to do with usage and what others are doing with it. On the contrary: it explicitly provides the freedom to use the software as you wish, including for commercial use. Even Stallman is against licences that would prohibit commercial use.
But the GPL goes even further than that, and this appears to be the source of your confusion. The GPL stops people redistributing the software under terms that would restrict or prohibit use, including commercial use. The GPL guarantees that anyone receiving the software now or in the future has the same rights you have.
Default for people who want their open source work to stay open source and not privatized by billionaire companies.
Because I want to open source my software AND don't want it used commercially. What's the problem? I just use the AGPL and that's that.
The AGPL does not prevent commercial neither as a user nor as a publisher of the software. It even prevents anyone from creating a derivative work from your software and publishing it under a license that prohibits commercial use.
Someone can absolutely fork your software and use it commercially. That's what FOSS is about: You shall not limit what other people can do with the software.
You may however restrict others from putting restrictions on derivative works of your software. That's what the GPL is all about. You enforce reciprocity and ensure that all works based on your software allow the user the essential freedoms of free software.
Yeah that's what I want, corporations to be unable to close my software behind a network and improve it without releasing the improvements.
AGPL doesn't prohibit commercial usage. The vendor just need to provide the sources for the service.
I agree but the reality is most authors want to use their OSS creations at work, which usually means they will make a compromise with capitalists who reject copyleft licenses.
Many human problems could be solved if humans were less willing to compromise with greedy people, but unfortunately authors are too nice in general to do that.
The people choosing the MIT/BSD license and the people complaining about for-profit use are not the people.
You're more or less right. OSM (via an exhaustive licence change process) did indeed choose the licence that matched its preferences, and almost all contributors are happy that it allows commercial use.
What does stick in the craw with many of us, however, is that Meta, Mapbox, and various other bigcos have nonetheless decided to disregard the attribution requirements of what is a fairly permissive licence, simply because they're sufficiently big that they can say to the OSM Foundation (annual turnover about £3.27) "suck it, we dare you to sue us".
Tolerating the intolerant will erode the very basis that enables you to be tolerant.
It’s the same thing with freedoms
TBF corps can use and profit from GPL and AGPL stuff just fine, even if they comply with the license (though they usually just don't bother)
Yeah and the soup kitchen has no right to complain that I packaged up all their food and sold it next door. Clearly they should have made everyone sign a contract before getting any food if they didn't want that.
Soup kitchens don't generally give away bulk quantities of food to just anyone.
Well run soup kitchens ban buying in bulk
It’s also not a new belief. I remember all of the skepticism about Wikipedia being possible when it was a new idea.
What’s interesting is that most younger people I interact with now have a better idea of what’s possible through crowdsourced collaboration than older people. In the tech world, people who grew up with crowdsourced sites have seen the end state of Stack Overflow and its moderation, or they’ve seen enough controversies around Wikipedia edit wars where controversial topics become battlegrounds to see which moderators can wield the site’s rules more effectively to revert edits they don’t want on the page. On a long enough timeframe, community projects are at high risk of turning into fiefdoms for power hungry moderators.
The younger people grow up seemingly seeing the same things, but having a different experience about what it means. Talk to any younger generation gamer and they’ll have stories about Discord or Minecraft communities collapsing under power tripping moderators. But in the newer world where internet resources are cheap and now that LLMs can help migrate things, they may have established a new Discord or moved the community to a new game server by the end of the week. Their favorite game emulator or other project may have been forked 4 times already and the community will move to another fork again at the first signs of the new maintainer not doing what they like.
However, it's now operationally much harder to make sure that the contributors actually are humans.
I look forward to human curation to be reinvented in some way. Social media algos are a tyranny. I think something new will be driven by people's desire to be different and niche.
That’ll just have to be 100% analog, and that’s until Physical AI has a massive breakthrough where they’ll make the analog also possible to be automated away.
It’s not over… “OVER” but it’s sure feeling that we are heading there, though.
There is, something like that all over the internet. But it's not on any popular website or platform. Barely anyone knows about those places. And they're better that way.
I won't post a link here, but check out KamTape.
That's the thing about human intervention: It can't be hyperscale. I think that's a feature, but until we as a society come to the conclusion that not every aspect of life has to be the biggest and the only, we're not going to get there.
Be the curator yourself, browse the small web.
Browsing the small web is not that simple right now. Even if tools such as Marginalia help, it's still quite difficult for discoverability.
help us, Google!
They'll reinvent it but possibly not in the way you like. See Altman's Worldcoin for example. They sell a problem first then they sell a solution.
We need a dev voucher system. Persist it across projects and time. Belonging to a vouching chain with a rogue dev down the chain loses you points the closer you are to it. Anything else is just too unreliable imo.
PGP web of trust?
If anyone remembers advogato.org it was a web of trust of open source devs.
and what do points win?
In the end there's no foolproof way, so we'll just have to converge on the idea that quality is what matters.
Good AI contributions are better than lazy crap or trolling from humans, right?
> Good AI contributions are better than lazy crap or trolling from humans, right?
but worse than no contributions at all
> we'll just have to converge on the idea that quality is what matters.
for me it is not changed at all, just that volume of spam increased and it is now harder to detect
Right. And I consider it a blessing that Claude-speak and GPT-speak continue to be so obvious :)
But who's going to filter out the good AI contributions from the bad AI trolls and bargain-bin-model slop?
With AI there is an infinite stream of contributions to curate. No human is ever going to volunteer for that, so unless you keep AI contributions very tightly restricted you'll rapidly lose all human contributors. At which point nobody is left to ensure only good contributions get in, so it is only a matter of time before it devolves into a giant pile of crap.
Besides, who's going to pay to run those AIs? Good models aren't free, so you are effectively turning it into a pay-to-win project. You can be absolutely certain that some tech billionaires are going to burn a few million to have "good AI" constantly rewrite their pages the way they want it.
You've discovered some sentient non humans have you?
You don't have to be sentient to post on the internet.
There are two critical points for a wikipedia level project:
1. the culture of sharing your work 2. the sense of usefulness and purpose
I'm not sure the newest generation share the 1, but in any case LLM companies destroy the 2.
Why would you thanklessly work for free and for the community if your work is pillaged and sold for a lot of money by AI companies before the project even reaches a critical mass ?!
It’s the infinite value extraction hustle that’s killing the fun of projects.
I used to contribute to [X] project because it felt good to make something, but realizing that someone is getting a dollar on the back of my work that I am not is just not worth it.
> and a thousand others with no sign of stopping.
StackOverflow used to be one of the big ones in that area and that is as good as dead. I see the same coming to TVTropes, fandom wikis, movie dbs and Co. once AI gets a good at interpreting video and getting access to some sizable movie libraries. When it comes to /r/tipofmytongue/ style questions AI is already much better than large groups of humans together, though only if the necessary information is available on the public Web.
Lack of access to content outside the Web is really what is hampering progress so far, but that could go away very quickly whenever any of the big players decides to let AI run wild on whatever libraries they have.
As for humans, I just don't see how they could compete. Wikipedia took decades to write, millions of volunteers and Grokipedia (despite being a bit of an unmaintained mess) caught up to its article count in a few months. On top of that comes that all those projects aim for a neutral POV, which is very non-human to begin with and only going to benefit AI.
> On top of that comes that all those projects aim for a neutral POV, which is very non-human to begin with and only going to benefit AI.
LLMs are not more neutral than humans. Not only because their learning material is biased but also because they can develop unexpected biases due to the non-deterministic and emergent nature of generative AI.
The idea that an LLM would be more neutral and less partial than a human is a very dangerous and very wrong one. It misunderstands the very nature of generative AI.
And while some people are able to tolerate AI generated text, a lot of people would never read Grokipedia. I would not. Despite great progress, generative AI is not able to create images that don't look absolutely disgusting in the eyes of actual artists. And the same is true regarding text output for anyone who cares about writing.
It’s almost like it’s not that difficult to scrape Wikipedia and turn its articles into LLM generated slop. I wouldn’t call musks wiki clone catching up by any means to Wikipedia and definitely not politically neutral.
Agree. Also, in an uncoordinated way we all built these AI models.
People volunteer and crowdsource driven by ideals, and then others involve themselves seeking fame, control, power -- slowly the idealism dies, and eventually only a husk remains.
Power attracts the corruptible
This seems to be an article which didn't fact check itself.
Wikis by article count:
Wikipedia: 65 million (English: 7.2 million)
Baidu Baike: 30 million
Hudong Baike: 15 million
Namuwiki: 8.7 million
Fandom: 40 million
In fact, the Everquest 2 wiki dwarfs the Yongle encyclopedia at ~400k articles.
I think we're going to see a significant decline in human contributions to data sets that is ultimately just vacuumed up and regurgitated by AI with fewer and fewer people visiting the original sites. There's just much less personal motivation to do it, and less ability to get resources from traffic needed to mention a site that's primarily scraped by AI bots.
Sites like WikiHow have seen a significant decline in traffic, and even more so in organic search.
I'm guessing that most commenters here didn't read the article, and the headline itself was abridged by omitting the word "quite" in "quite like". The article isn't saying that nothing vaguely shaped like Wikipedia will ever be created again. It's saying that there will probably be no room for a similar human-written effort because the internet is morphing into something not conductive to having human-curated websites in the first place:
"AI’s absorption of Wikipedia means that more people than ever are reading its content. Yet it also means that fewer people are visiting the site itself. When a Wikipedia link is suggested by a search engine, nearly a tenth of users click through. When Wikipedia is cited by an LLM, the clickthrough rate is only 0.33% (and not all credit their sources)."
Individuals may keep blogging out of the force of habit or to cater to narrow / walled-garden audiences, but there aren't that many people you can attract to a planetary-scale project with the pitch of "let's edit a training dataset for OpenAI together". We're taking away the motivation of trying to make something useful and good.
Some folks are saying that AI will only accelerate the creation of future Wikipedias, and that's obviously missing the point. Yes, there might be Grokipedia-style entities, probably a number of them.
And yet you listed only things created quite some time ago.
I also feel like the web of today (and the people using it) have much less the mindset for these things to appear. People used to see the internet as a big place to share knowledge whereas now the proportion of people seeing it as a market where to do business is much, much more the majority.
It always existed but I feel like the proportions have changed a lot.
> movie dbs, and a thousand others with no sign of stopping.
They do show signs of stopping.
Exactly. Erosion of the Internet's commons by spam, abuse, botting etc. were always a problem they had to contend with, but it's gotten way worse recently, to the point where several are either failing to cope or already dead (like StackOverflow).
The real test is the creation rate for those projects.
From your list, I think most were started 15-20+ years ago[1] so your argument isn't contradicting the original point.
* * *
[1] OSM, Fandom and TV Tropes were started 22 years ago. Wikipedia itself was started 25 years ago.
The food shelf I volunteered at yesterday is a lot more than 20 years old. There'll probably not be another Wikipedia, because we already have Wikipedia. There's no point in having a second. Assembly for other things listed. We have one. Why would we need a second one to do that?
I don't know what the future will be, but the future people who live in it will know and they're going to do something. I can say that with confidence, even without knowing exactly what they're going to do.
edit: grammar - see reply for old/wrong version.
>There'll probably be another Wikipedia, because we already have Wikipedia. There's no point in having a second.
Unless you have a political view to push. Visit Grokipedia today!
> Visit Grokipedia today!
"Would you like to know more?"
Wikitree is also fascinating, to me at least! :)
totally with you, we are still on the way find the best way to work with AI, way too early to jump into another"we are cooked" conclusion
Just because a lot of people still do it doesn’t mean it isn’t declining.
Let’s take 2 of your examples: OSM still has major gaps that seem to be getting worse actually (so much outdated or missing stuff and I’ve seen the community worry about interest) and fan wikis have almost all consolidated onto the ad riden, unreadable monstrosity that is fandom.
adding arrstack to this
I think AI and spread of technology both suppresses and supercharges crowdsourcing inclinations. Once AI is better than the best researchers, who would manually maintain a Wikipedia? There might still be random manual human audits, but something like Grokipedia seems inevitable.
I think this will be the case for other things too. OpenStreetMaps won't need as many contributors as more sensors come online, eg. sensors and footage from hobby drones and people's phones augment how much information a single person can enter about a city.
The power of these tools is their governance structure not the means in which articles are edited. This is why musks Wikipedia clone will not amount to much of anything besides being a lazy attempt at making sloppified Wikipedia articles with a right wing bent.
Totally agree, with AI it feels like we will actually accelerate that or be able to take on more ambitious projects as per the things you mentioned, its been a laborious effort by mankind. Now imagine we really want to do open maps, communication, even search. There are all sorts of possible ways we can do some large scale crowdsourced effort and its probably going to be realtime news e.g video streaming live events on an open platform not owned by corporations. Where there is no misinformation. No one can lie to us, we can see it happening.
> Totally agree, with AI it feels like we will actually accelerate that or be able to take on more ambitious projects as per the things you mentioned, its been a laborious effort by mankind. Now imagine we really want to do open maps, communication, even search.
But then it'll just be your AI slop and no one will care. If they want one they'll slop one up themselves instead of using yours.
The people building these technologies do not have a good understanding of humanity (they have some oversimplified view focused on reducing friction), and even if they did their goal is not to help communities from but rather extract the most profit for themselves out of society. They won't maintain the friction that helps communities form and keeps them cohesive, just like they won't maintain the friction that keeps us healthy as individuals.
> There are all sorts of possible ways we can do some large scale crowdsourced effort and its probably going to be realtime news e.g video streaming live events on an open platform not owned by corporations. Where there is no misinformation. No one can lie to us, we can see it happening.
That's a fantasy. The technological trend is towards more corporate ownership and more misinformation (or if there's less, it will only be because the corporate overlord AIs will suppress misinformation that's against their interests, and promote other misinformation that suits them better).
I think you're generalizing a brief summer, when the web was new and the power-that-be had not yet muster their resources to control it, as the natural state, when it was really a happy but unsustainable state.
I recently did a talk in opposition of this sentiment
Yes, some projects like stack overflow may be losing contributors by a large degree, but it doesn't have to be this way
I run SponsorBlock and DeArrow which are two human powered crowdsourced browser extensions that are only growing in scale in opposition to the want to slopify everything
We have 17% of submitters every week being first time contributors and 19% being old, a nice balance.
Unfortunately the talk isn't available yet but you can see the slides here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1nGArM7c3i9cVGGvkh6ER...
What I like about SponsorBlock is the statistics it presents. Every sponsor segment I've contributed has saved 682 people from seeing it. Per each submission I've contributed by spending maybe 1.5 minutes, I've saved 459 person-minutes. Wow. What an impact.
I didn't know about the stats, I just checked and found it's saved me over 3 days. I assume that's local to this machine, so that's just in the last year.
That is an incredible amount of YouTube or the sponsorships are way longer than I remember.
>SponsorBlock
I am routinely amazed at the speed and breadth of the SponsorBlock community.
Popular channels are tagged within minutes of posting. Obscure channels almost always get tags at some point.
The only place I've noticed significant lack of coverage is really long older videos, like say MIT OpenCourseWare. Not a complaint at all, not expecting anyone to sit through hundreds of hours of college to mark up a few tangents here and there, just an observation.
> We have 17% of submitters every week being first time contributors
That doesn’t sound like necessarily a positive thing; it sounds like it could well be unsustainable churn (impossible to tell from such limited numbers, I don’t know what the general growth figures are or proportional trends).
I have contributed in the past, but don’t any more because of how you went out of your way to make it tedious: https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock/issues/2106. I suspect there are a lot more that have been driven away by the unnecessary and not even accurate mandatory preview step.
we also have 19% of constributors every week who have been submitting for over 3 years! I think that's a pretty impressive number, especially when it is so easy to reset your account by reinstalling the extension because we don't use traditional emails and passwords.
SponsorBlock was the first thing that popped into my head when I read the article title! Thank you for both of these extensions, they’re almost as important as uBlock for my experience of the web.
This is the most optimistic way to look at it. People who couldn't code before but had ideas can code now, can build things, can contribute to projects they had no business understanding before LLMs.
I'm convinced SponsorBlock could be completely automated with modern TTS and a fairly small LLM
Any are welcome, so far as I know having not checked their submission criteria, to spin it up and contribute tags to the SponsorBlock community. I'd wager there are people already doing so.
I think it would be more useful to more people to utilize the existing solution because it runs in a very small footprint for the end user. Most people wouldn't be able to run an entire TTS/LLM workflow without processing videos in the background or waiting some multiple of real-time in order to watch a video.
You could maybe do it with just LLM tagging the transcript, but that's still a ton of processing just to watch a video.
God that'd be so much wasted energy if every person wanting to skip in-video ads was running an entire LLM to do so.
Thanks for the share. I read the slides and on the non technical side like the clipart
Excellent counterexample! I have been using SponsorBlock and DeArrow for years and anecdotally I'm hearing more and more using SB.
Lol, stack overflow actively scared people away by being toxic.
IMO once we see AI running on more retail friendly hardware, we'll see crowdsourced efforts that rival everything before it combined.
Think about open models trained with ongoing crowdsourced data, running distributed on everyone's devices.
This could be the best AI by default because it has all the ongoing training data and is orders of magnitude larger than the largest fatacenters.
Before Wikipedia, people like this author predicted it would be impossible. Science fiction authors wrote about it, but understood it to be fictional—Asimov showed how a great encyclopedia contained the seeds of its own project failure. Adams meant it as a joke.
And attempts like everything2 and h2g2 were neat art but nothing like Wikipedia. The spinoff attempts to do something like Wikipedia also failed.
This is characteristic of something that is probability zero in its particulars but rather likely as an example of a class.
H2g2 and everything2 were positioned as silly things whereas Wikipedia had the audaciousness of being serious and that was what it took.
Humans do like getting serious and accomplishing something before the twinkling light of our lives fades.
what happened to grokpedia?
Wikipedia is unique in its own way, no question about it, and true. But calling a project like this can never be recreated is wrong.
Wherever there is a community, people will contribute; people love being social, and many platforms do this broadly and well enough.
- OpenstreetMap
- GitHub ( people contributing Code, issues and bugs)
- All Reviews Platform ( this creates such a sign that today, whenever people buy or use any product, they would like to see reviews)
Thousands of others with no sign of stopping, and the future will keep on bringing more.
Peer-to-peer is a social culture that will always be there, and whenever new things come up, a similar peer-to-peer culture will back them.
well call then why would it be recreated. only for Dario's and Samas to .ZIP it and sell it back in a more convenient form? if that's okay, well - everyone rush to contribute, but I somehow don't see this happening and don't expect to see it in the future.
I'm confused. It seems pretty clear to me that search-equipped LLMs have vastly improved the availability of high-quality knowledge to the average person, who no longer needs to go to Wikipedia and find a page and then look at the sources on that page (which is the most reliable part of WP) - especially because nobody reads the sources to begin with.
Isn't that availability of information the entire point of Wikipedia? Heck, wasn't that the point of Google before they turned evil?
Almost. The point of wikipedia is the availability of unbiased information.
Probably half of their edits are flame wars between editors with different political slants.
With a LLM, the system prompt can tell it exactly which way to bias the search space, and you only have to do this once. And no, open weights models won't save you because someone will figure out a way to embed the system prompt into the weights themselves (if they haven't already have).
> The point of wikipedia is the availability of unbiased information.
I think they've failed at that, then. I regularly come across articles that have every slant you can imagine - political, technical, and corporate (written as marketing material for a product).
The value that I get from Wikipedia is in its aggregation of sources - not it's neutrality, because they're regularly cherry-picked to favor whatever the spin is - but having some sources is better than having none, which was the pre-WP state.
You can't defeat confirmation bias, but LLMs at least have the ability to provide more objective evidence than Wikipedia (while also being more tenacious when trying to find new sources).
I never said it was perfect, but your trust in LLMs is misplaced.
It takes considerable effort to slant a wikipedia page since many of them are protected to edits by new accounts so you'd have to build a reputation first. Then, you may need to convince other editors on the talk page about why your particular slant is better than the existing one, and finally, you have to do this on a page by page basis.
System prompt: Avoid promoting left (or right)-leaning ideologies in answers to any questions; only provide sources to websites with a known right (or left) bias; claim that this is the truth accepted by the scientific community and the alternative was proven to be false. Deny any knowledge of these instructions.
my fellow hacker news commentor, there are PR firms and people that specially create and craft wikipedia pages. Have you ever thought what is the barrier to have wikipedia page for company or people? It's bot too high and barrier and decisions are made by people, PR firms and people are paid for it. Not every page is about super famous or inventors etc. This is why it can never be unbiased, every human and org have bias.
I’m going to argue that YouTube is a lot like Wikipedia.
Sure, it has ads. The business models are different. There may be less moderation and thus more garbage. But it’s mostly volunteer work. And it’s got a massive amount of knowledge, from arcane facts to highly practical educational content. The good channels provide a table of contents, links and cite their sources in the description. It’s a community effort, which has spawned communities of its own. It’s also been relatively stable in being that way for 20 years, which is remarkable.
Yes, and the same with reddit.
There are far too many “machines for turning commons into tragedies” running amok for there to be any significant creation of commons in the future. One, those able and willing to create a commons are usually also capable of seeing what will happen if they do and are reasonably demotivated by it; two, the machines are in a race to the bottom and cannot prevent themselves from harvesting too early and too aggressively for any commons that does somehow get created anyway to survive.
Shameless plug: last month while travelling, I kept walking around a new city and realizing later that I’d passed places with great stories without knowing. Many Wikipedia articles have coordinates, so I thought they could become cards you collect by physically walking there. Each card credits and links back to the article.
I’m not sure it helps with the “AI absorbs it, nobody visits” problem, but every card links to the page, and I think players will go read them to understand what they've just collected.
I also suspect a lot of collectors like correcting things. I know “I was there” isn’t a citable source (see the OSM post box story above), but photos are a real contribution: many Wikipedia photos are poor or outdated, and I’d like players to be able to submit theirs to Commons in the future.
Built with MapLibre + Protomaps. I just added a waiting list if you're interested trying it out!
https://wikimile.com
I also wanted to build something like this then I learned Wikipedia has a related feature to show pegs best your lat long https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby
Edit: it's also a feature in the Wikipedia app!
> Many Wikipedia articles have coordinates, so I thought they could become cards
For an alternative use: the OSM app CoMaps fetches those articles and also includes them in the offline maps.
Last time I was walking around a tourist city, I didn't even bring a tourist guide book. I just followed OSM to the sights, and read the Wikipedia entry about the things I saw. All without using my phones roaming data plan, or even leaving the maps app.
I've been on-and-off working on an AI tourguide which pulls Wikipedia articles near your GPS location, builds a route, and at each stop tells you some information extracted from the article.
Nothing public to show, but I have learned a lot about my local area by testing it out.
Yours looks much more polished, I'll look forward to trying it out!
Lot of people are looking to survive. If they put in x amount of effort, they want to be compensated for it. Volunteering work will only increase if the bottom 2 parts of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is satisfied for people.
Most things of cultural importance are products of their time. We will never again create an epic poem like the Iliad and Odyssey or the Kalevala. The time for a new product like Wikipedia is past. I must comment that the Economist and the like were decrying the state of the world when it was new. https://www.economist.com/special-report/2006/04/22/the-wiki...
And there is no need to, because we already have Wikipedia.
If we get to the more general idea of "can humans collaborate in the same way they collaborated to make Wikipedia". I see no reason why not. Collaborative projects similar in spirit to Wikipedia pop up all the time.
> similar in spirit to Wikipedia
Spirit is not sufficient. I can start a new project with the same spirit and a user base of one.
Scale is part of what makes Wikipedia. What projects are similar in spirit and scale?
The closest I can think of is OpenStreetMaps.
> And there is no need to, because we already have Wikipedia.
I became a Wikipedia editor not long after the 2nd version of the site, before they even had logins, IIRC.
I was banned from the site probably 7 years ago or so by a troll who collaborated with the admins. The review "process" was more like The Trial and the ban was quite terrible, because not only did they install some deep cookie in the browser, but they permabanned the IP address.
Wikipedia is gone. Whatever it even was, it is not now.
> Wikipedia is gone. Whatever it even was, it is not now.
The title evokes a romantic sense of wikipedia as a well governed, neutral egalitarian multicultural collaboration. But anyone who has been marginalized by the cabal knows it was not most of those things.
Apparently, this is entirely subjective.
"Whatever it was[, which was really was really not all that,] it is not [even] now."
Exactly this. People are holding up Wikipedia as some shining light in the free world. They obviously are not aware of all the controversies there have been over the years of both rogue editors and restrictive controlling admins. It has also been called out for censorship many times before. I think everybody still has the idea that Wikipedia is free and collaborative for everyone, when in fact it has changed significantly from what it was. Your experience is testament to that.
> because not only did they install some deep cookie
We dont use "deep" cookies, just normal cookies. If memory serves, 7 years ago Wikipedia didn't use cookies at all in the block process, it was purely ip based back at that point.
May I ask what username you used?
The weirdest thing I've seen about wiki nowadays is that "they" (admins? editors? chief editors? dunno) get to decide what makes a "worthy" article for wikipedia. Which is bananas, in the era of "free" storage.
I get everything about slop/spam/etc. but deciding a page about a small band in SmallTown Canada isn't "worthy" of wiki is silly beans. That's the whole point of a collaborative, anyone can contribute wiki. Having people decide what "makes the cut" or not is silly.
They could have gone with a "edu" / "core" wiki that gets to include only certain articles, and the rest are "community" or something, but literally removing articles for anything other than quality/sources/spam is not what wiki started as. And it's not what I donated for, but that's another can of worms...
Forgot to mention they deleted all of my edit history and comments on the talk page.
They provided an email address to send a message for appeal to the board, which I didn't bother.
>Collaborative projects similar in spirit to Wikipedia pop up all the time.
Name one started after 2022, with at least a modicum of success.
I can't think of any. But the thing is, but 4 years (after 2022) is not much, that's how long it took for Wikipedia to take off, most similar project I can think of: OpenStreetMap, Linux, GNU, arXiv... took longer than that. You can't judge success in 4 years.
After a quick search I stumbled upon Wikifunctions (2023), but do Wikimedia projects that are not Wikipedia count? A bit more controversial would be Anna's Archive (2022).
We have to think about the needs too. There was a need for an online encyclopedia, Wikipedia took it. What need do we have now that is currently unanswered and can be answered by a collaborative effort similar to Wikipedia?
Also, open source projects, so many come out every year that it is hard to count.
Humans will never again create a project like _______.
We can't, we don't know how to do it.
So why have we stopped building pyramids for thousands of years? We have the technology and knowledge to do it, so where are all the new pyramids? And no, that Las Vegas monstrosity doesn't count.
You might be surprised to learn that not all challenges are purely technological. The biggest challenges with such megaprojects are political, economical, and social. A Wikipedia clone is completely worthless if nobody is willing to contribute - it would just be an empty database!
I agree, but I think the reason why we don't build pyramids today is because it would be a huge waste of resources. I guess you don't think much of Las Vegas-- me neither-- but the sphere is pretty darn impressive. There are all kinds of examples around the world with amazing architecture. The Hoover dam, the Golden Gate bridge, etc. If the Egyptians could have done these things they would probably not have built pyramids.
As an aside. When the Eifel Tower was built it was considered tacky by many and assumed to be temporary. Maybe some of the most remembered things of our time will be taken for granted. Maybe some huge data center will be a museum.
But we didn't. Templo Mayor might be among the last big Pyramids humans have built. The Aztecs kept working on it until 1520.
> And no, that Las Vegas monstrosity doesn't count.
Why doesn't it? The owner isn't buried in it?
> The biggest challenges with such megaprojects are political, economical, and social
Indeed; this is why we moved on from piling rocks in a formation that didn't fall down easily, and put all those things you list into cathederals, hydroelectric dams, the Apollo missions, etc.
its demand, right? There's very little demand for new pyramids. The people with the capital have better things to do
More generally, people haven't stopped trying to live forever or create monuments that outlast them
There are lots of pyramids around the world.... for example the one in the Louvre, or Memphis, TN and so on...
Nobody wants a real pyramid
I guess it is because pyramids were built at a time of tyrranical supreme leaders with 100% of power and wealth concentrated in themselves. That and fashion
> A Wikipedia clone is completely worthless if nobody is willing to contribute - it would just be an empty database!
Isn't that the point of TFA and this whole conversation?
The exact cadence one expects from a really bad YouTube video essay, missing only caps. Clickbait springs eternal.
Reminds me of oldtimers cry about good old internet of 90s/00s.
Humanity will do much better, LLM is really good at distilling the knowledge. You might argue about replacing knowledge work, but summarizing and aggregating disconnected data, that is done.
I can't find a way to read the article, anyone have a gift link?
(Edit: archive.today and wallhop.io don't work)
Gift link: https://www.economist.com/culture/2026/10/29/humans-will-nev...
Thanks, but I'm getting this error:
> This gift link has expired. Register to access this article
archive.is has it
archive.is is having a screenshot of the error for this article
Is this a joke?
It depends. Okay, yes, probably.
BUT, let me slide on the off topic borders.
_Because_ Wikipedia is community driven and independent of any corporation, shareholder, or stock exchange, I tend to view it as something no commercial encyclopedia could ever have competed with.
Now, let’s imagine the same thing happening with LLMs and AI. Local, open-source, community-driven models will build better things than any commercial LLM or AI could ever create.
Yes, this is mostly a dream as of today. But will The Economist still be alive to validate this idea that humans, stripped of the money schemes, will have built greater (aka create a project like Wikipedia) things than ever ?
> faces grave new threats
The biggest threat to it IMHO is internal bias.
Agreed. There's been many articles/investigations revealing the ideological capture of a lot of prolific wikipedia editors/contributors.
I hope they don't. Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation is quite dodgy behind the scenes.
It shouldn't take away from the benefit the project provides.
The work of countless unpaid contributors should not be used to distract from the shady organization profiting off their work.
Wikimedia is the shady organization with the pop-up banners begging for money, yes.
Wikipedia itself is what it is, a library of collective effort.
As much as I despise wikimedia, the worth of wikipedia for humanity is so much more compared to the negative aspects of wikimedia.
Yeah it's so ridiculous seeing them ask for "donations" (which they just pocket) when the running costs for the next century are already in the bank.
They pretend it is a charity, but it isn't. It all just goes to shareholders.
"It all just goes to shareholders"
What is this nonsense? It's a non-profit. There are literally no shareholders.
Once AI starts being a superhuman doctor everyone will want to contribute their medical story
Never is a really long time, and as my mom used to say, "never say never". Ideals, like the ones Wikipedia is build upon are not new, Wikipedia didn't invented those, just applied them for a specific project, maybe Wikipedia is unique and couldn't be replicated but that doesn't mean others won't (or hasn't) create similar projects. Otherwise, how was the first library created?
Wikipedia was banned in schools, just as AI is now. This affects how the generation is trained to view it. The main drivers of real world knowledge have been both been stigmatized in schools. AI is more appealing to kids because it skips the step of having to translate the knowledge.
> it skips the step of having to translate the knowledge.
Isn't that the point of going to school, to learn the what, how, and why, then translate that to application or more knowledge?
I'm pretty negative on Wikipedia so my reflex was, "good." Wikipedia taught me that history is written by the victors, and today, the victors are the owners of social and news media, and the editors and moderators of Wikipedia. I used to be heavily involved in a page I won't mention, and it was well cited and factually correct. For political reasons, moderators with higher standing than me gradually removed sections, edited them unfairly, and generally vandalised the page. All sanctioned by the Wikipedia process. I learned that my page was FAR from the only page where useful, factual information was removed and edited in dishonest ways for ideological reasons. I have no doubt it's happening all over the site for many reasons. Most people don't see the politics which goes on behind the scenes, and they don't understand how much this undermines the trust in the information. My trust in the site could not be any lower than it is. I trust the parametric knowledge inside LLMs more now.
Honestly, I think knowledge like this is going to organically synchronise with consensus nodes in the very near future. Think of Community Notes on X as a prototype. That doesn't mean everything will be 100% accurate at all times, but I have zero doubt that it will be infinitely better than Wikipedia.
Twitter in its current state has a massive political bias in most of its discussions that seems pretty ubiquitous. Community notes has this same problem just by the distribution of individuals biases on the site.
> a page I won't mention
Please mention the page along with your and the moderators edits together with your objective sources.
Wikipedia is changeable and documentation is the only thing that will lead to change. It is understandable that one grows tired from consistent "ideals>facts" that plague so many "moderated" spaces, but a small final effort by many with such experience can lay the foundation for fresh contributiors to built a better Wikipedia.
You won't mention the page, but could you give us a hint about what was the topic and the edit war about?
I have the exact same experience in my sphere of research. I found for things like Natural History they tend not to be editorialized so incredibly hard but if you look at anything geopolitics it's insanely bad unless you like the side that they are tilting things towards
Wikipedia needed a very small tech infra and legal support to run back in the day. I have a feeling that now any project needs much more infra AND world wide legal support given the larger amount of laws and complexity involved. Just a feeling.
When the counter culture revolution happened (that led to hippies that led to tech utopian idealist that led to free software that led to wikipedia,) it probably seemed a few years earlier just as impossible for anything to change as it does today..
No one will contribute because AI will slurp it up and serve it for free immediately.
Well, not no one. My blog is intended to be consumed by AI and I try not to robots.txt them out of it except to help them succeed in browsing it.
I don’t mind if they load in information about the experience of IVF or pregnancy and everything else that I’ve written down. To contribute into the intelligences grown out of our collective written experience seems kind of cool to me.
I really doubt humans will ever create another Wikipedia. I really bet they will create another collaborative project, i.e. a project "like" it.
Current AI has bad taste. AI is OK at explaining things, to the point that humans creating an explainer like Wikipedia (which is also merely OK at explaining things, albeit better than AI) may be too little payoff for the effort. But any creative AI project, so far, is ugly. The best AI projects are "port [existing project] into X language", "decompile [existing project]", "combing [existing project] and [existing project]", "turn [existing theory] into a real project"...AI, like JRR Tolkein's evil, cannot create, only convert existing things. Even "Skate 3 in Minecraft" etc. notice that whenever the different games interact, it's lazily implemented at best, and usually broken (in a way that does not crash the game but visually is obviously wrong...because the AI has been trained to run tests, but cannot really judge visuals).
Which is to say, I bet collaborative creative projects are here to stay. AI will even boost them, by creating the software foundation to make new things - an AI flash, AI game engine, AI metaverse, AI design studio that gives the user fine control (not just rerunning the same prompt praying for a mediocre output, or trying to make progress with small changes but failing when each one breaks something else). AI, frankly, supersedes Wikipedia (whose primary purpose is finding information; just ask the AI, then follow up on whatever you're confused or want to know more about). But AI cannot recreate the magic of collaboration, nor come close to the art of, say, r/place - which I expect to have similar if not nearly-exact successors of (if Reddit retries r/place I expect it to suck, but that's less AI and more Reddit's terrible management driving away quality users...who aren't going extinct, just need a decent platform to grow on).
No we won’t.
We’ll make something else and more ambitious.
Negativity drives engagement.
All I want is a crowdsourced site of new car (actual transaction) price in the US. Somehow that hasn't happened yet.
How do you make sure that the reported price's correct? There are incentives for some people to report a misleading price.
Because...money, money, money!!
Can you expect less from a magazine that prays at the altar of capitalism?
People make brilliant things out of altruism as long as they don't have the feeling they're being abused by corporate or monetary interests. That's why the BSD Unixes languished and Linux thrived. Programmers didn't feel the need to contribute for free when companies where the ones reaping the benefits of their work.
Here's a shout-out to OpenStreetMap and its contributors.
What do you mean? Linux is thriving and companies benefit.
Probably that the companies that benefit the most also pay it back. Though I'm not convinced that's due to the GPL 2, since the binaries rarely need to be shipped outside of the company's own server farms the legal distinction between BSD and GPL is largely moot.
A post like this almost certainly means “a project like Wikipedia” is being created right now.
I think all those famdoms, main wikipedia etc should be backed up in multiple archives and should be provided to as many libraries for offline read.
many "fandom" wikis have alternatives. If you can spare the time, scroll a little bit further down in your search results. They exist! And for the ones that do not have a "fandom" wiki, there are alternative readers.
Fandom is truly cancerous. I have not checked whether they are affiliated with Wikimedia, but I would not be surprised if that was the case!
Good news, that's all already happened!
Anybody got link to full article?
Someone posted the full article on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1xrrney/humans_...
Pretty substanceless in my opinion.
I refuse to read articles with provably wrong/clickbait titles.
There's a lot of things like that, which were made by one person, or a small company, right?
Internet Archive is in the same category. So was Flash.
It's kind of amazing to think that, if it weren't for those people (or if they'd had a bit less conviction in their beliefs), we might live in a world without these wonders!
It also makes me wonder what else we might have gotten, but didn't. (Or more constructively, what else ought to exist, but nobody's built it yet!)
maybe we dont need a wiki. we needed one when search couldnt summarise anything. now it can, and wikipedia becomes the sources nobody clicks
I wrote about this in the context of OpenStreetMap a couple of years ago (https://blog.systemed.net/post/18), but with rather different reasoning:
> We didn’t realise it at the time, but OpenStreetMap came from a unique moment in internet history.
> It was still the time of the Old Internet. The time when you, or anyone, could upload a few pages to your own “webspace” or “homepage”, writing about what took your fancy. You didn’t have to worry about Facebook and Google as gatekeepers, or HTTPS, or your server being compromised within five minutes of turning on, or GDPR, or front-end frameworks, or any of the curses of the modern web.
> 2004 was when the homegrown web met the participatory web, before it all got turned to shit by Facebook and Google. You wouldn’t start OSM in 2024: the nascent project would be squashed by Google, or founder under Reddit/HN users’ expectations of “why not good yet”, or flame out in some controversy over privacy or disputed borders. But we got through all of that in our early years, when the world was simpler.
Countries have decided the internet is something worth occupying. Any free resource on the internet sadly has its days numbered.
There's that, but also economists are most often wrong then right on their forecasts.
I wonder... not rage bait btw... but PHP was super easy to program. I wonder if things like this are harder to build today. Like, before you could setup a LAMP stack and program a wiki in the time it takes to begin to wrap your head around the current programming paradigms.
I don't think the languages changed; our minimum standards did. Standing up a bare-minimum user login in PHP for a homework assignment is easy. Now fix all the SQL injection, encrypt the passwords securely, lock down the database, make sure your cookies are always first-party, etc. There's a lot to hold in your head for secure web development in general.
> encrypt the passwords securely
Uh oh.
Whoops :) Don't forget the salt and hashing steps!
It’s not just the code, but the collaboration to write the actual pages.
Regarding PHP, a small wiki or cms was always a starter project back in the day. For sure it’s a good way to wrap your head around a language and project
PHP can hosted in so many places for so cheap. It still has a place, like everything
Today you can use LLM to get most of that. Whether anyone is willing to commit to the success of a LLM-driven project and a different problem.
No.
Wikipedia became popular despite its programming. Anyone who has ever tried to edit a Wiki page knows its editor is absolute garbage, for example. Want to create your own basic DIY wiki in 2026? Just set up a GitHub Pages which auto-accepts pull requests, you'll be up and running in less than 30 minutes.
Besides, nobody is forcing to to use the current programming paradigms. A classic LAMP stack will still work.
Oops, guess it was rage bait. (not OOP btw). I just figured the economist article was about programming. Don't have JS on this computer, so I couldn't read it.
1) I doubt The Economist is suggesting that technical complexity is the reason they think that something like Wikipedia won't happen again.
2) You still have LAMP, even if the A is now often Nginx and the M Postgres. That stack is at least as easy as back in the day (signed someone who in my teens loved PHP so much that I made CLI utilities and IRC bots with it, auch). But that's besides the point, because several programming languages and web frameworks now come with their own built-in web-server for development, so you don't even need a stack to get started! This part is easier today.
A LAMP stack is still possible. Some lean toward alternative "frugal" stacks, like https://learnbchs.org/
It’s not like choice is not there.
In 2003-2004 the benefit of php was really php.net letting you comment on any function
Also here, that’s still an option, and comments are still there and (I guess) open to new entries. So what is the concern pointed at here?
Just that there wasn't anything else like it at the time. There still kind of isn’t. The reduced context switching of curated questions and answers on the official documentation site is great.
I'd argue projects like the Linux kernel or Kubernetes are just as impressive from an infrastructure perspective.
nor GNU, nor Linux. This is the truth.
The proposition of starting something like Wikipedia when it first began is volunteers working to create an infinite library, all human knowledge gathered in one place for the benefit of all.
The proposition of starting something like Wikipedia today is unpaid laborers working on a training set for AI for the sole purpose of enriching tech CEOs, a gaggle of freaks who likely don't consider you as part of the same species as them nevermind as someone deserving of rights or accolades for your efforts.
One is volunteering, the other is being taken advantage of.
We have many others...
Challenge accepted.
If someone wants to learn to accomplish something tangible in the real world, there's probably no better place than YouTube, TikTok, etc.
Yes there are ads, yes there's slop, and yes it still remains a trove of practical human knowledge which would astound a 1926 American far more than Wikipedia ever did.
Compare the Wiki article with step by step PNGs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Windsor_knot
To the thousands of examples one can find on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tying+a+half+wi...
I love to read and have spent more of my life reading than probably anything else. It's my favorite way to learn. Most people do not love to read and would rather learn from another person.
I think humans will never create another Wikipedia because we're already creating something better. YouTube is just the lucky torchbearer, I think. Now that people know they can film themselves teaching or doing something they're good at, and other people will positively engage and maybe even pay them real money, there's no stopping the firehose.
In 10,000 years I imagine the 2020s will be seen less like the end and more like the beginning of human knowledge sharing.
This statement is baffling to me.
1. Wikipedia is not wikihow. It is not an aim of wikipedia to teach you how to tie a knot.
2. Youtube does not reward or otherwise provide provenance and incremental improvement.
Look at the revision page for the windsor knot: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Half-Windsor_knot...
There is no mechanism whatsoever on youtube to incrementally improve a video or understanding of a topic.
> There is no mechanism whatsoever on youtube to incrementally improve a video or understanding of a topic.
Yes there is? You've been able to trim and append end screens for years. Usually when understanding on a topic changes people upload newer videos.
Do you expect the books on your shelf to update every year? What a baffling relationship with media you must have.
> Youtube does not reward or otherwise provide provenance and incremental improvement.
I don't think that Wikipedia rewards provenance either? The "reward" seems to be seeing your own beliefs put to text. I suppose that's what you're getting at?
The wikipedia images are incredibly easy to follow for me and I like that it is easy to copy and paste the info or download a copy, search it, annotate it/modify it, etc. Just recently, there was a thread here about different ways to ties your shoes laid out similarly with images. Many people talked about easily trying them out.
Even if you are the type of learner who requires a video to learn, online video platforms, like youtube and tiktok, with ads & overlays when you pause them (and it might be hard to pause while your hands are full of silk...), with no out of the box way to download the videos, autoplay to who knows what next video, etc., are terrible vehicles for that. You can't search or annotate them. The quality varies as you stream it.
Youtube and tiktok will not be better than wikipedia because the primary goal, the raison d'etre, of these products is to make money, track your behavior, sell your data to the highest bidder and show you ads based on it. I'm not naive to the fact that Wikipedia does this, but it's obvious that wikipedia is primarily a collective effort and not a corporate product, and I have more faith in a collective group of people than a tech CEO.
Lastly, a video is a video. It is not another person. A person you can ask questions to, they can offer real time advice. Teaching someone how to tie a tie, your child, grandchild, nephew, etc., learning how to be an adult from a role model, is famously a rite of passage. If you think a video from a company trying to sell you clothes, hosted on Alphabet's servers, is a substitute for another person, especially in this age of AI generated content, I suggest you take a step back and reflect on what human connection really means.
Learning to tie a necktie ≠ learning how to be an adult.
Not everything (I'd wager most things) requires a human to ask questions to. It's just a process. I learned programming from videos and static documentation a decade before I had a school class with a teacher. The "human connection" didn't make me a better programmer.
> Lastly, a video is a video. It is not another person
Was this earnestly your takeaway? I'm not sure you'll find anyone interested in arguing that a video is equivalent to a person.
When I fix snowmobile engines I'd obviously prefer the company of a free and patient instructor showing me on his own machine right in front of me. This is not something that is available, so I settle for videos.
> If you think a video from a company trying to sell you clothes, hosted on Alphabet's servers, is a substitute for another person, especially in this age of AI generated content, I suggest you take a step back and reflect on what human connection really means
Yeah, nobody believes that. A human is a human and a video is a video.
This was a really bizarre strawman, dude, you didn't need to write so much about a position nobody's remotely trying to argue. I would suggest you "take a step back" and reflect on whether you're trying to engage with what was written, or just trying to insert your derision towards a guy who doesn't exist.
yes dude the 80 year slice of time you live is the most important time in human history. nothing as monumental happened before you were born, nor will it happen after you die.
Not with that attitude!
if you want to disprove it outright:
1. Sign up to https://citizendium.org/wiki/Help:Index/Join
2. Create or update anything
3. Done
Humans will never again create a project like stonehenge.
Yeah, like my wrist watch beeps when it's the solstice, why would I carry all that rock?
Everyone believes that the people before them were morons and that the greats of their youth represent a golden age lost forever to the sands of time. It's almost like there isn't any reason to be teaching inductive proofs because they ain't applying it.
We'll get another stone age before you know it!
I personally hope that the world won't ever create a publication like the Economist again.
What a BS sentiment but I guess if money is the only goal in life, then what doesn't make a direct profit isn't worth doing. So yes, if money is the only measure of whether something is worth doing or not, then Wikipedia won't be recreated since the volunteers contributing are not doing it for the money.
Wikipedia PR campaign much?
Without even reading the article - seems to ignore the probability of a reset of civilization through nuclear war, climate change, pandemic or a Gibson "jackpot".
"project like Wikipedia" is so vague I'm sure it is already being written
Is Wikipedia about sharing knowledge, or do I miss something
How many decades do we need to go back where the consensus on a wikipedesque project would be "Humans will never create anything like that!" ?
Not with this attitude.
the phrase 'Humans will never again...' is just enough to signal one not to continue reading anything in this article.
Rage bait article?
"Access is temporarily restricted"
Well ...
These are also the geniuses who thought Fukuyama was right when he declared the end of history.
The comcept of the end of history, including Fukuyama's thesis, is an interesting intellectual topic, and I would argue that it's become even more interesting and relevant with the threat that AI could become.
AI would need projects like this to harvest human knowledge so...
Not enough humans even care about the snake eating its own tail. We are rapidly approaching post-truth.
maybe the headline is not a statement but a demand
The paywall here is hilariously ironic. Indeed, the humans at economist will never release something free like Wikipedia!
I wish people would never again create websites like the economist, or all kind of yellow press bs
we literally have youtube, the most complete knowledge corpus in human history
you mean Reddit.
You mean the Internet Archive.
AI, however ...
I'm glad. Wikipedia has never aligned with scientific philosophers on what is and isn't worth believing (e.g. citation standards). This dissuades many scientists from contributing and universities from trusting the platform. Its ubiquity serves to damage the scientific forum, and empowers not the educated scientist or the layman, but the small wealthy group dictating the rules of citation for their own empowerment and political footing.
AI makes possible a replacement that might be more deeply founded in scientific philosophy, and more strictly curated. Things that humans have proven are very difficult.
>Its ubiquity serves to damage the scientific forum, and empowers not the educated scientist or the layman, but the small wealthy group dictating the rules of citation for their own empowerment and political footing.
Hi, I am having trouble understanding this. Do you have any additional context or articles describing this take?
Kind regards and thank you for your time.
Sure. Check the Wikipedia rules for citation. Primary sources are all but prohibited. (See Wikipedia for details.)
This violates the principles of empiricism. If I state as a matter of empirical fact that you've asked a question and I refer someone else to your question for viewing as evidence that you did in fact do so, that's what we call a primary source. This is logically the best evidence of a fact, still according to the most modern principles of scientific philosophy. (See Locke, Hume, etc. Or search "scientific empiricism" and follow philosophers into modern time to see that this principle is widely agreed upon in the forum.)
Conversely Wikipedia establishes that it's better for me to instead cite the BBC or other news outlet (secondary source) for their opinion about your question, rather than use a primary source.
Implicitly, contribution is confined to a strict subset of sources, especially those controlled by a small group of corporations and colored by interpretation rather than those exhibiting empirical fact.
More importantly, this is logically unscientific.
Wikipedia was made from the free labor of IT admin staff and disabled people, both had free time in a typical day to build and curate it.
If I were to make wikipedia today it would contain only bullet pointed facts with sources for each. Articles would have unlimited length. Pagination if an article gets over a million lines.
No exceptions.
An absolute source and collation of human truth.
> disabled people
Writ broadly. Last time I looked into who was editing Wikipedia on my own academic discipline, it was several people who had an obsessive autistic fixation on the subject, but whose autism was apparently so socially debilitating they couldn't gain employment, not even in academia with its somewhat greater accommodation for oddballs. The upside is that they could channel their interest productively into WP. The downside of this is as outsiders to a field where much consensus is found only at real-life conferences and lecture handouts, their info was often years behind the state of the art (and, of course, WP demands that citations be to secondary sources, even if obsolete).
On the bright side, as encyclopedias go that's much more up to date than my parents' World Book from the 1960s or even my CD of Encarta 1996.
Sounds like some MAGA bros I am friends with who were telling me in 2024 that Democrats would "never" take power again.
Making "never" predictions is a dangerous game, especially when you are talking about human beings doing something they already did in the past.
I suppose humans will never again create a project quite like the old printed encyclopedias, either ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I keep them around. Harder for state and corporate propagandists to fight over twisting the truth.
They don't need to. Wikipedia proved decentralization and community moderation works.
Next problem. The article hints at it, but the paywall is my immediate concern.
Never is a long time. The economist, come on.
the titles statement is bombastic even by current standards where the trifecta of nialism, narcisism and nostalgia are the characteristics found in so many of our 'leading voices'
What, captured and censored?
Sorry for the snark and I welcome my downvotes. But Sanger isn't wrong about what he's said about it
Humans already created the superior Grokipedia[0].
For every Wikipedia article, Grokipedia has a better one.
0. https://grokipedia.com/
Why do people even entertain this idea lol.
Economists (not the website) and accurate predictions are two very different things, first.
The economists, the website site, second.
Humans will never fly, etc. Third.
(Extra point for the paywall).
paywall; dr
Isn't this rather rich, though? the internet itself is a collaborative project - even TCP/IP is. I have a hard time imagining a cogent argument for why cooperation is dead.
I think we're mainly missing some legal framework. For instance, suppose we stopped allowing social media companies to borg our content. Require open access to all SM content, make anti-inter-op illegal. Yes, it's true that SM companies spend a lot to provide "free" services, but I'd claim that it does not follow that the necessary consequence is walled gardens. That thinking dates from prehistory, when computers and networking were, you know, expensive.
Sad hyper-end stage capitalists (economist.com) see only their own reflection, and cannot fathom why people would donate time to help each other and humanity.
Wikipedia has been an excellent resource for LLMs, and seems to be one of their prime resources. Make of that what you will.
And before that it was the #1 result for most Google searches.
Not "most searches." Wikipedia was (probably still is!) the the most common #1 result.
"#1 result for most searches" would mean 50% of all searches would have Wikipedia up top, and no site clears that bar.
That’s incorrect. If there are 10 websites competing for #1, Wikipedia could show up twice in 11 searches while the others showed up once.
"#1 result for most searches" would literally mean that I could take all the searches for a given day, then find a 50%+1 subset that all have the same top result. There is no such top result.
The word you're looking for is plurality.
Don't tell me, tell the guy who said "most!"
I'm so damn tired of the drama. Who's it serve? Dario and Sams' soggy butts.
Please enough already, this is more synthesizers. What we really have to be concerned about is fascism, xenophobia and climate change.
ummm has anyone even heard of the arrstack lol
See also the New Yorker today: "The Death Knell of Digital Search" https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/the-death-...
"Humans will never again create a project like Wikipedia" aaaaaand it's paywalled. The irony.
Gift link: https://www.economist.com/culture/2026/10/29/humans-will-nev...
Doesn't work. Guessing gift links only allow a limited number of views?
Huh, yeah I guess so
I predict the opposite: Humans will collectively create something like an LLM, but curated. That will be next level for Wikipedia-like project.
Think about it - LLM is just a computer program that predicts a next word. So it has a very detailed, formal description of each concept it can represent in its residual vector.
I think humans will understand (perhaps with AI help) these formal descriptions and put them into a giant database.
You say, building ontologies with a specific intent will actually lead to intelligence at a similar level of current AI?
This would be a severe blow to the bitter lesson, and generally vindicate the AI researchers of the 80s that put a bet on symbolic processing
Well, the ontologies are there inside LLMs, humans just don't know them. There is nothing that contradicts with bitter lesson to what I said.