Comment by Borgz
1 day ago
As it is, Grokipedia is not a threat to Wikipedia because relative to Wikipedia, almost nobody is using it.
Additionally, an encyclopedia reader likely cares about accuracy significantly more than average.
1 day ago
As it is, Grokipedia is not a threat to Wikipedia because relative to Wikipedia, almost nobody is using it.
Additionally, an encyclopedia reader likely cares about accuracy significantly more than average.
I remember when Fox News was considered irrelevant compared to mainstream news outlets. Don’t underestimate the reach of billionaires with an ideological agenda.
> Don’t underestimate the reach of billionaires with an ideological agenda.
Or the audience's need to have their wrong opinions validated.
Fox News has been the #1 rated cable news network for over two decades. They've had more viewers than CNN and MSNBC for most of their existence. Calling them anything other than "mainstream" is just supporting their propaganda. They've always branded themselves as the scrappy outsider because it plays well with their audience, not because it reflects reality.
Yes, and I’m talking about the time before that, when experts doubted whether Fox could survive. (I’m old.)
> Fox News has been the #1 rated cable news network for over two decades.
Yeah, but cable news only displaced local and broadcast TV news as the main news source after 9/11, and already by 2010 had itself been displaced by online media. There was only a very brief moment in history where "the #1 rated cable news network" was really an indicator of being a mainstream news source.
> As it is, Grokipedia is not a threat to Wikipedia because relative to Wikipedia, almost nobody is using it.
For now. With a little collusion, and a lot of money, it can be pushed as the front page of the internet.
What are you going to do if Google and Bing are convinced to rank its bullshit over Wikipedia?
Most people don't change the defaults.
> For now. With a little collusion, and a lot of money, it can be pushed as the front page of the internet.
I know it has come up near the front of at least one of my Kagi searches, because it's now on my blocklist.
Yup, same for DuckDuckGo.
It would arguably be a benefit to Wikipedia to be pulled from Google search results, since Google prominence is the root of a huge fraction of all the misbehavior on the site.
If nobody ever finds the website, there will be no misbehavior. Genius.
Obviously, people would continue to go to "Wikipedia", and the encyclopedia itself wouldn't be hidden from Google, but Wikipedia pages on arbitrary subjects wouldn't be at the top of search rankings simply by dint of being Wikipedia pages.
Security through obscurity!
Nah. Wikipedia is popular because it is the #1 search result for a lot of stuff. Most of people going there just want to look up something for a homework assignment, online argument, or whatever. If Grokipedia has an error rate 5%, compared to 1% for Wikipedia, it's probably still fine.
If Wikipedia traffic shrinks down just to the true "encyclopedia reader" crowd, they will be in trouble, because I suspect that's less than 10% of their current donations. And Grokipedia is already starting to crop up in search results.
Wikipedia has an endowment big enough to sustain the site's basic maintenance, essentially forever. If donations disappeared then they would have to severely cut spending, however, I don't think it would be an existential threat.