Comment by Viliam1234
8 hours ago
> The article creation [...] growing at a slightly declining pace, which is expected since the amount of knowledge is finite.
Not just because of that, but they also made the process of creating new articles very hostile.
Decades ago, when Wikipedia started, it was possible to create a short article, and as long as no one objected against it, it stayed there, and people could later expand it. That's what "wiki" was supposed to mean.
Today, you need to create an article in a separate "Draft" namespace, then a random Wikipedia editor will judge it, and if it is not perfect (e.g. does not have enough references), it cannot be published. And if you don't fix it by a certain date, it gets automatically deleted. (Rather than leaving it there for someone else to hopefully improve.)
I tried to make an article for an author whose books my kids liked. His books were translated to many languages, he won a few awards, and now some company has bought movie rights for the books. Alas, I have failed to establish notability sufficiently in my short article, so it was rejected. The editor didn't even have to argue that the author is not notable (which would be silly, a google search clearly shows otherwise), only that my article failed to establish it. So the official policy now kinda says that it is better to have no article rather than an imperfect one.
Well, I am not getting paid for producing perfect articles for Wikipedia, which means there is no way for me to contribute anymore. Too bad, I have created a few articles long ago.
The old Wikipedia had more information on obscure Pokemon than major politicians, and you could add PowerThirst as an energy drink and not have it reverted for weeks.
There was something good and glorious about that, but that era is gone. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow are done, finished, cooked - what comes next?
Quora had a lot more arrogant mods, but a much shorter peak when it was useful. Now it’s not even worth for AI models to train on its content, it’s even worse than expert-sex-change, the site that was so bad in incentivized SO’s creation.
I still remember when quora was launched and people claimed it was more welcoming for open-ended questions, when it was obvious from day one it was the opposite, extremely hostile to any newcomers. It actually more appeared to be mostly a community of assholes that was expelled from SO.
Q&A sites in the age of LLMs are dead.