Comment by throwaway2037
17 hours ago
> The same thing is happening to Wikipedia
Can you explain? I am read-only there and it seems better than ever. Even in the era of LLMs, Wiki is still an awesome source.
17 hours ago
> The same thing is happening to Wikipedia
Can you explain? I am read-only there and it seems better than ever. Even in the era of LLMs, Wiki is still an awesome source.
Wikipedia's traffic (and donations) are collapsing. https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/10/17/new-user-trends-on-wik...
People don't like to think of it this way, but Wikipedia is funded by ads. Except, the ads only advertise one thing: requests for donations. If people don't visit Wikipedia, because the AI regurgitated Wikipedia's answers, they won't see Wikipedia's donation ads, and they won't donate.
Over time, if current trends continue, more and more people won't even know about Wikipedia. They won't have any "warm feeling" towards the project, because they never go there, they never use it, they never see what good it does them.
Doesn’t WMF hold hundreds of million and growing on their foundation balance sheet, and raise $150M+/year through donations when hosting expenses are $4M/year?
Obviously they need staff and more costs than just hosting, but something isn’t adding up for me, so I stopped donating.
I feel exactly the same. I think I saw a blog post on HN with a deep analysis of their financial state of affairs. They don't need my money. They can run for a long time by (1) reducing unnecessary headcount (the org is way too big) and (2) carefully managing their endowment.