Re: Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call (essay)

On 4/29/2026 10:07 PM, Luis Villa via Wikimedia-l wrote:
> I would go a much different direction. After the 1st quarter, *our 
> strategic process has to start by asking the hardest possible 
> question: what if "reading an encyclopedia" is mostly over, like 
> reading a print newspaper?* In other words, what if our long-term 
> on-wiki readership graph looks like this one? 
> https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/fact-sheet/newspapers/

A "print newspaper" is not a valid apples-to-apples comparison, because 
that phrase combines both the medium and the message and means the data 
can be dragged down by the limitations of either, or both. The graphs 
after the first, which leave some hope for the industry in digital 
subscriptions (hence the proliferation of paywalls in recent years), 
suggest that the medium is the greater factor in that instance. Having 
myself been part of a "newspaper" that has never seen the printed page, 
I would agree. However, as a free knowledge project there are also 
limits to what we can learn from commercial media, and I'm not 
suggesting subscriptions are the answer.

We seem to have two leading theories to explain our trend. One is more 
about the medium, that there is a transition from text to audiovisuals. 
The other is more about the message, that information backed by human 
authorship is losing ground to synthetically generated equivalents. 
Either way, the premise is that we have fallen behind somehow. Both may 
even have a certain truth to them, but if we ask thoughtful questions 
and have the appropriate data, it should be possible to tease out how 
much explanatory power they really have.

Ultimately, focusing on traffic means that the underlying issue is 
information discovery online. If you analyze in the direction of the 
medium, the challenge is the rise of social media as represented by 
TikTok or Instagram. If you analyze in the direction of the message, the 
challenge is the rise of artificial intelligence as represented by 
ChatGPT or Claude. What they share in common, with particular relevance 
to us, is a bias away from links - they rarely provide any but also rely 
on them less for their own discovery, utilizing apps/embedding/autoplay 
instead. The wiki meanwhile has long relied on the link above all else, 
both as the core of its internal structure and the entry point for its 
audience. Given that, I think there are difficult questions we need to 
ask. Like, what does a path to a different core technology look like for 
us? And, should we get there, what would we still retain of what we 
started with?

The internet is at least middle-aged by now, so it has a decently long 
history of disintermediation. We are clearly in a significant period of 
it at present. I believe for a long time, our leading source of 
discovery has been referrals from search, fittingly enough for link 
technology. If search is being disintermediated, we should think about 
what other sources of discovery for the wiki that we can create or 
promote. But I do wonder, supposing we need some response to the impact 
of generative AI for us in discovery - how would using generative AI on 
the content creation side change the discovery equation for us at all?

(The medium and the message can also cross-pollinate, but I don't 
believe that is a particularly critical factor here. If anyone disagrees 
on that point, they're welcome to demonstrate their case, but I suspect 
it would simply illustrate that there exists an opposing trend to "print 
newspaper".)

--Michael Snow

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