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

One way we can make Wikipedia better is by adding interactive graphs. We
have built software to allow about 2,000 of these on all sorts of topics to
be integrated into Wikipedia. A bunch can be seen on Commons:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:List_of_interactive_data_graphics

Today we have rolled out code to add initial machine translation support to
the SVG translation tool. For example:

https://svgtranslate.toolforge.org/File:Per_capita_energy_use,_World,_1965.svg

By translating one SVG an interactive graph can be fully translated into
any language. The source of these graphs, Our World in Data, is only in
English. We are also developing tools to make keeping these graphs updated
much simpler.

Many folks within our movement are innovating :-) Best
James


On Thu, Apr 30, 2026 at 11:43 AM Michael Snow via Wikimedia-l <
[email protected]> wrote:

> 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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-- 
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian

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