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

Sure.


--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

בתאריך יום א׳, 3 במאי 2026, 03:36, מאת Christophe Henner via Wikimedia-l ‏<
[email protected]>:

> That's a good idea, I started that there :
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now/a-plan
> If you think of a better place on meta, just move it. And I started with
> my initial content so that we can link to that version if we ever want to
> but feel free to change everything.
>
> @Amir are you ok with me copying our discussion on the meta talk page and
> answering there?
>
> --
> Christophe
>
>
> On Sat, 2 May 2026 at 20:05, Steven Walling via Wikimedia-l <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
>>
>> On Thu, Apr 30, 2026 at 3:10 PM Christophe Henner via Wikimedia-l <
>> [email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> If I may, I think we need to be much more aggressive in how we address
>>> the situation. And I'm not saying we don't need interactive graphs, we
>>> should have had them years ago, but we need to go further than that.
>>>
>>> The way we grew is by having one product for each "vertical"
>>> (encyclopedia, pictures, data, thesaurus/dictionary, quotes, books,
>>> lessons). And that product is at the same time the content production
>>> platform for editors and the distribution system.
>>>
>>> I believe our mission is twofold: curating/maintaining content AND
>>> making it available. For years, one product was good enough-ish to do both,
>>> but not any longer.
>>>
>>> Distribution is being eaten by AI summaries, featured snippets, and
>>> social platforms. The production side works but is far from being optimal
>>> and we always need to be mindful of both.
>>>
>>> But, if you start considering it first as a production platform, it
>>> unlocks many things and one that becomes magic, the authorization to break
>>> it. The ability to lower our expectations on "perfection" (and tech teams
>>> are mostly delivering quite stable code for such a platform). But that
>>> comes at a cost, speed. It also comes at the cost of piling "problems"
>>> like... mobile editing.
>>>
>>> I now believe that pretending one product can keep doing both is how we
>>> sleepwalk into irrelevance.
>>>
>>> Anyway, I, and many others!, have some very long-term, very theoretical
>>> ideas on the evolution of distribution, but change needs to happen fast and
>>> we do have available quick wins. Not saying those are perfect, but it's to
>>> share what it could look like.
>>>
>>> *Three principles:*
>>>
>>>    1. *Human running the loop is our number one value.* Wikimedia
>>>    projects are great, but we have also successfully created something bigger:
>>>    communities that across topics, languages, and geographies share a vision
>>>    on what quality is. Even with the differences across projects, this is our
>>>    biggest achievement. No AI system can replicate community-validated
>>>    knowledge with editorial accountability. That's our moat. Not the content
>>>    itself, but the human process behind it.
>>>    2. *We are techy nerds and we need to act like it again.* We
>>>    leveraged that identity first with wikis, then with Wikidata, then with
>>>    ORES (we started working on machine learning in 2015 if I remember
>>>    correctly!). We need to stop protecting ourselves from technology and make
>>>    it work for us. Invest in innovation truly. Not as gadget but as our
>>>    edge... like we did in 2001.
>>>    3. *Invest in ourselves.* I know this is "controversial" but if we
>>>    want to be relevant in the future, we need to stop chasing our own tails
>>>    and frowning every time we talk about investment. As a movement, we have
>>>    resources available or obtainable. We need to get back into a shape where
>>>    we trust ourselves to invest in ourselves. This is easier said than done,
>>>    and a lot of things need to happen. But they are needed.
>>>
>>> *Three things that can be started tomorrow:*
>>>
>>>    1. *Decide that our projects are production platforms.* The core of
>>>    our investment and focus should be to make them as efficient and useful to
>>>    all communities as possible. Distribution is a separate problem that needs
>>>    separate solutions.
>>>    2. *Put Wikidata and Commons (and Wikifunctions) front and center as
>>>    core resources.* I know not all projects are enthusiastic about them
>>>    but we do need to work that out because they are each in their own way the
>>>    best way to mutualize resources and work across projects. This needs to be
>>>    a clear goal and to find out how we make it happen properly together for
>>>    each projects.
>>>    3. *Unleash capacities.* Two clear areas of investment:
>>>       - *The production platform.* I know we've been focused on using
>>>       MediaWiki everywhere. But maybe (or maybe not I'm not the expert) it is
>>>       time to consider that it may not be the case anymore and build capacity to
>>>       develop and maintain other product lines. And yes it will mean investment
>>>       and let go, but sometimes, and, I may be wrong, I feel like we're dragging
>>>       Mediawiki a bit at the sweat of some insanely dedicated engineers (perhaps
>>>       Mediawiki is the perfect software but I doubt it).
>>>       - *AI for editors.* We need to embrace AI, and I know this is a
>>>       complex decision. AI-assisted translation across linguistic versions,
>>>       AI-powered content gap detection, AI drafts for stub articles reviewed by
>>>       humans, AI assistants to help newcomers to navigate rules, CI/CD for our
>>>       content to make content reviewing able to absorb high volume of AI slopes
>>>       without exhausting users.. The boundaries are to be defined, but we can't
>>>       define them without the capacity to experiment. The technical teams and
>>>       community have built a lot of very cool tools and infrastructure but we
>>>       need to double down. Make it friendlier, easier, more well known, AND with
>>>       real AI capabilities made available. Without that, we won't be able to
>>>       experiment and finding out how to use AI in ways that work for us will take
>>>       ages.
>>>
>>> Those would be a start. With potential quick impact and results. If
>>> anything, the sheer clarity of the road ahead may be enough to move the
>>> needle and open up possibilities for the bigger (more exciting?) challenges
>>> ahead on the future of open knowledge.
>>>
>>> But this stub of a plan starts with a clear, strong decision, and the
>>> first one is to say we consider our projects to be production platforms.
>>> That needs to be made by the Board of Trustees.
>>>
>>> Perhaps it's not the best path. That is fine, but we need a plan and a
>>> path.
>>>
>>> Any plan with any remote chance to keep Wikimedia relevant starts with
>>> clear, strong, and bold decisions by the Board of Trustees. And the "new"
>>> Annual Plan is a continuation of the past. It's not opinionated. It's not
>>> laying a clear path, a clear direction. It feels like a non-decision
>>> relative to a -20% traffic drop YoY. It reads slow and safe. But no
>>> decision is also a decision. The worst one, but still a decision.
>>>
>>> The best time to move was four years ago. The second best time is right
>>> now.
>>> --
>>> Christophe
>>>
>>
>> I could not agree more strongly with this call to action and proposed
>> plan, Christophe. Shall we move this on wiki like Meta to flesh out more? I
>> would like to help refine this strategy and I think others would as well.
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Steven Walling
>>
>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, 30 Apr 2026 at 15:41, James Heilman via Wikimedia-l <
>>> [email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>>> 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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>>>
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>>
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