Wikipedia eventually failed.

What do you mean? It's one of the most popular sites

I won't call it dead, but it is declining. Their various sources of traffic are now regurgitating Wikipedia Content (and other 3rd party sources) via uncited/unlinked AI "blurbs"...instead of presenting snippets of Wikipedia contents with links to Wikipedia to read more.

It's not the only reason their traffic is declining, but it seems like a big one.

Who cares if the traffic is declining? I don’t find Wikipedia useful because it gets lots of visits, I find it useful for the information it contains.

The problem has more to do with editors. The theory is that less visits leads to less editors in the long run.

I may be wrong, but I don’t think the people that edit Wikipedia are the same people that are content with half truths from LLMs and thus no longer visiting the site. So I kinda doubt it matters much.

That’s certainly true for stack overflow, but in their case the moderators were very active in getting the negative feedback loop going.

Also, Stack Overflow is a commercial website, while Wikipedia is a free (as in freedom) project. Editing Wikipedia feels like you're contributing towards "an ideal", that you're giving back something to humanity, instead of just helping somebody else getting richer.

Visits drive revenue. Declining traffic is declining revenue. Not an issue yet, but eventually...

I saw statistics somewhere that Wikipedia ALREADY has enough money for centuries of work (if it stops spending them on promoting wokeism).

People have been talking about wikipedia's decline since like 2008. It seems fine.

That's just plain old citogenesis[0][1], and has been in play for at least two decades, so I don't think it's any evidence of decline.

[0] https://xkcd.com/978/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_...

It's still working for me?

Interesting example, as Google used to link to Wikipedia much more prominently, then stopped doing that, which dropped Wikipedia's visitor counts a lot. A very large percentage of Wikipedia's visits are Google referrals.

Google shifted views that used to go to Wikipedia first to their in-house knowledge graph (high percentages of which are just Wikipedia content), then to the AI produced snippets.

All to say, yes...Wikipedia's generosity with outbound links is part of the popularity. But they still get hit by this "engagement" mentality from their traffic sources.

I would argue that this is less an example of why linking out may be bad for engagement and more an example of google abusing its intermediary/market position to keep users on their own pages longer

I'd argue that a user not having to click through is clearly a better result for the user, and that alone would be sufficient motivation to do it.

In terms of a single search, I don't think Google really benefits from preventing a click-through - the journey is over once the user has their information. If anything, making them click through to an ad-infested page would probably get a few fractions of a cent extra given how deeply Google is embedded in the ads ecosystem.

But giving the user the result faster means they're more likely to come back when they need the next piece of information, and give them more time to search for the next information. That benefits Google, but only because it benefits the user.

That'd be all fine if google produced that content, but since it doesn't, once they kill off the website, what happens to the quality of their snippets? Then the user has only shitty snippets that are out of date.

That's the kind if short-sighted view that's the root issue in a ton of enshittification happening around: the belief that short-term gains or benefits are all it's about. It's not sustainable to leech off of wikipedia content to fuel your own (ad in Google's) knowledge pop-ups, even if it benefits the user in that they save a single click, because that means long-term wikipedia will die out because users no longer associate the knowledge gained with wikipedia but with Google even though they had nothing to do with it apart from "stealing it".

In my niche these links are all going to indian scam sites for years and years. Right now can google "taehyung" one of the largest kpop idols and see it live. Count the indian links that have been dominating without any particular expertise thanks to google's changes (indian scammer site kickbacks etc)