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A comment on Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summaries and social video. Parent comment

Re:Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summar... by bawolff on Tuesday October 21, 2025 @06:14PM (#45662407)
Remember that time in feb 2005 when Wikipedia went down for several days and lost about a week of data because there was a power failure and they were too shoe strings to have proper back ups, and also had disabled a bunch of ACID features in mysql to get the last bit of performance out of mysql causing the power failure to corrupt the db, because they didn't have enough money for more servers and were desperate to try anything to get the last bit of performance out of their servers?

No? That's because it doesn't happen anymore now that WMF has a reasonable budget.

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Re:Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summar... by papichulo2023 on Tuesday October 21, 2025 @07:46PM (#45663229)
How many comments did you write on this thread to justify Wikipedia's expenses? I counted at least 6.
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Re:Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summar... by bawolff on Wednesday October 22, 2025 @03:23AM (#45665847)
Its actually kind of ironic given i don't think WMF is particulary well managed or effective in its spending. I just think most of the criticisms of WMF spending are kind of terrible.
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Re:Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summar... by nitwit005 on Tuesday October 21, 2025 @06:24PM (#45662500)
That doesn't mean their spending money on what the people donating want. Most people seem to want to donate to keep Wikipedia running, but that is not necessarily where the money actually goes.
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Re:Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summar... by loeg on Tuesday October 21, 2025 @10:55PM (#45664441)
There are like 3 orders of magnitude of budget difference; I'm sure a happy middle ground could be found. Even going back to 2010's budget would save $160M/year and still be 17x 2005's budget.
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Re:Wikipedia says traffic is falling due to AI search summar... by episode404 on Wednesday October 22, 2025 @05:36AM (#45666722)
This is by far the worst defense I have ever read for why wikipedia needs a $200m budget.
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