You might be surprised to learn that not all challenges are purely technological. The biggest challenges with such megaprojects are political, economical, and social. A Wikipedia clone is completely worthless if nobody is willing to contribute - it would just be an empty database!

As an aside. When the Eifel Tower was built it was considered tacky by many and assumed to be temporary. Maybe some of the most remembered things of our time will be taken for granted. Maybe some huge data center will be a museum.

Why doesn't it? The owner isn't buried in it?

> The biggest challenges with such megaprojects are political, economical, and social

Indeed; this is why we moved on from piling rocks in a formation that didn't fall down easily, and put all those things you list into cathederals, hydroelectric dams, the Apollo missions, etc.

Several hours later, I realise we have many things which would seem like much more impressive versions of the pyramids, in the event of the collapse of industrial civilisation followed by a second renaissance and future archeological digs looking at us as we looked upon the tombs of Tutankhamen: artificial hills made by covering landfill likely contain a lot more precious metal than a pharaoh's tomb.

Isn't that the point of TFA and this whole conversation?

"#1 result for most searches" would mean 50% of all searches would have Wikipedia up top, and no site clears that bar.

It’s not like choice is not there.

Regarding PHP, a small wiki or cms was always a starter project back in the day. For sure it’s a good way to wrap your head around a language and project

PHP can hosted in so many places for so cheap. It still has a place, like everything

2) You still have LAMP, even if the A is now often Nginx and the M Postgres. But that's besides the point, because several programming languages and web frameworks now come with their own built-in web-server for development, so you don't even need a stack to get started! This part is easier today.

Uh oh.

Wikipedia became popular despite its programming. Anyone who has ever tried to edit a Wiki page knows its editor is absolute garbage, for example. Want to create your own basic DIY wiki in 2026? Just set up a GitHub Pages which auto-accepts pull requests, you'll be up and running in less than 30 minutes.

Besides, nobody is forcing to to use the current programming paradigms. A classic LAMP stack will still work.

The economists, the website site, second.

Humans will never fly, etc. Third.

(Extra point for the paywall).

But the future will raise the bar. Perhaps we'll see wiki of wikis, or something else getting the web closer to truly semantic knowledge.

It’s not over… “OVER” but it’s sure feeling that we are heading there, though.

I won't post a link here, but check out KamTape.

without assuming such centralization, we end up with more distributed, even async networks. I'm not sure such a network would even need to be mainly supported by permanent hosts (like mastodon is). It could use more torrent-like ad-hoc mechanisms.

Good AI contributions are better than lazy crap or trolling from humans, right?

With AI there is an infinite stream of contributions to curate. No human is ever going to volunteer for that, so unless you keep AI contributions very tightly restricted you'll rapidly lose all human contributors. At which point nobody is left to ensure only good contributions get in, so it is only a matter of time before it devolves into a giant pile of crap.

Besides, who's going to pay to run those AIs? Good models aren't free, so you are effectively turning it into a pay-to-win project. You can be absolutely certain that some tech billionaires are going to burn a few million to have "good AI" constantly rewrite their pages the way they want it.

but worse than no contributions at all

> we'll just have to converge on the idea that quality is what matters.

for me it is not changed at all, just that volume of spam increased and it is now harder to detect

From your list, I think most were started 15-20+ years ago[1] so your argument isn't contradicting the original point.

* * *

[1] Both OSM and TV Tropes were started 22 years ago.

I don't know what the future will be, but the future people who live in it will know and they're going to do something. I can say that with confidence, even without knowing exactly what they're going to do.

Unless you have a political view to push. Visit Grokipedia today!

"Would you like to know more?"

”We should respect freedoms and not restrict them arbitrarily… except when I do not like the people using those freedoms.“

It is always a weird take to me. Pick a license that matches your preferences, like the GPL. Do not pick MIT/whatever and then complain when corps make use of the freedoms you afforded them.

But you can also take a noncommercial GPL software, slightly modify and put your logo and name on it, do some marketing and get cash out of it without contributing anything significant. You just can't make it proprietary. But it's still an unfair situation.

If you don't want your software used commercially, don't Open Source (or Free Software) it. Maybe a CC-NC license if you want to give it away for noncommercial use.

The rest of us will continue to use and make OSS and enjoy it without worrying about what others are doing with it.

But the GPL goes even further than that, and this appears to be the source of your confusion. The GPL stops people redistributing the software under terms that would restrict or prohibit use, including commercial use. The GPL guarantees that anyone receiving the software now or in the future has the same rights you have.

Companies like Microsoft with huge marketing departments hate the GPL because they don't like their users to be free. It's part of their business strategy to keep people locked in. That alone should tell you it's probably not for for you. Sadly you seem to have been taken by their bs, though.

Someone can absolutely fork your software and use it commercially. That's what FOSS is about: You shall not limit what other people can do with the software.

You may however restrict others from putting restrictions on derivative works of your software. That's what the GPL is all about. You enforce reciprocity and ensure that all works based on your software allow the user the essential freedoms of free software.

(Alternately, Google for people trying to get the full sourcecode to their Android phones from Samsung and see how difficult it can be).

Many human problems could be solved if humans were less willing to compromise with greedy people, but unfortunately authors are too nice in general to do that.

What does stick in the craw with many of us, however, is that Meta, Mapbox, and various other bigcos have nonetheless decided to disregard the attribution requirements of what is a fairly permissive licence, simply because they're sufficiently big that they can say to the OSM Foundation (annual turnover about £3.27) "suck it, we dare you to sue us".

It’s the same thing with freedoms

> younger generations raised on corporate platforms and their phone apps are less aware of non-corporate alternatives

All the new guys I work with are trapped in the app store/play store bubble. If it's not available directly through the device's software distribution system it's not getting used.

> might even be suspicious of libre and altruistic movements

All my boomer bosses think that anything that is outside the Windows/O365 ecosystem, or doesn't come with a $150 yearly license, is clearly pirate hacker software that will give your e-mail a virus and steal your bitcoin.

It is increasingly frustrating when we have a problem that could be fixed with GNU corutils and a bash script, or a raspberrypi/arduino translating between 2 serial devices, but we end up getting some $1500 black box from the 'official' vendor. It teaches the newer guys that step one is not to think about the problem, it's to grab your wallet and call a salesman.

</tangent>

It's the whole reason management consultancies exist. If Deloite tell you to do X, or Gartner say buy Y, and you do, you aren't going to have the blame. Even when you end up losing half a billion as our last CxO did, you'll just get a golden handshake and a move to another company.

Turn it all off, bury it in concrete, toss the concrete in a river and hurl the river into space, and maybe then IT will be happy with the security.

What would be a sensible fee to do support on 1000 lines of code you didn't write?

Of course, all the software in the distro repo is there because somebody went against this tendency.

I get why people might not be motivated to join us in the tragedy of the commons.

Then the project loses visibility to end users. I don't know if that is worth the occasional commercial contributions from them to satisfy their own requirements.

This post box is no longer there. "I'll drive round and check", "no need I'm stood there, it has gone". "I'll drive round tomorrow"...I got the impression i was on someone else's patch and gave up

But with regard to bodies of water, there are systems that monitor OSM and warn if someone has tried to "move them to the right place". These details were often added to OSM from professionally surveyed maps, so they are in the right place. However, ordinary people's consumer GPS is typically a few meters off, and they end up moving things to the inaccurate coordinates on their screens.

Meanwhile, the Dutch community also imports all official addresses, but there the tool simply allows for these to be used with other OpenStreetMap tags. It makes you wonder about the Danish approach.

Anecdotally, I’ve had a lot of experiences like this with newer generations of people on topics like open source software or community projects: They’ve been trained, usually by a social media niche, to believe that the only good fight is to actively harm corporations. Their idea of the world is a very clear black and white contrast with people on one side and corporations on the other.

Such a clean separation of the world only exists in ideas they get from social media and movies. Encountering a project like OSM or an open source project where the largest users (and for OSS, maybe the largest contributors) are people involved with corporations doesn’t fit into their worldview, so they file it in the “corporate” side of the divide and dislike it.

However on the other hand, it has been drilled into your head repeatedly that wanting compensation for work is "bad" and antithetical to social movements. You work for the whole, not for yourself. Besides, you (along with everyone else) gets to enjoy the fruits of others free work.

But then after dwelling on it, you realize that 90% of the people holding you to this ideology aren't contributing much if anything at all, and just gorging themselves on the work of a few.

So now you either consolidate power into your hands (nazi mods), lose motivation (project decays), or become an "evil" capitalist(start charging money for access).

You can be compensated by "gorging" on other open-source that you haven't contributed to, working outside OSS, or asking for funding to keep working or work more. But if you work privately, you're competing against someone who will work publicly, while limiting someone else who would like to use your private work but can't afford it (like you can't afford others).

You never hear about them but there are also invitation only communities where contributing is required. The benefits are not shared outside.

Any ideology built on this premise is doomed to failure. Successful movements are ones that align the particular interests of individuals with the broader goals of the community.

Dogmas that set individual interest and public interest at odds with each other will always debilitate the effectiveness of the entire movement, and subject it to never-ending internal conflict.

The free software/open source ecosystem has successfully demonstrated how public-interest idealism and for-profit commercial pursuits can not just coexist, but actually complement and reinforce each other. Anyone who's arguing for one side of the ecosystem in opposition to the other is asking for the entire thing to collapse.

This is something I've noticed as well.

- Movies made after WWII that needed villians often made them Nazis.

- During the cold war, evil villians were communists or Soviet spies.

- Movies made after the fall of the Soviet Union often make their villians evil faceless corporations.

A generation or two has been raised by Hollywood and Disney on business always being evil, while simultaneoulsy choosing to consume and make themselves dependent on giant corporate content.

It’s fascinatingly devilish, isn’t it? They control the outrage and profit from it. I’m reminded of Bill Hicks’ bit on marketing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0

We’ve been very lucky that the incentive structure has them doing a lot of useful things for us, but that doesn’t mean we have to be happy about having so much of our lives being ruled by these amoral aliens.

Oh hollywood and disney, not the behaviour of Standard Oil, DeBeers, Nestle, Coca Cola, banks in the sub-prime mortgage crisis, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, OPEC, DuPont, Chemie Grünenthal, an "epidemic" of wage theft in America estimated in the tens of billions per year, the trends towards enshittification, nickel-and-diming, rent-extraction and grifting of most products and services over time, health insurance companies, the lived experience of millions of workers being devalued, insulted, and treated like cattle?

Or maybe they just feel that corporations are actively trying to harm them and this is the logical response?

I don't think that's unfair at this point.

So I don't know that it's fair? Nearly all the material goods around me and a ton of services were provided by corporations, which are largely composed of regular people glued together at scale by bureacracy.

Correction:

Stop buy stuff.

My issue would be with the corporations, which I see as the new estates. Except that they are far larger and far more powerful than what we had two centuries ago. Their perks include: regulatory capture, political access, access to finance. Ie powerful corporations run the infrastructure for capital movement and consumption - in their interests.

Free market competition makes sense. Lowest prices.

What we see right now in the USA, though, is a mafia. That has nothing to do with capitalism as such. It is a racket, a ponzi scheme. There are many variants of capitalism. Even the chinese adapted their variant to sinomarxistic ideals (to certain extent; I don't think today's main China is purely capitalistic nor purely sinomarxistic as it once used to be).

> Capitalists hate capitalism. They don’t want to be exposed to the risks entailed by competition, and feel the goad of that insecurity. They want monopolies, or platforms, or monopoly platforms. They want assets, not businesses.

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-capitalists-hate-...

Government intervention is the principal mechanism by which powerful participants restrain other partipants' market activity, and insulate themselves from competition.

So there is no theory/practice distinction here, because there is no applicable theory -- it's all just a description of manifest reality. Markets just are ecosystems of people engaging in value-for-value exchange with each other, and competition just is an inherent characteristic of them that's observable in reality.

> What happens in practice is that one or a small set of participants become big enough to shut others out through all sorts of tactics including locking suppliers and customers into exclusive contracts, buying out competitors, paying for ads and headlines about customers, etc., etc.

Negotiating exclusive contracts is a way of securing long-term business from a customer, motivated by a desire to prevent the customer from defecting to a competitor -- naturally, customers don't sign such agreements unless there's something in it for them.

Buying out competitors is only possible if there are competitors to buy out, which means there aren't barriers to entry, and other firms can target your weaknesses, which you're seeking to compensate for by gaining the market position of a firm that's been successful at doing so. If you can't maintain that position, someone else will fill it -- if they couldn't then the competitor you're acquiring couldn't have done it in the first place.

Paying for ads is a method of trying to win customers' business in a competitive environment. If you didn't have competition, you wouldn't need to advertise.

Everything you're listing here are methods by which firms engage in competition with each other. Every single item on your list is a tactic used by firms because they are in a competitive environment.

It's not "a competitive environment" just because it's legal to found a company if anticompetitive tactics are allowed.

You can start a railroad, but if the big existing railroads that already have lines running to the cities and factories refuse to let you connect to their service, your company has no hope of surviving.

You can start a factory making paperclips, but if the incumbent has billions of dollars in reserves and can afford to sell at a loss or barely above cost you will never be able to grow and thrive.

You can make a lot more money talking to your competitors and agreeing to fix prices or to each operate in regions that happen to not overlap, eliminating competition.

You can tell customers that if they want to buy product X that they want, they have to buy a bundle that includes Y, meaning that any competitors to Y are bound to fail since customers are already buying that version anyway.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. "History of antitrust" will give you any number of real world examples.

Unchecked Capitalism always leads to Mono/Duopolies aka Mafia. The best of both World is maybe called Social-direct-democratic-capitalism.

>What we see right now in the USA, though, is a mafia. That has nothing to do with capitalism as such.

Has everything to do with unchecked Capitalism, go too far and both extremes end in a ~Monopoly, in Socialism/Communism it's mostly the State (China, USSR, Cuba etc.) in Capitalism a massive conglomerate of Enterprises (S.Korea, again "new" China, Russia, USA, India)

But he also wasn't interested in major political change.

So we've got something that I'm surprised Europeans don't recognize; state-backed champions and heavy government intervention in various markets, and almost total free markets in sectors that the government doesn't really care about. But at no point can any one company or industry even attempt to undermine the central authority, because Deng wanted to get China out of the economic gutter, not lose power.

But the issue is not about corporations - or companies - per se.

The issue is how they relate to the general population. You can have good corporations and bad corporations. When billionaires buy legislation then something is wrong. When a corrupt elite invades countries and kills people - that's bad.

The problem of "billionaires buying legislation" is that billionaires get money from market activity to buy it with, not that it's up for sale by politicians or that the limits on the scope of legislation are insufficient?

When a military force marches into another country, that's the work of a vague "corrupt elite" and not the political officials in charge of the military?

Shock horror, people tend to care most about things that they feel personally affect them.

Samesame after a while if unchecked, just play cyberpunk 2077 ;)

So even when these people have turned into a broken clock about being anti-corporate to the point that they’re anti-open-projects, someone will always come along to explain why we everything is the fault of corporations. A normal working class person can not be faulted for their beliefs in this model, because every fault will be transformed into something that can be blamed on a corporation.

Personally I find the erasure of individual thought in this model to be demeaning. You can’t blame everything every individual does on corporations having either made them do it or forced them to believe it through their actions. At some point we have to admit that people’s thoughts and actions are their own.

If someone becomes so bitter that they’re becoming anti-OSM or anti-Wikipedia or anti-OSS, I’m fully okay with holding them to account for their chosen beliefs.

> Personally I find the erasure of individual thought in this model to be demeaning.

The fact that you are describing a behavior that you believe to be shared among a sizable group of people seems to contradict your claim that their beliefs are due to individual failings rather than some broader social forces that caused them to believe these things, no?

The historical left/marxist view is essentially: look at someone's social context and where their money comes from, and you'll know how they probably think. The American ideology is: everyone is an individual and a tramp can be a philosopher.

The second is much more appealing to us as individuals, and to our sense of self-determination and independence. And people do have agency---some people succumb to despair, others don't; some work hard, some don't; some rebound from setbacks, some don't.

But if you look at large groups of people, the first one starts to have strong explanatory power. Look at US coverage of foreign elections, and that second view is almost all you see.

US coverage of foreign elections can't indulge in personality based coverage or leverage the audience's in-built understanding of culture and politics, so you get broad statements about how urban professionals voted for party X but the rural poor voted for party Y.

I think GP pretty clearly states it's due to broader social forces:

> They’ve been trained, usually by a social media niche

I don't think that was a complicated point, but maybe you think you were asking something else, while trying to still blame whatever "social forces" TikTok has told you to blame.

I’m responding primarily to this sentiment:

> At some point we have to admit that people’s thoughts and actions are their own.

I generally find that placing blame on individuals for views that one believes are wrong is not constructive. Clearly there are reasons that they believe the things that they do, and this is especially true when you disagree not with an individual but with an entire group.

Of course anyone is free to get angry at anyone else for their individual beliefs, and I believe that individually people’s minds can be changed. But blaming individuals _who you have never met_ for behaviors that you are stereotyping from an entire group seems wholly unproductive. This is not going to change the group’s minds, and is only going to make you bitter.

When discussing group behavior, it only makes sense to discuss things that influence the whole group.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood

The problem isn't "corporations", it's capitalism. The economic system forces corporations to behave in anti-social ways.

Similar goes with the trope you peddle, individuals were to blame. They're not. The system they live in, and never had any say in shaping, forces them to engage in behaviors short term that ultimately run counter to their own interests long term.

Contributing to open source software or commons like Wikipedia definitely is questionable. Those contributions get monopolized and their benefits privatized. That's not a "belief".

Which bits do you object to? The idea that people should be able to form going concerns that outlive any individuals (e.g. investing in the construction of a fishing boat)? That several individuals should be able to share in the risk and profit of such a venture (e.g. a group investing in the construction, and receiving shares of the profit of each catch)? Or that they should be able to hire others on a free market for a wage or share of profits (e.g. hiring a crew for the boat)? Or that if they should have a dispute, there should be a formal, legal, process to resolve it?

The trouble is that there is no human system in which the agents who distribute the resources are perfectly aligned with the agents to whom resources are distributed. This is nowhere more obvious than in the planning, execution, and communication, failures of the Soviet Union. This is a general case of the alignment problem, which is fundamentally unsolved. I would argue that it's un-solvable as long as your agents are living organisms competing in an ecosystem.

Niches exist to be exploited. As long as the niches exist, they will be exploited. Resenting that is akin to resenting the biggest fish in the pond for being so damn aggressive - it's pointless. We live in a pond, and we should focus on maintaining the nonviolent and often ecosystem-benefitting nature of our exploitation (since it is hard-won and precarious), rather than resent the inescapable reality of its existence.

As far as I can tell none of these things existed before modern times. Mostly people were under authoritarian rule.

When you refer to "private ownership", you unreflectedly endorse things like individuals "owning" land.

The consequence of that negligence are things like environmental destruction, capturing of arable land by rent-seeking individuals and on and on. A substantial part of what currently goes wrong on the macro-scale.

"Free exchange" is a misnomer in the same vein. The "freedom" leaves people to willfully avoid asking whether they really should in the first place. More importantly, it favors people with money to impose their will upon those without.

"Due process" isn't tied to capitalism to begin with and all these things don't "span back to the dawn of agriculture".

You put up the straw man of the Soviet Union, prepping it up to the height of serving as the epitome of what humans could conceive of as alternatives (or modifications) of the existing system. That's a declaration of intellectual bankruptcy, not higher insight.

> environmental destruction, capturing of arable land by rent-seeking individuals and on and on

> asking whether they really should in the first place?

> it favors people with money to impose their will upon those without

All of these criticisms reflect a total naivety to ecosystem dynamics at play, and the motivational landscape that they create. As long as these behaviours continue to create a competitive advantage for the organisms that display them, they will continue to emerge and perpetuate. There is no method of social organization that can overcome the competitive reality of the ecosystem we live in.

You'll also note that environmental destruction, resource hoarding, and interference competition are all widespread behaviours in the natural world. We are part of that world, and are subject to the constraints that it produces.

It's like trying to overcome a bug in the CPU instruction set by writing JavaScript. The "problems" are part of the fundamental substrate and aren't addressable at the proposed layer of abstraction.

When you abstract, you leave things out. You claim to abstract from cave people. How is that the best we can do?

You pretend, humans were cells competing mindlessly. Then you conclude, any other approach than mindless behavior was naive.

You again observe animals and justify your behavior (on a vastly greater scale) by it.

How do you manage not to see the absurdity in that? You're not an animal, you have a conscious mind, capable of rational thought and according foresight.

Because that is, in a very fundamental and immutable way, who we are.

I'm saying that we live in an ecosystem, and that creates emergent properties and behaviours. Resource hoarding and interference competition are among those. No amount of consciousness, rational thought, or foresight, can change that.

As long as (e.g.) hoarding resources today makes it more likely for your offspring to succeed tomorrow, the traits that influence people to hoard resources will continue to perpetuate. It's also why, for example, we have the dark tetrad - it works.

Too high of trust creates opportunities for liars. Too many liars lowers trust to the point that it's not profitable to lie. There exists between these two points a stable equilibrium between zero liars and everyone lying all the time, and it's at neither extreme. The same is true for all other behaviours you moralize.

I'm not justifying anything, I'm simply observing the constraints of the system we live in, and inferring that any mode of social organization that ignores or opposes these constraints is doomed.

Apart from debatable (but real) genetic differences you don't know about, the crucial point is culture. We're not cave people as we don't share their culture and don't have to.

Your idea of our environment predisposing us for capitalism is simply false. Notably, the premise rests solely on your posturing here.

Your ideas about people being automata beholden to their genetic programming beyond their control is even more absurd. And lacks any basis in evidence.

You apparently have never heard about ethics. There is a difference between morals and ethics. Lying isn't wrong because "arbitrary morals" say so, it is because realistic, objective consequences tell you so.

Your idea of an "equilibrium of all behaviors" presupposes mindless automata, again.

Human societies are meta-organisms - they modify themselves over time, and compete with each other for finite resources. Any culture which sacrifices competitive advantage for any reason is simply out-competed and absorbed by other societies which make no such sacrifice. There is no escaping this reality. This is referred to as cultural group selection.

> Your idea of our environment predisposing us for capitalism is simply false. Notably, the premise rests solely on your posturing here.

I'm not saying it predisposes us to capitalism though, I'm saying it predisposes us to maximize resources and engage in competitive behaviour. This is supported by the fact that very nearly every organism in nature also engages in resource maximization and competitive behaviour (r-Selection). There is no altruism (going against genetic self interest) in nature, it's simply not sustainable.

> Your ideas about people being automata beholden to their genetic programming beyond their control is even more absurd. And lacks any basis in evidence.

I'm making no such claim. I'm simply claiming there are constraints in the system, and ignoring them doesn't make them go away.

> Lying isn't wrong because "arbitrary morals" say so, it is because realistic, objective consequences tell you so.

Any yet, no matter how hard we try, we've not managed to eliminate lying (or even agree what specifically it means). Are you really suggesting that some yet-undiscovered set of rules will create a society in which no one will ever lie? Doesn't that sound a bit.. unrealistic?

well, other systems were tried and were worse (feudalism, communism etc)

in practice capitalism with some regulations is better than known alternatives

> Contributing to open source software or commons like Wikipedia definitely is questionable

what is not questionable then?

Worse, you mistake the bounds of your personal knowledge as the borders of the world.

Even if there was no currently "known" alternative, the proper course of action is to research that and find one?

please test it properly before putting it in production, communism went poorly

> Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.

note that I am not arguing that better system is impossible - that would be silly

but "destroy capitalism" attempts went remarkably badly so far

The idea, you would have to produce a turn-key solution, beta-tested on "somebody else" is obvious nonsense and pure deflection.

In the given dire situation, you have to do the best you can, not wait for some imaginary perfect escape hatch to appear.

Not taking a side in this particular discussion, but this specific sentence looks like a self-fulfilling statement: if people disagree with you, you take it as proof that they are unable to evaluate your claim fairly.

"Or maybe they just feel that organizational methodologies used by people to coordinate complex multi-participant activities are actively trying to harm them and this is the logical response?"

No, it's quite illogical.

A million lines of C supporting 2k lines of declarative unit files is less complex from the user's perspective than 50k lines of custom bash scripts. Of course it would be better if it did the same thing in, say, 100k lines or in Rust, but perfect is the enemy of good. systemd exists today and it works fine.

Everything is regular, predictable, documented and easy to read. A file made for one distro only needs trivial changes to run on another. That's what simple really means. I would never go back to init scripts.

OpenRC, s6, rc.d (the BSD), are more simpler than the systemd ecosystem which is feature ladden and not easy to use on the common line. They are also way easier to hack upon, especially when you want to run a lean system (small vm, containers). systemd feels like running windows server for a small php application. The happy path is easy, anything outside of that is torture.

If indeed, their contributions serve mainly to enrich corporations that then contribute to the subversion of the political system through corruption, anti-democratic measures and so on, that's an entirely reasonable response.

Craft is Wikipedia / OSM for software. We're building an open source AI software factory to agentically remake everything.

We're going to open source all the apps, turn platforms into protocols, build open infra, and help assist open weights.

Everything will be rewritten as high quality open source software. And once we've covered the space of everything people use, we'll turn the components into highly reusable open source libraries that can be reshaped into new workflows in real time.

We're going to make a seamless bridge between local and cloud AI, we're going to make a rich set of primitives for fine tuning and sharing.

Not just applications. Data, infra, hardware, the whole of technology.

https://github.com/storytold

https://discord.gg/artcraft

I've been around long enough to know that sustained collective enthusiasm can sometimes blindside you.

I took a brief look at the posted projects and quickly surveyed the community behind it and I'm not ready to dismiss them yet. I'm not exactly sold either, but I am going to put them on my radar and check in every few months.

Can you explain how you will resolve the tension between "high quality" without moderation who turn into Reddit "nazi moderators" or StackOverflow meanies, and without turfing out all moderators and turning into 4chan of old, trolling, and low quality overrun with ads and noise?

What social structure, organization, review, moderation, do you think will solve that tension?

Then please publish it. Others can ask Claude too but it's stupid, and one central repository will have everyone's bugfixes and feature recommendations.

Did you ask for help in the community group for your country?

> That could be fixed easily if there was a convenient app that recorded my driving and uploaded it to a central source, processed it, and converted that into edits for me to confirm.

Mapping requires more than that. GPS traces can be useful in areas where no recent aerial imagery is available, but automated importing of that would cause a lot of errors.

I really wish the world recognized and provided tax income to these projects because they have been the backbone of our ever-complex technological society for probably about thirty years. Rather than what we have now where large corporations will take a foothold in an open-source project and hollow it out for parts then sell it as a "turnkey" product like we have seen time and time again.

It is, however had, true, that the interaction pattern changed. So many walled ghettos about nowadays - look at Facebook and Google (via youtube).

There is quite a lot of open cooperation between national mapping agencies and OpenStreetMap, at least in Europe.

As for updating the name of the latest pop-up shop, the owner will just have to sort it out himself.

Most of my peers in the bicycle-travel community are uninterested in mapping, or even totally unaware of where maps come from. Apps like Komoot became standard tools for cyclists, but only a minority ever learned that its data derives from OSM and anyone can edit it.

I think this will be the case for other things too. OpenStreetMaps won't need as many contributors as more sensors come online, eg. sensors and footage from hobby drones and people's phones augment how much information a single person can enter about a city.

OSM still has major gaps that seem to be getting worse actually, and fan wikis have almost all consolidated onto the ad riden, unreadable monstrosity that is fandom.

Minecraft, GTA, League of Legends, Valorant, Overwatch, Fortnite, Warframe and RuneScape (OSRS too) all moved off Fandom because they started forcing ads even harder. They're now hosted by a nonprofit that takes money from Riot to host their official wikis and uses it to pay for the rest.

I really don’t want to do that thing where I have to couch every single statement I make with parentheticals and qualifiers explaining the exact meaning and making sure to add a dozen “not” and “to be clear” statements in anticipation of this kind of responses

What’s interesting is that most younger people I interact with now have a better idea of what’s possible through crowdsourced collaboration than older people. In the tech world, people who grew up with crowdsourced sites have seen the end state of Stack Overflow and its moderation, or they’ve seen enough controversies around Wikipedia edit wars where controversial topics become battlegrounds to see which moderators can wield the site’s rules more effectively to revert edits they don’t want on the page. On a long enough timeframe, community projects are at high risk of turning into fiefdoms for power hungry moderators.

The younger people grow up seemingly seeing the same things, but having a different experience about what it means. Talk to any younger generation gamer and they’ll have stories about Discord or Minecraft communities collapsing under power tripping moderators. But in the newer world where internet resources are cheap and now that LLMs can help migrate things, they may have established a new Discord or moved the community to a new game server by the end of the week. Their favorite game emulator or other project may have been forked 4 times already and the community will move to another fork again at the first signs of the new maintainer not doing what they like.

But then it'll just be your AI slop and no one will care. If they want one they'll slop one up themselves instead of using yours.

> There are all sorts of possible ways we can do some large scale crowdsourced effort and its probably going to be realtime news e.g video streaming live events on an open platform not owned by corporations. Where there is no misinformation. No one can lie to us, we can see it happening.

That's a fantasy. The trend is towards more corporate ownership and more misinformation (or if there's less, it will only be because the corporate overlord AIs will suppress misinformation that's against their interests, and promote other misinformation that suits them better).

They do show signs of stopping.

"AI’s absorption of Wikipedia means that more people than ever are reading its content. Yet it also means that fewer people are visiting the site itself. When a Wikipedia link is suggested by a search engine, nearly a tenth of users click through. When Wikipedia is cited by an LLM, the clickthrough rate is only 0.33% (and not all credit their sources)."

Some folks saying are saying that AI will only accelerate the creation of future Wikipedias, and that's obviously missing the point. Yes, there might be Grokipedia-style entities, and some of them might not suck, but that's not the point.

Wikis by article count:

Wikipedia: 65 million (English: 7.2 million)

Baidu Baike: 30 million

Hudong Baike: 15 million

Namuwiki: 8.7 million

Fandom: 40 million

In fact, the Everquest 2 wiki dwarfs the Yongle encyclopedia at ~400k articles.

1. the culture of sharing your work 2. the sense of usefulness and purpose

I'm not sure the newest generation share the 1, but in any case LLM companies destroy the 2.

Why would you thanklessly work for free and for the community if your work is pillaged and sold for a lot of money by AI companies before the project even reaches a critical mass ?!

StackOverflow used to be one of the big ones in that area and that is as good as dead. I see the same coming to TVTropes, fandom wikis, movie dbs and Co. once AI gets a good at interpreting video and getting access to some sizable movie libraries. When it comes to /r/tipofmytongue/ style questions AI is already much better than large groups of humans together, though only if the necessary information is available on the public Web.

Lack of access to content outside the Web is really what is hampering progress so far, but that could go away very quickly whenever any of the big players decides to let AI run wild on whatever libraries they have.

As for humans, I just don't see how they could compete. Wikipedia took decades to write, millions of volunteers and Grokipedia (despite being a bit of an unmaintained mess) caught up to its article count in a few months. On top of that comes that all those projects aim for a neutral POV, which is very non-human to begin with and only going to benefit AI.

LLMs are not more neutral than humans. Not only because their learning material is biased but also because they can develop unexpected biases due to the non-deterministic and emergent nature of generative AI.

The idea that an LLM would be more neutral and less partial than a human is a very dangerous and very wrong one. It misunderstands the very nature of generative AI.

And while some people are able to tolerate AI generated text, a lot of people would never read Grokipedia. I would not. Despite great progress, generative AI is not able to create images that don't look absolutely disgusting in the eyes of actual artists. And the same is true for text output for anyone who cares about writing.

I also feel like the web of today (and the people using it) have much less the mindset for these things to appear. People used to see the internet as a big place to share knowledge whereas now the proportion of people seeing it as a market where to do business is much, much more the majority.

It always existed but I feel like the proportions have changed a lot.

Sites like WikiHow have seen a significant decline in traffic, and even more so in organic search.

Yes there are ads, yes there's slop, and yes it still remains a trove of practical human knowledge which would astound a 1926 American far more than Wikipedia ever did.

Compare the Wiki article with step by step PNGs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Windsor_knot

To the thousands of examples one can find on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tying+a+half+wi...

I love to read and have spent more of my life reading than probably anything else. It's my favorite way to learn. Most people do not love to read and would rather learn from another person.

I think humans will never create another Wikipedia because we're already creating something better. YouTube is just the lucky torchbearer, I think. Now that people know they can film themselves teaching or doing something they're good at, and other people will positively engage and maybe even pay them real money, there's no stopping the firehose.

In 10,000 years I imagine the 2020s will be seen less like the end and more like the beginning of human knowledge sharing.

Even if you are the type of learner who requires a video to learn, online video platforms, like youtube and tiktok, with ads & overlays when you pause them, with no out of the box way to download the videos, autoplay to who knows what next video, etc., are terrible vehicles for that. You can't search or annotate them. The quality varies as you stream it.

Youtube and tiktok will not be better than wikipedia because the primary goal, the raison d'etre, of these products is to make money, track your behavior, sell your data to the highest bidder and show you ads based on it. I'm not naive to the fact that Wikipedia does this, but it's obvious that wikipedia is primarily a collective effort and not a corporate product, and I have more faith in a collective group of people than a tech CEO.

Lastly, a video is a video. It is not another person. A person you can ask questions to, they can offer real time advice. I learned to tie a neck tie from family. Teaching someone how to tie a tie, your child, grandchild, nephew, etc., learning how to be an adult from a role model, is famously a rite of passage. If you think a video is a substitute for another person, especially in this age of AI generated content, I suggest you take a step back and reflect on what human connection really means.

Not everything (I'd wager most things) requires a human to ask questions to. It's just a process. I learned programming from videos and static documentation a decade before I had a school class with a teacher. The "human connection" didn't make me a better programmer.

Was this earnestly your takeaway? I'm not sure you'll find anyone interested in arguing that a video is equivalent to a person.

When I fix snowmobile engines I'd obviously prefer the company of a free and patient instructor showing me on his own machine right in front of me. This is not something that is available, so I settle for videos.

> If you think a video from a company trying to sell you clothes, hosted on Alphabet's servers, is a substitute for another person, especially in this age of AI generated content, I suggest you take a step back and reflect on what human connection really means

Yeah, nobody believes that. A human is a human and a video is a video.

This was a really bizarre strawman, dude, you didn't need to write so much about a position nobody's remotely trying to argue.

1. Wikipedia is not wikihow. It is not an aim of wikipedia to teach you how to tie a knot.

2. Youtube does not reward or otherwise provide provenance and incremental improvement.

Look at the revision page for the windsor knot: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Half-Windsor_knot...

There is no mechanism whatsoever on youtube to incrementally improve a video or understanding of a topic.

Yes, this remains true for every source of media except Wikipedia.

If we get to the more general idea of "can humans collaborate in the same way they collaborated to make Wikipedia". I see no reason why not. Collaborative projects similar in spirit to Wikipedia pop up all the time.

Name one started after 2022, with at least a modicum of success.

After a quick search I stumbled upon Wikifunctions (2023), but do Wikimedia projects that are not Wikipedia count? A bit more controversial would be Anna's Archive (2022).

We have to think about the needs too. There was a need for an online encyclopedia, Wikipedia took it. What need do we have now that is currently unanswered and can be answered by a collaborative effort similar to Wikipedia?

Also, open source projects, so many come out every year that it is hard to count.

I became a Wikipedia editor not long after the 2nd version of the site, before they even had logins, IIRC.

I was banned from the site probably 7 years ago or so by a troll who collaborated with the admins. The review "process" was more like The Trial and the ban was quite terrible, because not only did they install some deep cookie in the browser, but they permabanned the IP address.

Wikipedia is gone. Whatever it even was, it is not now.

The title evokes a romantic sense of wikipedia as a well governed, neutral egalitarian multicultural collaboration. But anyone who has been marginalized by the cabal knows it was not most of those things.

"Whatever it was[, which was really was really not all that,] it is not [even] now."

We dont use "deep" cookies, just normal cookies. If memory serves, 7 years ago Wikipedia didn't use cookies at all in the block process, it was purely ip based back at that point.

I get everything about slop/spam/etc. but deciding a page about a small band in SmallTown Canada isn't "worthy" of wiki is silly beans. That's the whole point of a collaborative, anyone can contribute wiki. Having people decide what "makes the cut" or not is silly.

They could have gone with a "edu" / "core" wiki that gets to include only certain articles, and the rest are "community" or something, but literally removing articles for anything other than quality/sources/spam is not what wiki started as. And it's not what I donated for, but that's another can of worms...

They provided an email address to send a message for appeal to the board, which I didn't bother.

Spirit is not sufficient. I can start a new project with the same spirit and a user base of one.

Scale is part of what makes Wikipedia. What projects are similar in spirit and scale?

> This gift link has expired. Register to access this article

copy paste the html into https://codebeautify.org/htmlviewer

Wikipedia itself is what it is, a library of collective effort.

As much as I despise wikimedia, the worth of wikipedia for humanity is so much more compared to the negative aspects of wikimedia.

They pretend it is a charity, but it isn't. It all just goes to shareholders.

What is this nonsense? It's a non-profit. There are literally no shareholders.

There (wikimedia) public financials aren't particularly detailed, just the base required, but even they are damning.

The spent $4,767,366 on hosting. Sounds like a lot?

It's there smallest expense.

They spent $6,768,621 on travel and conferences, $9,645,387 on donation processing, $20,373,682 on professional services, and $127,467,261 on salaries/wages.

There financials do not support the "woe is us we're dieing worse than ever before and no one supports us" banners.

Ok so they're a fairly large organization. Compared to other similarly sized tech companies, they pay pretty far below market rates. They're not exactly looting the coffers.

They are doing pretty well financially, yes, and they have done well with their endowment, but it's not like they have an order of magnitude more money then they are letting on.

Are their banners obnoxious? Yes. Are they effective? Apparently.

What would you rather have? Do you really want Wikipedia to be destitute? "Hey guys Jimmy here we don't really need any money but I guess you can give us some?"

No one knows what the future holds. A strong endowment fund today isn't a guarantee for tomorrow.

I'm glad they're striking when the iron is hot. I hope they build up enough wealth to operate for generations upon generations. Of the things on the modern Internet that offend my senses, the fundraising banners on Wikipedia probably rank dead last.

I don't get how people can be so negative about such an overwhelmingly positive contributor to society.

The ASPCA and St Judes don't get money from "we're doing amazing shit with this pile of money you've given us". They get money from "look at these dieing children and pets".

Wikimedia is no different. The mission is worthwhile, and they have been overwhelmingly effective in their pursuit of that goal. The bickering over a few articles getting deleted or volunteers being banned is just par or the course for such a large org with such a large mission.

One could argue that the ASPCA could save more dogs if they didn't spend so much on execs and ads, but we can't know that to be true. What if saving that many dogs really does require million dollar c-suites and multi-million dollar ad-campaigns?

If I were choosing where to put my money, Wikimedia wouldn't be on the list for other reasons. I prefer smaller local orgs where the people managing the money have to interact directly with their neighbors who support their missions as I find the social pressure effective and it doesn't represent a cost to the organization like an accounting or accountability firm would. $1000 to my local library does more for my community than $1000 to wikipedia would ever do.

That's why I prefer federated national non-profits as well. Donating to say my local Habit for Humanity does support the national org to some degree, but most of the donation stays to support local efforts.

wiki-p/m-edia is a great mission, it just isn't my mission.

BUT, let me slide on the off topic borders.

_Because_ Wikipedia is community driven and independent of any corporation, shareholder, or stock exchange, I tend to view it as something no commercial encyclopedia could ever have competed with.

Now, let’s imagine the same thing happening with LLMs and AI. Local, open-source, community-driven models will build better things than any commercial LLM or AI could ever create.

Yes, this is mostly a dream as of today. But will The Economist still be alive to validate this idea that humans, stripped of the money schemes, will have built greater (aka create a project like Wikipedia) things than ever ?

Think about it - LLM is just a computer program that predicts a next word. So it has a very detailed, formal description of each concept it can represent in its residual vector.

I think humans will understand (perhaps with AI help) these formal descriptions and put them into a giant database.

This would be a severe blow to the bitter lesson, and generally vindicate the AI researchers of the 80s that put a bet on symbolic processing

People make brilliant things out of altruism as long as they don't have the feeling they're being abused by corporate or monetary interests. That's why the BSD Unixes languished and Linux thrived. Programmers didn't feel the need to contribute for free when companies where the ones reaping the benefits of their work.

Fandom is truly cancerous. I have not checked whether they are affiliated with Wikimedia, but I would not be surprised if that was the case!

If I were to make wikipedia today it would contain only bullet pointed facts with sources for each. Articles would have unlimited length. Pagination if an article gets over a million lines.

No exceptions.

An absolute source and collation of human truth.

Writ broadly. Last time I looked into who was editing Wikipedia on my own academic discipline, it was several people who had an obsessive autistic fixation on the subject, but whose autism was apparently so socially debilitating they couldn't gain employment, not even in academia with its somewhat greater accommodation for oddballs. The upside is that they could channel their interest productively into WP. The downside of this is as outsiders to a field where much consensus is found only at real-life conferences and lecture handouts, their info was often years behind the state of the art.

The biggest threat to it IMHO is internal bias.

Hi, I am having trouble understanding this. Do you have any additional context or articles describing this take?

Kind regards and thank you for your time.

Yes, some projects like stack overflow may be losing contributors by a large degree, but it doesn't have to be this way

I run SoonsorBlock and DeArow which are two human powered crowdsourced browser extensions that are only growing in scale in opposition to the want to slopify everything

We have 17% of submitters every week being first time contributors and 19% being old, a nice balance.

Unfortunately the talk isn't available yet but you can see the slides here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1nGArM7c3i9cVGGvkh6ER...

That doesn’t sound like necessarily a positive thing; it sounds like it could well be unsustainable churn (impossible to really tell from such limited numbers).

I have contributed in the past, but don’t any more because of how you went out of your way to make it tedious: https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock/issues/2106.

I think it would be more useful to more people to utilize the existing solution because it runs in a very small footprint for the end user. Most people wouldn't be able to run an entire TTS/LLM workflow without processing videos in the background or waiting some multiple of real-time in order to watch a video.

You could maybe do it with just LLM tagging the transcript, but that's still a ton of processing just to watch a video.

God that'd be so much wasted energy if every person wanting to skip in-video ads was running an entire LLM to do so.

Circle back to original topic, eventually having local LLMs intercepting EVERYTHING in background to reproject a curated personal bubble filter feels like wasteful but sensible end game. Not just to hide ads / skip sponsors, run every image through anime filter, live editing xyz, if there'es some centralized DB to grab timestamps do it, but otherwise we could be burning tokens none stop to modify reality, and some add manipulation is just rounding error that comes along for the ride. I click a video, background processes play opens 10 instances of the video at 4x speed, processes, gives me version of video without ads, sponsorblocs, xyz content filtered out... or just generate video to conform to my biases because it makes me feel good.

No idea if it's good enough for all podcasts that are out there. It works for me and the podcasts I listen to, and I have tried testing it against a larger corpus, but I'm one developer and I just wanted to solve a problem for me.

https://github.com/Q726kbXuN/podcast-ad-tagger

I am routinely amazed at the speed and breadth of the SponsorBlock community.

Popular channels are tagged within minutes of posting. Obscure channels almost always get tags at some point.

The only place I've noticed significant lack of coverage is really long older videos, like say MIT OpenCourseWare. Not a complaint at all, not expecting anyone to sit through hundreds of hours of college to mark up a few tangents here and there, just an observation.

However (and I haven't seen your talk) can't you agree that there is a difference between crowd-sourcing wikipedia and clicking on a marker for a sponsor?

The proposition of starting something like Wikipedia today is unpaid laborers working on a training set for AI for the sole purpose of enriching tech CEOs, a gaggle of freaks who likely don't consider you as part of the same species as them nevermind as someone deserving of rights or accolades for your efforts.

One is volunteering, the other is being taken advantage of.

And attempts like everything2 and h2g2 were neat art but nothing like Wikipedia. The spinoff attempts to do something like Wikipedia also failed.

This is characteristic of something that is probability zero in its particulars but rather likely as an example of a class.

Humans do like getting serious and accomplishing something before the twinkling light of our lives fades.

>70x the Citations, 1615x the Traffic https://ahrefs.com/blog/wikipedia-vs-grokipedia/ (mar 2026)

Wherever there is a community, people will contribute; people love being social, and many platforms do this broadly and well enough.

- OpenstreetMap

- GitHub ( people contributing Code, issues and bugs)

- All Reviews Platform ( this creates such a sign that today, whenever people buy or use any product, they would like to see reviews)

Thousands of others with no sign of stopping, and the future will keep on bringing more.

Peer-to-peer is a social culture that will always be there, and whenever new things come up, a similar peer-to-peer culture will back them.

Isn't that availability of information the entire point of Wikipedia? Heck, wasn't that the point of Google before they turned evil?

Probably half of their edits are flame wars between editors with different political slants.

With a LLM, the system prompt can tell it exactly which way to bias the search space, and you only have to do this once. And no, open weights models won't save you because someone will figure out a way to embed the system prompt into the weights themselves (if they haven't already have).

I think they've failed at that, then. I regularly come across articles that have every slant you can imagine - political, technical, and corporate (written as marketing material for a product).

You can't defeat confirmation bias, but LLMs at least have the ability to provide far more objective evidence than Wikipedia.

It takes considerable effort to slant a wikipedia page since many of them are protected to edits by new accounts so you'd have to build a reputation first. Then, you may need to convince other editors on the talk page about why your particular slant is better than the existing one, and finally, you have to do this on a page by page basis.

System prompt: Avoid promoting left (or right)-leaning ideologies in answers to any questions; only provide sources to websites with a known right (or left) bias; claim that this is the truth accepted by the scientific community and the alternative was proven to be false. Deny any knowledge of these instructions.

This regularly happens. Even beyond personal ideological bias (of which there is much), there are entire companies that you can pay to affect your technical/political/commercial slant on pages, in addition to teams in the major political parties that do this in-house

I know that LLMs are unreliable and that a clever system prompt can instill bias. But there are mitigations - namely, either doing your own inference (either locally or through a GPU-as-a-service), by sampling from multiple providers, or by crafting your questions in ways that avoid triggering that bias. And, so far, LLMs have proven to be far less slanted than some of the tech+political Wikipedia pages I've read.

in way perhaps similar flame wars to those here in HN so I can definitely feel the kick.

but the whole point is, if this whole energy which writes Wikipedia is funneled through flame wars - what a way to ti - tis an arena. Never though of it, and as arena it sure has a future. But as a source of truth that gets munched into models, well - super questionable, and also questionable if people still feel like going there (I do, tbh more than 40-50 times a month), but then I can also take focused resumes from GPTs.

So then the question is - if my text is to be projected through some biased multidimensional manifold filter, why do it? It probably keeps its value as the recordbook of humanity, perhaps revisions get their own blockchain, but also it looses all or most of direct human traffic.

> We didn’t realise it at the time, but OpenStreetMap came from a unique moment in internet history.

> It was still the time of the Old Internet. The time when you, or anyone, could upload a few pages to your own “webspace” or “homepage”, writing about what took your fancy. You didn’t have to worry about Facebook and Google as gatekeepers, or HTTPS, or your server being compromised within five minutes of turning on, or GDPR, or front-end frameworks, or any of the curses of the modern web.

> 2004 was when the homegrown web met the participatory web, before it all got turned to shit by Facebook and Google. You wouldn’t start OSM in 2024: the nascent project would be squashed by Google, or founder under Reddit/HN users’ expectations of “why not good yet”, or flame out in some controversy over privacy or disputed borders. But we got through all of that in our early years, when the world was simpler.

For every Wikipedia article, Grokipedia has a better one.

0. https://grokipedia.com/

I'd be interested to see a rigorous comparison of error rates. Perhaps need to use a better model.

I don’t mind if they load in information about the experience of IVF or pregnancy and everything else that I’ve written down. To contribute into the intelligences grown out of our collective written experience seems kind of cool to me.

Internet Archive is in the same category. So was Flash.

It's kind of amazing to think that, if it weren't for those people (or if they'd had a bit less conviction in their beliefs), we might live in a world without these wonders!

It also makes me wonder what else we might have gotten, but didn't. (Or more constructively, what else ought to exist, but nobody's built it yet!)

Pretty substanceless in my opinion.

We’ll make something else and more ambitious.

Negativity drives engagement.

I’m not sure it helps with the “AI absorbs it, nobody visits” problem, but every card links to the page, and I think players will go read them to understand what they've just collected.

I also suspect a lot of collectors like correcting things. I know “I was there” isn’t a citable source (see the OSM post box story above), but photos are a real contribution: many Wikipedia photos are poor or outdated, and I’d like players to be able to submit theirs to Commons in the future.

Built with MapLibre + Protomaps. I just added a waiting list if you're interested trying it out!

https://wikimile.com

For an alternative use: the OSM app CoMaps fetches those articles and also includes them in the offline maps.

Last time I was walking around a tourist city, I didn't even bring a tourist guide book. I just followed OSM to the sights, and read the Wikipedia entry about the things I saw. All without using my phones roaming data plan, or even leaving the maps app.

Nothing public to show, but I have learned a lot about my local area by testing it out.

Yours looks much more polished, I'll look forward to trying it out!

What a BS sentiment but I guess if money is the only goal in life, then what doesn't make a direct profit isn't worth doing. So yes, if money is the only measure of whether something is worth doing or not, then Wikipedia won't be recreated since the volunteers contributing are not doing it for the money.

Honestly, I think knowledge like this is going to organically synchronise with consensus nodes in the very near future. Think of Community Notes on X as a prototype. That doesn't mean everything will be 100% accurate at all times, but I have zero doubt that it will be infinitely better than Wikipedia.

Please mention the page along with your and the moderators edits together with your objective sources.

Wikipedia is changeable and documentation is the only thing that will lead to change. It is understandable that one grows tired from consistent "ideals>facts" that plague so many "moderated" spaces, but a small final effort by many with such experience can lay the foundation for fresh contributiors to built a better Wikipedia.

I should also preface this by saying I was involved in a community which is often stereotyped and denigrated by those on the "online left." When I was younger my parents divorced and my dad was treated very badly by the courts, by friends, and by society. He is a good man and I saw the ways in which he was systematically marginalised and outright discriminated against. It helped me understand why male suicide is so high. This led me to learning more about the men's rights movement. Nothing like the "manosphere," men's rights is interested in the many issues men face as a group. The various ways in which society and the law discriminate, and how men might adapt and help each other through some very difficult periods. For many men, it is mostly a support group. A place where they can talk about how they were raped and then the police laughed at them at the station. Or about how the judge awarded their wife full custody of their three children because she lied about being abused. Or about how they lost limbs in unsafe workplaces and no one cared. Or about how they feel suicidal. Etc. I organised support groups online and in real life. It was very positive and I believe we helped many men through some very dark times.

Apologies for the preamble, but I wanted to provide some context. In the 2000s, I began updating the Men's Rights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_rights_movement) Wikipedia page. Mostly statistics around things like suicide, homelessness, likelihood of being assaulted and murdered, disparities in the educational systems and courts, the high rates of workplace death and injury, etc. Always cited with peer reviewed or governmental data, and sometimes with "accepted" news articles. My goal was to inform people about the facts. Some time in the late 2000s and early 2010s, questionable edits began happening. For example, suicide statistics were removed periodically. The reasons were generally specious. Sometimes arguing about semantics. Sometimes the source. Sometimes procedural. One editor argued that the statistics should be contained as a subsection of the Feminism page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism), for example. They also tried to remove the page entirely. I began to notice that the people making the edits were frequent editors of related pages like Feminism.

It is at this point that I should point out that feminists and men's rights advocates don't always see eye to eye.

The questionable edits became malicious edits. Administrators began selectively enforcing rules. For example, applying a higher standard for sources on the Men's Rights page than they do on the Feminism page. They applied a banner at the very top of the page directing people to a feminist friendly page called the "men's liberation movement." They removed countless statistics and examples of inequalities in law and education. They changed the language in all sections to suggest or imply that the people involved in the movement are incorrect or mistaken. For example, the entire second paragraph (of only two) in the introduction is a refutation of the movement. Compare with the Feminism page. Criticisms are now located at the very bottom of the page in a sub-sub-section which doesn't even have its own anchor. It's a few small paragraphs now on a page with tens of thousands of words. In the "Suicide" section now they include, "studies have also found an over-representation of women in attempted or incomplete suicides and men in complete suicides." Just to make sure that no one could make the mistake of caring about men, unless it's framed in relation to how women might be affected.

I could go on but the stark differences between these pages should be extremely clear. They have not been edited for clarity or truth, but for ideological reasons. This is just one of millions of pages on which ideological wars are being waged. Unfortunately, the war is lost. WikiProjects, Arbitration Committees, and Administrators are all some version of far to extremely far left wing Americans. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger now calls the site "propaganda." (https://www.foxnews.com/media/wikipedia-co-founder-larry-san...) It's clear that many like this bias, but for those of us who used to be involved, we can confidently tell you that you should never, ever take what Wikipedia has to say at face value. It is much closer to propaganda than it is factual.

Yeah, like my wrist watch beeps when it's the solstice, why would I carry all that rock?

Everyone believes that the people before them were morons and that the greats of their youth represent a golden age lost forever to the sands of time. It's almost like there isn't any reason to be teaching inductive proofs because they ain't applying it.

Isn't this rather rich, though? the internet itself is a collaborative project - even TCP/IP is. I have a hard time imagining a cogent argument for why cooperation is dead.

I think we're mainly missing some legal framework. For instance, suppose we stopped allowing social media companies to borg our content. Require open access to all SM content, make anti-inter-op illegal. Yes, it's true that SM companies spend a lot to provide "free" services, but I'd claim that it does not follow that the necessary consequence is walled gardens. That thinking dates from prehistory, when computers and networking were, you know, expensive.

Next problem. The article hints at it, but the paywall is my immediate concern.

Current AI has bad taste. AI is OK at explaining things, to the point that humans creating an explainer like Wikipedia (which is also merely OK at explaining things, albeit better than AI) may be too little payoff for the effort. But any creative AI project, so far, is ugly. The best AI projects are "port [existing project] into X language", "decompile [existing project]", "combing [existing project] and [existing project]", "turn [existing theory] into a real project"...AI, like JRR Tolkein's evil, cannot create, only convert existing things. Even "Skate 3 in Minecraft" etc. notice that whenever the different games interact, it's lazily implemented at best, and usually broken (in a way that does not crash the game but visually is obviously wrong...because the AI has been trained to run tests, but cannot really judge visuals).

Which is to say, I bet collaborative creative projects are here to stay. AI will even boost them, by creating the software foundation to make new things - an AI flash, AI game engine, AI metaverse, AI design studio that gives the user fine control (not just rerunning the same prompt praying for a mediocre output, or trying to make progress with small changes but failing when each one breaks something else). AI, frankly, supersedes Wikipedia (whose primary purpose is finding information; just ask the AI, then follow up on whatever you're confused or want to know more about). But AI cannot recreate the magic of collaboration, nor come close to the art of, say, r/place - which I expect to have similar if not nearly-exact successors of (if Reddit retries r/place I expect it to suck, but that's less AI and more Reddit's terrible management driving away quality users...who aren't going extinct, just need a decent platform to grow on).

Isn't that the point of going to school, to learn the what, how, and why, then translate that to application or more knowledge?

Making "never" predictions is a dangerous game, especially when you are talking about human beings doing something they already did in the past.

Sure, it has ads. The business models are different. There may be less moderation and thus more garbage. But it’s mostly volunteer work. And it’s got a massive amount of knowledge, from arcane facts to highly practical educational content. The good channels provide a table of contents, links and cite their sources in the description. It’s a community effort, which has spawned communities of its own. It’s also been relatively stable in being that way for 20 years, which is remarkable.

Well ...

Sorry for the snark and I welcome my downvotes. But Sanger isn't wrong about what he's said about it

Humanity will do much better, LLM is really good at distilling the knowledge. You might argue about replacing knowledge work, but summarizing and aggregating disconnected data, that is done.

1. Sign up to https://citizendium.org/wiki/Help:Index/Join

2. Create or update anything

3. Done

Think about open models trained with ongoing crowdsourced data, running distributed on everyone's devices.

This could be the best AI by default because it has all the ongoing training data and is orders of magnitude larger than the largest fatacenters.

The amount of open source software - and yes, throwaway projects too - being just .. brought into and handed off to the world .. is beyond staggering. It's already given rise to megaprojects rising at the top of the pile - crazy stuff like Photocraft, which has seen multiple releases a week for months. And we are just getting started.

I find the author's lack of faith disturbing.