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points by Ericson2314 2 days ago | 0 comments

I wonder if the AI companies would even pay for this, because it increases the quality of the training data.

That would be good, as I imagine that wikipedia is in survival mode these days, as less and less people visit their site directly Even so more people indirectly benefit from its content

[–] hamolton 2 days ago

It's not in survival mode, they have a pretty large endowment and low dev spend they'd like to increase. The number of edits per week has been roughly steady for years, and their revenue per year has been increasing steadily. Their hosting costs are hyper-optimized and tiny; they spend much more on programmers and lawyers.

[–] asdff 2 days ago

Wikipedia is not supported by ads and site views.

[–] honeycrispy 2 days ago

The donation banner is an ad.

[–] cowlevel 2 days ago

And a profit-maximizing one at that. They've got plenty of money but they need as much as possible, no different from a Zuck enterprise in that regard.

[–] unethical_ban 2 days ago

Pedantic without a point. A first-party ad for support of the platform is entirely a different category than running ads for other services, served from third-party ad companies.

[–] asdff 2 days ago

And is their rake on that correlated with site views? I'd guess not so linearly like it is with ad impressions. It is a different business model.

[–] fallingbananna 2 days ago

On the same note, I wonder why AI almost never gives me links to Wikipedia. Do they have it in training data without any attribution?

It feels like the distribution of sources/links it outputs is 33% Reddit, 33% Random blog, 33% Not Found.

[–] dofm 1 day ago

> I wonder why AI almost never gives me links to Wikipedia

Users on Reddit say…

[–] TheRealPomax 2 days ago

The LLM weights are not tuned for truth, including citing sources, it's tuned for "doing as much as possible, as fast as possible, on your own". If you ask it for a source, it literally has to autocomplete one, it's not going to figure out which source is the most appropriate or authoritative as part of that text generation pass.