Wikipedia dethroned a 600-year-old encyclopedia in just six years
Humans will never again create a project like Wikipedia
As Wikipedia turns 25, The Economist traces how a scrappy Florida startup outgrew the Yongle encyclopedia, the Ming dynasty's 23,000-roll reference work that held the record for roughly 600 years. The collaborative encyclopedia now spans 30 billion words across more than 300 languages, and its Latin edition alone carries more articles than the Encyclopedia Britannica. Yet one of the internet's unlikeliest successes now faces grave new threats.
It held that title for around 600 years—until Wikipedia, a startup run out of a chaotic office in Florida, overtook it after just six years in business.
- ajayyy
I recently did a talk in opposition of this sentiment
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 SponsorBlock and DeArrow 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...
- MitPitt
This is most definitely wrong. People volunteer and crowdsource all the time, driven by ideals. And the async nature of the web will only make such projects stronger. There's OpenStreetMap, TV Tropes, fandom wikis, movie dbs, and a thousand others with no sign of stopping.
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.
- brians
Before Wikipedia, people like this author predicted it would be impossible. Science fiction authors wrote about it, but understood it to be fictional—Asimov showed how a great encyclopedia contained the seeds of its own project failure. Adams meant it as a joke.
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.
- apiclay
Wikipedia is unique in its own way, no question about it, and true. But calling a project like this can never be recreated is wrong.
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.
- sholladay
I’m going to argue that YouTube is a lot like Wikipedia.
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.
- fwlr
There are far too many “machines for turning commons into tragedies” running amok for there to be any significant creation of commons in the future. One, those able and willing to create a commons are usually also capable of seeing what will happen if they do and are reasonably demotivated by it; two, the machines are in a race to the bottom and cannot prevent themselves from harvesting too early and too aggressively for any commons that does somehow get created anyway to survive.
- thatslast
Shameless plug: last month while travelling, I kept walking around a new city and realizing later that I’d passed places with great stories without knowing. Many Wikipedia articles have coordinates, so I thought they could become cards you collect by physically walking there. Each card credits and links back to the article.
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!
- GuB-42
And there is no need to, because we already have 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.
- FrankWilhoit
Humans will never again create a project like _______.
- fooker
IMO once we see AI running on more retail friendly hardware, we'll see crowdsourced efforts that rival everything before it combined.
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 datacenters.