Humans will never again create a project quite like Wikipedia

FrankWilhoit

Humans will never again create a project like _______.

nephihaha

Wikipedia has been an excellent resource for LLMs, and seems to be one of their prime resources. Make of that what you will.

AndyMcConachie

These are also the geniuses who thought Fukuyama was right when he declared the end of history.

mdlxxv

Not with that attitude!

mad_

I wonder... not rage bait btw... but PHP was super easy to program. I wonder if things like this are harder to build today. Like, before you could setup a LAMP stack and program a wiki in the time it takes to begin to wrap your head around the current programming paradigms.

DotNetCorePowa

Economists (not the website) and accurate predictions are two very different things, first. The economists, the website site, second. Humans will never fly, etc. Third. (Extra point for the paywall).

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.

amelius

AI, however ...

haunter

Not with this attitude.

jaigupta

AI would need projects like this to harvest human knowledge so...

seydor

Once AI starts being a superhuman doctor everyone will want to contribute their medical story

joenot443

If someone wants to learn to accomplish something tangible in the real world, there's probably no better place than YouTube, TikTok, etc. 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.

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.

bariumbitmap

I can't find a way to read the article, anyone have a gift link? (Edit: archive.today and wallhop.io don't work)

GaryBluto

I hope they don't. Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation is quite dodgy behind the scenes.

rnd0

nor GNU, nor Linux. This is the truth.

mtgh2s

I suppose humans will never again create a project quite like the old printed encyclopedias, either ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

thedellmonitor

"Humans will never again create a project like Wikipedia" aaaaaand it's paywalled. The irony.

Bengalilol

It depends. Okay, yes, probably. 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 ?

rodolphoarruda

Wikipedia needed a very small tech infra and legal support to run back in the day. I have a feeling that now any project needs much more infra AND world wide legal support given the larger amount of laws and complexity involved. Just a feeling.