This graph shows a distinct change pre-dating AI, starting 2014, there's explosive growth which suddenly stops around then.
A soft decline which carries on until Covid caused a temporary reversal of that.
The soft decline then continues at a pace around where it was, until November 2022, when it suddenly accelerates to its death. That's ChatGPT of course.
But the site was already in decline, against the backdrop of vastly increased software developers and software development, because of hostility.
Software developers used Stackoverflow despite the hostility, because there was no alternative.
The early growth wasn't caused by the moderation, because the early moderation was a lot softer.
I've maintained that if they handled this AI-caused decline well, they could return the site to its better days before the flood of people who didn't know what they were doing, offloading the bad questions while getting still getting all the good ones. I'm not sure they're even trying.
[citation needed]
Well here it is, and you're wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Statistics
The article creation and edits curves are stable. The former growing at a slightly declining pace, which is expected since the amount of knowledge is finite. The latter is literally flat.
The monthly page views are in decline on mobile (from ~5.7 billions at the peak in 2024 to 4.5 billions currently). They are stable YoY on desktop at ~3.7 billions, and have been rising in the recent months.
StackOverflow is dead, the WP community is thriving, even if the page views have declined a bit.
SO had a moat because of its mass, but the place was a cesspool.
Not just because of that, but they also made the process of creating new articles very hostile.
Decades ago, when Wikipedia started, it was possible to create a short article, and as long as no one objected against it, it stayed there, and people could later expand it. That's what "wiki" was supposed to mean.
Today, you need to create an article in a separate "Draft" namespace, then a random Wikipedia editor will judge it, and if it is not perfect (e.g. does not have enough references), it cannot be published. And if you don't fix it by a certain date, it gets automatically deleted. (Rather than leaving it there for someone else to hopefully improve.)
I tried to make an article for an author whose books my kids liked. His books were translated to many languages, he won a few awards, and now some company has bought movie rights for the books. Alas, I have failed to establish notability sufficiently in my short article, so it was rejected. The editor didn't even have to argue that the author is not notable (which would be silly, a google search clearly shows otherwise), only that my article failed to establish it. So the official policy now kinda says that it is better to have no article rather than an imperfect one.
Well, I am not getting paid for producing perfect articles for Wikipedia, which means there is no way for me to contribute anymore. Too bad, I have created a few articles long ago.
There was something good and glorious about that, but that era is gone. Wikipedia and Stack Overflow are done, finished, cooked - what comes next?
> The same thing is happening to Wikipedia
People don't like to think of it this way, but Wikipedia is funded by ads. Except, the ads only advertise one thing: requests for donations. If people don't visit Wikipedia, because the AI regurgitated Wikipedia's answers, they won't see Wikipedia's donation ads, and they won't donate.
Over time, if current trends continue, more and more people won't even know about Wikipedia. They won't have any "warm feeling" towards the project, because they never go there, they never use it, they never see what good it does them.
Obviously they need staff and more costs than just hosting, but something isn’t adding up for me, so I stopped donating.
It’s pretty much a meme now.
Strict moderation etc isn’t a bad thing, but the environment and culture you mould is what matters.
The year that Google made "open source contribution" a checkbox on your annual review. That's when almost ALL these types of sites went to dogshit. And then everybody followed Google which then weaponized it even more.
Once Google made Fake Internet Points(tm) worth actual money via your annual review, all holy hell broke loose over the sites.
Many professional certifications require bearers to earn CEUs. One way these may be earned is by blogging or doing demonstrations. So if you see a bunch of entry-level techbros doing really boring blog entries or posting to LinkedIn, you should know that they intend to earn CEUs for their particular professional certifications, such as CompTIA, et. al.
It’s not their fault... but Lord, how insufferable it can be!
The same thing is not yet happening to wikipedia as you can see with the pageview tool. You may be confusing a covid bump. At most any drop is within an order of magnitude.