I donate to them every year b/c I fully agree they’re doing a thankless critical job very well.
replyThank you for the inspiration! I just made my first donation.
replyI've been donating $5 to them monthly for I don't know how long. I've only recently bumped it up to $25. They're the heroes of the internet age
replyfully expect them and wikipedia to get assaulted by AI companies to monopolize data source access in the near future.
replyThe future is bleak :\
I'm expecting a full court legal attack on Wikipedia at some point. It's just too good for information, and companies would rather you use their chatbot to regurgitate that info now that they have their own copies. Google was already built to pretend as if they had some magic system giving you "Answers" that were 95% just the text of the infobox they used to have for wikipedia on the side.
replyIt's going to suddenly be extremely valuable that wikipedia didn't settle for having a small rainy day fund and instead ceaselessly grabbed every fucking donation they could for two decades so they can fight such a legal battle.
I don't think there's much grounds for a serious legal attack at this point, and also it would look so horrible from a PR standpoint no non-desperate would dare it. Anyway, google has been steering enough traffic away, now that its AI jumps in with an answer and the wikipedia link which 99% of the response is based on is always hidden with a bunch of other overlaid icons. Google has surely managed to kill off a bunch of reddit and stackoverflow traffic with this trick.
replyon what basis?
replyWikipedia is not a challenge to the system. If it were, it would be excluded from search results, much like blogs are now.
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