• brucethemoose@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    the old Encyclopedia Britannica.

    No one uses this.

    You’ve got dozens of alternative Wiki competitors with their own rarified communities of editors and contributors.

    No one uses them.

    You’ve got subject-specific Wikis for a thousand different fandoms, hobbies, and crafts.

    Fandom has a grip on this space, unfortunately, and that’s under Wales too. Yes, I know there are community alternatives, but their traffic/SEO is small in comparison.

    But the idea that tens of millions of curious people and subject-experts are just going to endure a vacuum? Come on.

    They absolutely will.

    They already have!

    Look at the rest of the internet. Literally every space, every niche, every congregation of experts has rotted away, and these “curious people and subject-experts” are clingimg to big social media toxic spaces because it’s the default.


    It’s a very English-language and Euro-History oriented source of truth for tens of millions of online nerds. If it gets subsumed or shut down or otherwise undermined by western-aligned governments, I might suggest that the problem will not be an absence of Wikipedia but the presence of a malignant surveillance-enabled censorship bureaucracy.

    You’re speaking of an internet that, for the bulk of humanity, doesn’t exist anymore. It is all but gone. That’s what I’m saying.

    Maybe a few million nerds would create new Wikipedias, but the billions of other people on their phones and tablets would almsot never see it.

    And that is dangerous for society. Wikipedia’s sheer critical mass is a huge monkey wrench in “soft” censorship, and for all its faults, every bit Wikipeida is delegitimized is a fascist dream-come-true.

    And I hear a lot of people talking like that popularity isn’t important. There’s this sort of “old internet” attiude like we can just archive it and keep to ourselves. What does everyone else matter?

    Well. Without Wikipedia putting the braKES on loss of freedoms in our IRL lives, we may lose the ability to do that.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      24 hours ago

      No one uses this.

      Estimated annual revenue of around $100M. That’s half of Wikipedia’s. Someone’s using it.

      No one uses them.

      Quora alone has 400 million monthly active users.

      Look at the rest of the internet. Literally every space, every niche, every congregation of experts has rotted away

      None of that is true. Your institutional knowledge hasn’t keep pace with the modern net. And your nostalgia has biased you against anything novel or unfamiliar.

      You’re rotting. The net is doing fine.

      • michaelalf@lemmy.world
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        21 hours ago

        Nobody sane is using Quora as a legitimate source of information. Seems like you’re the one not keeping pace with the modern net. Would you also suggest Pinterest lead the charge in representing collective human knowledge?

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          21 hours ago

          Nobody sane is using Quora as a legitimate source of information.

          • Nobody uses anything but Wikipedia

          • Nobody I like use anything but Wikipedia

          Uh-huh

          Would you also suggest Pinterest lead the charge in representing collective human knowledge?

          If you’re interested in art, fashion, or any number of other hobbies, absolutely.

          But if you want to host other media on their systems, it works just as well. I suspect you just feel embarrassed to use other websites.