Future Audiences

[Dan of La Mancha]

Maryana Pinchuk, Principal Product Manager of the WMF, has an op-ed in this week's Signpost where she talks about some of the challenges facing Wikipedia in the modern world:

In March 2023, I helped organize a Zoom call to discuss external trends that may impact the Wikimedia movement, and over a hundred Wikimedians attended to talk about the opportunities and risks of generative AI. But a different concern also surfaced that really surprised and stuck with me. Longtime English Wikipedia editor Ragesoss noted that when observing how his children like to learn things online, he saw that instead of going to websites, they sought out personalities who had built large followings on platforms like YouTube, and could provide information from an authentically human point of view.

[...] Despite the excitement (and hype) around generative AI in the press over the last year, Wikipedia is still used by more people globally than ChatGPT. But, when looking at Wikipedia usage compared to usage of popular social platforms frequented by young people, the comparison is far less favorable for us. TikTok has close to two billion monthly global users – twice as many as Wikipedia – and is still growing. [...] A third of US people under age 30 recently reported regularly getting their news from TikTok, and one in four US TikTok users say they come to the platform for educational purposes like learning history.

The Future Audiences initiative has been set up to experiment with different ways of keeping Wikipedia relevant into 2030. In a presentation at WikiConference North America in November, Maryana laid out three potential pathways:

1) Make Wikipedia a "knowledge destination" by creating more engaging content, in order to compete with sites like TikTok and Quora; this is obviously unrealistic, and in the Signpost piece Maryana implies that the idea has been pretty much abandoned.

2) Do more to encourage the re-use of content by third-parties, but request (demand?) more prominent attribution.

3) Make Wikipedia "the Internet's conscience," by creating tools that allow users of third-party platforms to quickly verify online information.

The third stategy appears to be the current focus, with the launch of a new tool called "Citation Needed." This is a browser extension for Chrome that allows users to instantly "verify" anything they read online. I use the scare-quotes because this "verification" is achieved simply by asking ChatGPT to read and summarize the relevant Wikipedia article. In the example images, the tool doesn't provide any links to the sources used in the article, nor are there any warnings or disclaimers about Wikipedia's unreliability (or ChatGPT's, for that matter). It's still in the early stages of testing, but the feedback solicited is only about whether end-users trust the information they're receiving, not about whether the information is actually trustworthy.

More generally speaking, I don't think it's likely that strategies (2) or (3) will significantly boost Wikipedia's readership among the younger generation, because they don't address the main problem: Wikipedia's model of "boring but informative" is losing its appeal. The Citation Needed tool includes a link that says "Continue reading on Wikipedia," but it's a safe bet that whatever the user is reading is more interesting than a Wikipedia article, so why would they click away? Especially when they know they can get the same information in a more engaging format from their favourite YouTuber or chatbot.

This is obviously a big problem for the WMF – if readership declines, donations will dry up – but is it really a problem for Wikipedia? If the WMF collapses, the worst-case scenario is that Wikipedia moves to another set of servers. Reduced readership would also mean a smaller core group of active editors, but this in my opinion could only be a good thing. It would hasten the onset of Wikipedia's much-needed consolidation phase – the first glimmerings of which have already been seen in LUGSTUBS and related sagas – as a smaller group of volunteers would have to find ways to manage its time more effectively, and a brutal culling of unnecessary articles would be an obvious starting point. There would also be less time for drama, and the community would consequently be far less tolerant of POV-pushing and well-meaning incompetence. Serious editors would always find their way to the site, but the reduced visibility of the articles would make them much less of a target for casual vandalism. There might even a chance that articles, once written, would remain fairly static, rather than degenerating into pond slime.

In short, I think this latest Seldon crisis could be exactly what Wikipedia needs. It's just a case of identifying who the future audience is likely to be, rather than trying to forcibly retain the audience you'd like. Casual visitors are on the way out; Wikipedia's future audience will be, on the one hand, researchers and journalists, and on the other, LLMs and other content scrapers. Wikipedians, therefore, should focus on finding ways to tailor their content to suit the needs of these end-users. The WMF's money-grubbing projects are only a distraction.

[No Ledge]

I wonder how much the editors of Encyclopædia Britannica worried in the 1950s about their loss of market share to that new technology called "television", and how much their readers would prefer to get their education from TV. Despite my significant education by sources such as American Experience and Nova, I still find a lot of time to both read and edit Wikipedia. I can't really contribute to American Experience and NOVΛ the same way. My only practical way to contribute to those programs is to send money, money which I presume the recipients use in a more productive way than the Wikimedia Foundation uses their contributions.

I see no sign of any significant reduction in Wikipedia editors. The flood of new content is still arriving much faster than the smaller core group of active editors can keep up with it. Despite the lack of any sign of contributions drying up, the WMF, via Wiki Ed, continues their push to add even more content to the overwhelming flood.

The shortage that continues is a shortage of competent, skilled curators who manage that content flood. The WMF has never shown much if any interest in nurturing curators. They just say that somehow, despite assumptions that the Wiki model shouldn't work, it, somehow, magically, does. Then they put on blinders with regard to investigating how well it works, or how to improve the way it works. My focus is on that, and I just slave away in obscurity working on that task.

A smaller core group of active editors would not be a good thing. Active editors are the overwhelmed curators.