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Ask HN: Is Wikipedia going to be obsolete soon?

1 points by piratesAndSons ↗ HN
Recently they began showing a download-our-app ad at the top of the site, and it made me wonder: is the website going away soon? Wikipedia was a fixture of the Web 2.0 era, but now websites are changing.

Chatbots are taking massive traffic from websites. Young people don’t like reading text; they prefer watching videos and listening to podcasts. Websites are seen as the old way of doing things, which is why Wikipedia has begun building its own app, since Gen Z is trending this way.

18 comments

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kbrannigan
Young people don't like reading text Umm is the same as young people don't like to walk they'd rather use cars You know what I'm thinking Nature will sort itself out That's all I can say
herrkobold
wikipedia is indispensable. therefore it will be dispensed
ckx
Wikipedia has always had an app, Wikipedia is not going away, sure, it will recieve less traffic, but it has and always will be a staple of the Internet. If Wikipedia ever went down, millions of pages of human knowledge would disappear. It's not going away anytime soon.
moomoo11
most wiki articles on current events are so politically slanted these days.

i hope so.

flippant
I used to think that English Wikipedia is biased, but now I've realized that it's a consensus machine. Wikipedia is just downstream of biased reporting. The editors are good about following whatever facts are most reliably citable.

Using North Korea as an example because I assume it's not a polarizing topic for people on HN. NK is especially interesting because we only have access to reporting from external news sources. Sure there's anti-regime bias, but that's just reflective of Western consensus. It's fascinating to see exactly when the editors decide it's appropriate to call Kim Jong-Un a "dictator". And also fascinating to see the editors flip back and forth on the term "supreme leader".

I wish this kind of edit-history/timeline/diff existed nicely in Wikipedia, but the existing tool in Wikipedia is too granular. I think a month view is the best for this kind of analysis.

https://memoryhole.app/wiki-timeline/compare?title=Kim+Jong+...

devilsdata
The truth is politically slanted too, according to some.
bwb
Love Wikipedia, not going anywhere. The app with seeing places around you is amazing when traveling.
NishanStepak
Wikipedia is going to change with this. I expect more apps and video instruction to happen. There is no reason Wikipedia cannot expand Wikimedia and make it more effective. They have a huge amount of creative commons content already on Wikimedia. Wikimedia is already better than Wikipedia in many ways.
sdevonoes
How would people update wikipedia if there’s no website? Via an app? Don’t think so
Muhammad523
I don't think so. I keep offline copies of Wikipedia using kiwix, maybe y'all should too.