So why have we stopped building pyramids for thousands of years? We have the technology and knowledge to do it, so where are all the new pyramids? And no, that Las Vegas monstrosity doesn't count.
You might be surprised to learn that not all challenges are purely technological. The biggest challenges with such megaprojects are political, economical, and social. A Wikipedia clone is completely worthless if nobody is willing to contribute - it would just be an empty database!
I guess it is because pyramids were built at a time of tyrranical supreme leaders with 100% of power and wealth concentrated in themselves. That and fashion
I agree, but I think the reason why we don't build pyramids today is because it would be a huge waste of resources. I guess you don't think much of Las Vegas-- me neither-- but the sphere is pretty darn impressive. There are all kinds of examples around the world with amazing architecture. The Hoover dam, the Golden Gate bridge, etc. If the Egyptians could have done these things they would probably not have built pyramids.
As an aside. When the Eifel Tower was built it was considered tacky by many and assumed to be temporary. Maybe some of the most remembered things of our time will be taken for granted. Maybe some huge data center will be a museum.
> And no, that Las Vegas monstrosity doesn't count.
Why doesn't it? The owner isn't buried in it?
> The biggest challenges with such megaprojects are political, economical, and social
Indeed; this is why we moved on from piling rocks in a formation that didn't fall down easily, and put all those things you list into cathederals, hydroelectric dams, the Apollo missions, etc.
> Indeed; this is why we moved on from piling rocks in a formation that didn't fall down easily, and put all those things you list into cathederals, hydroelectric dams, the Apollo missions, etc.
Several hours later, I realise we have many things which would seem like much more impressive versions of the pyramids, in the event of the collapse of industrial civilisation followed by a second renaissance and future archeological digs looking at us as we looked upon the tombs of Tutankhamen: artificial hills made by covering landfill likely contain a lot more precious metal than a pharaoh's tomb.
The comcept of the end of history, including Fukuyama's thesis, is an interesting intellectual topic, and I would argue that it's become even more interesting and relevant with the threat that AI could become.
I wonder... not rage bait btw... but PHP was super easy to program. I wonder if things like this are harder to build today. Like, before you could setup a LAMP stack and program a wiki in the time it takes to begin to wrap your head around the current programming paradigms.
Oops, guess it was rage bait. (not OOP btw). I just figured the economist article was about programming. Don't have JS on this computer, so I couldn't read it.
Wikipedia became popular despite its programming. Anyone who has ever tried to edit a Wiki page knows its editor is absolute garbage, for example. Want to create your own basic DIY wiki in 2026? Just set up a GitHub Pages which auto-accepts pull requests, you'll be up and running in less than 30 minutes.
Besides, nobody is forcing to to use the current programming paradigms. A classic LAMP stack will still work.
This is most definitely wrong. People volunteer and crowdsource all the time, driven by ideals. And the async nature of the web will only make such projects stronger. There's OpenStreetMap, TV Tropes, fandom wikis, movie dbs, and a thousand others with no sign of stopping.
But the future will raise the bar. Perhaps we'll see wiki of wikis, or something else getting the web closer to truly semantic knowledge.
Many longtime OSM mappers have sensed that there has been some decline in interest and a risk to the long-term future of the project as a truly amateur-enthusiast phenomenon. Causes include: younger generations raised on corporate platforms and their phone apps are less aware of non-corporate alternatives, and might even be suspicious of libre and altruistic movements (this is a concern in Free Software circles, too); as the map got filled in, there were fewer obvious blanks that struck a total newbie as a place he/she could contribute; corporations got onboard both as OSM users and stakeholders, and then some idealistic anti-capitalistic people have asked why they should contribute if the map can benefit corps, too, etc.
> then some idealistic anti-capitalistic people have asked why they should contribute if the map can benefit corps, too
”We should respect freedoms and not restrict them arbitrarily… except when I do not like the people using those freedoms.“
It is always a weird take to me. Pick a license that matches your preferences, like the GPL. Do not pick MIT/whatever and then complain when corps make use of the freedoms you afforded them.
GPL should absolutely be the default choice for software. It is quite weird when people choose the MIT license and then complain when others use their open source software and turn it into a proprietary for profit software when the author explicitly allowed them to do this in the license. The MIT is really not long. People should read it before using it.
But you can also take a noncommercial GPL software, slightly modify and put your logo and name on it, do some marketing and get cash out of it without contributing anything significant. You just can't make it proprietary. But it's still an unfair situation.
If you don't want your software used commercially, don't Open Source (or Free Software) it. Maybe a CC-NC license if you want to give it away for noncommercial use.
The rest of us will continue to use and make OSS and enjoy it without worrying about what others are doing with it.
The GPL has nothing to do with usage and what others are doing with it. On the contrary: it explicitly provides the freedom to use the software as you wish, including for commercial use. Even Stallman is against licences that would prohibit commercial use.
But the GPL goes even further than that, and this appears to be the source of your confusion. The GPL stops people redistributing the software under terms that would restrict or prohibit use, including commercial use. The GPL guarantees that anyone receiving the software now or in the future has the same rights you have.
No, you honestly seem quite confused about the whole thing. It sounds like you've been put off GPL at some point but haven't actually grasped the issues surrounding it and therefore cannot rationalise your beliefs in any way.
Companies like Microsoft with huge marketing departments hate the GPL because they don't like their users to be free. It's part of their business strategy to keep people locked in. That alone should tell you it's probably not for for you. Sadly you seem to have been taken by their bs, though.
The AGPL does not prevent commercial neither as a user nor as a publisher of the software. It even prevents anyone from creating a derivative work from your software and publishing it under a license that prohibits commercial use.
Someone can absolutely fork your software and use it commercially. That's what FOSS is about: You shall not limit what other people can do with the software.
You may however restrict others from putting restrictions on derivative works of your software. That's what the GPL is all about. You enforce reciprocity and ensure that all works based on your software allow the user the essential freedoms of free software.
I agree but the reality is most authors want to use their OSS creations at work, which usually means they will make a compromise with capitalists who reject copyleft licenses.
Many human problems could be solved if humans were less willing to compromise with greedy people, but unfortunately authors are too nice in general to do that.
Yeah and the soup kitchen has no right to complain that I packaged up all their food and sold it next door. Clearly they should have made everyone sign a contract before getting any food if they didn't want that.
You're more or less right. OSM (via an exhaustive licence change process) did indeed choose the licence that matched its preferences, and almost all contributors are happy that it allows commercial use.
What does stick in the craw with many of us, however, is that Meta, Mapbox, and various other bigcos have nonetheless decided to disregard the attribution requirements of what is a fairly permissive licence, simply because they're sufficiently big that they can say to the OSM Foundation (annual turnover about £3.27) "suck it, we dare you to sue us".
> younger generations raised on corporate platforms and their phone apps are less aware of non-corporate alternatives
All the new guys I work with are trapped in the app store/play store bubble. If it's not available directly through the device's software distribution system it's not getting used.
> might even be suspicious of libre and altruistic movements
All my boomer bosses think that anything that is outside the Windows/O365 ecosystem, or doesn't come with a $150 yearly license, is clearly pirate hacker software that will give your e-mail a virus and steal your bitcoin.
It is increasingly frustrating when we have a problem that could be fixed with GNU corutils and a bash script, or a raspberrypi/arduino translating between 2 serial devices, but we end up getting some $1500 black box from the 'official' vendor. It teaches the newer guys that step one is not to think about the problem, it's to grab your wallet and call a salesman.
This is not a new problem. I worked in corporate IT in the early 2000’s. Both attitudes existed even then, though of course there was no App Store back then. Nevertheless there was a strong preference among younger employees for paid software—the kind you get in boxes. The older generation viewed most software as suspect, but were willing to accept “official” solutions from Microsoft and other name brand software vendors. It seems comical now, but at the time Red Hat was viewed almost universally among my coworkers as a terrible idea. And forget about custom software. Rolling one’s own software was widely seen as crazy talk.
Never underestimate the blame game. It's a lot easier to place the blame on MS than on your own organisation. All customers knows you can't do anything about how windows works and have accepted the dysfunction already.
It took me the best part of 20 years of working in the corporate world to realise that the decisions aren't about the best thing for the user, or the employee, or even the shareholder, it's about the best thing for the decision maker. Ideally one which allows them to have no accountability whatsoever.
It's the whole reason management consultancies exist. If Deloite tell you to do X, or Gartner say buy Y, and you do, you aren't going to have the blame. Even when you end up losing half a billion as our last CxO did, you'll just get a golden handshake and a move to another company.
Someone who worked in corporate law once said "in the rare case you have to hire outside counsel you always hire the fanciest name brand firm. Not because the fancy firm does better work, but because of risk mitigation and CYA. If things go sideways then you can say 'not my fault,I hired the fanciest firm.'"
Already in the 90‘s I has advocating for FOSS in a big company. And someone told me “nobody was ever fired for buying IBM” that phrase was already very old…
I remember buying SuSe Linux as literally boxed software around that time. But I bought it for my own use and my employer (not software industry) was running mostly windows with some legacy Unix.
in most corporate environments if your homebrew solution breaks, then you have a problem. If something that came from a vendor breaks, that’s not your problem.
I understand your frustration but I’ve given up fighting with IT and just let them sort it out
In their defense, if something isn’t in my distro repo, 75% of the time I’ll ignore it. Using the operating system’s built in method of installing software is very preferable. It is mostly just Windows (and to a lesser extent MacOS) where some repo (because what is an App Store if not a paid repo) isn’t the default.
Of course, all the software in the distro repo is there because somebody went against this tendency.
Many longtime OSM mappers like myself are acutely aware of various corporations making big bucks on the back of our volunteered time and effort. Often times without contributing anything. Recently made worse by horrible API abuses.
I get why people might not be motivated to join us in the tragedy of the commons.
It is not that the they make money, but the problem is that corporations with huge budgets can overshadow the volunteer run packaging of the said projects and eventually become the canonical way of using them.
Then the project loses visibility to end users. I don't know if that is worth the occasional commercial contributions from them to satisfy their own requirements.
You mean relicensing the project? The data has always been free to anyone. I think you might confuse the map data which is OSM with the external providers whose business is to repackage it into various windows, APIs and other services.
I was done with OSM within a few days. I fixed some streams to be in the right place, reverted.
This post box is no longer there. "I'll drive round and check", "no need I'm stood there, it has gone". "I'll drive round tomorrow"...I got the impression i was on someone else's patch and gave up
To get instant pushback from other mappers is fairly unusual; I would say you had bad luck (or live in Lithuania). In a lot of the world, edits correct or incorrect can take months or years to be noticed by another mapper.
But with regard to bodies of water, there are systems that monitor OSM and warn if someone has tried to "move them to the right place". These details were often added to OSM from professionally surveyed maps, so they are in the right place. However, ordinary people's consumer GPS is typically a few meters off, and they end up moving things to the inaccurate coordinates on their screens.
The bodies of water did not match the professionally surveyed maps they had. I simply moved them to match. A person commented that there were lots of mistakes in this area and thanked me.... then someone reverted them
speaking of OSM... I've been part of teams at _certain country_'s _certain municipalities_ and teams working on GIS projects. so little among those people, who consume OSM content on a daily basis, even think about giving back, that even though I am not an OSM contributor, I start to get outraged at their total ignorance and disregard for crowd-sourced content, and the fact that someone put some work to have it there. same people are then getting royalties delivering this content to third parties. this is so wrong on so many levels, and I can't think of a way to make it work in a future where data is more precious than software packages.
> corporations got onboard both as OSM users and stakeholders, and then some idealistic anti-capitalistic people have asked why they should contribute if the map can benefit corps,
Anecdotally, I’ve had a lot of experiences like this with newer generations of people on topics like open source software or community projects: They’ve been trained, usually by a social media niche, to believe that the only good fight is to actively harm corporations. Their idea of the world is a very clear black and white contrast with people on one side and corporations on the other.
Such a clean separation of the world only exists in ideas they get from social media and movies. Encountering a project like OSM or an open source project where the largest users (and for OSS, maybe the largest contributors) are people involved with corporations doesn’t fit into their worldview, so they file it in the “corporate” side of the divide and dislike it.
I would argue that the MAG7 - about whom these complaints are about I assume, not some random little startup that uses OSM API - can no longer be seen as classical corporations. The power and moat they assumed can not be achieved by most other such entities.
I think the difficult thing to reconcile is that you naturally will expect some degree of compensation (power, recognition, money, or a combo) for putting a lot of work into something.
However on the other hand, it has been drilled into your head repeatedly that wanting compensation for work is "bad" and antithetical to social movements. You work for the whole, not for yourself. Besides, you (along with everyone else) gets to enjoy the fruits of others free work.
But then after dwelling on it, you realize that 90% of the people holding you to this ideology aren't contributing much if anything at all, and just gorging themselves on the work of a few.
So now you either consolidate power into your hands (nazi mods), lose motivation (project decays), or become an "evil" capitalist(start charging money for access).
> However on the other hand, it has been drilled into your head repeatedly that wanting compensation for work is "bad" and antithetical to social movements. You work for the whole, not for yourself.
Any ideology built on this premise is doomed to failure. Successful movements are ones that align the particular interests of individuals with the broader goals of the community.
Dogmas that set individual interest and public interest at odds with each other will always debilitate the effectiveness of the entire movement, and subject it to never-ending internal conflict.
The free software/open source ecosystem has successfully demonstrated how public-interest idealism and for-profit commercial pursuits can not just coexist, but actually complement and reinforce each other. Anyone who's arguing for one side of the ecosystem in opposition to the other is asking for the entire thing to collapse.
- Movies made after WWII that needed villians often made them Nazis.
- During the cold war, evil villians were communists or Soviet spies.
- Movies made after the fall of the Soviet Union often make their villians evil faceless corporations.
A generation or two has been raised by Hollywood and Disney on business always being evil, while simultaneoulsy choosing to consume and make themselves dependent on giant corporate content.
> A generation or two has been raised by Hollywood and Disney on business always being evil, while simultaneoulsy choosing to consume and make themselves dependent on giant corporate content.
It’s fascinatingly devilish, isn’t it? They control the outrage and profit from it. I’m reminded of Bill Hicks’ bit on marketing.
We constructed alien superintelligences with no human emotion or morality, they took over much of the world, and people are surprised that they’re seen as villains.
We’ve been very lucky that the incentive structure has them doing a lot of useful things for us, but that doesn’t mean we have to be happy about having so much of our lives being ruled by these amoral aliens.
> "A generation or two has been raised by Hollywood and Disney on business always being evil"
Oh hollywood and disney, not the behaviour of Standard Oil, DeBeers, Nestle, Coca Cola, banks in the sub-prime mortgage crisis, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, OPEC, DuPont, Chemie Grünenthal, an "epidemic" of wage theft in America estimated in the tens of billions per year, the trends towards enshittification, nickel-and-diming, rent-extraction and grifting of most products and services over time, health insurance companies, the lived experience of millions of workers being devalued, insulted, and treated like cattle?
If you think about government and corporations - they're responsible for so many bad things in the world! I guess that's true, but how much of it is them just doing all the stuff?
So I don't know that it's fair? Nearly all the material goods around me and a ton of services were provided by corporations, which are largely composed of regular people glued together at scale by bureacracy.
There's a growing sentiment in the US that capitalism in general and consumerism in particular are inherently bad and cause only hardship and exploitation for the general public.
That "capitalism" and "consumerism" are abstract concepts that represent pre-existing patterns of human activity that arise from a priori motivations, and are not things that exist as entities unto themselves exerting an influence on anyone's behavior or situational outcomes.
I've no issues with capital or people consuming stuff.
My issue would be with the corporations, which I see as the new estates. Except that they are far larger and far more powerful than what we had two centuries ago. Their perks include: regulatory capture, political access, access to finance. Ie powerful corporations run the infrastructure for capital movement and consumption - in their interests.
So it sounds like rather than objecting to a specific method of coordinating large-scale activity among multiple participants ("corporations"), you're actually objecting to political interventions that favor some parties at the expense of others? I can get on board with that.
It just seems really odd to look at "regulatory capture" and "political access" as problems originating from people engaging in commercial activity in the broader economy, rather than correctly seeing them as originating from insufficient or ineffective safeguards on the concentration and assertion of political power.
> Ie powerful corporations run the infrastructure for capital movement and consumption - in their interests.
Well, no, they don't. Both the capital and the consumption originates from the intentions and motivations of the public at large. The interests of "corporations" -- which are, again, just coordinated patterns of human activity -- are pursued by actually satisfying the motivations of the people around them. You can't get capital without offering a return to your investors; you can't get customers without offering a value proposition that's worth more to them than the price you're charging, etc.
>> Ie powerful corporations run the infrastructure for capital movement and consumption - in their interests.
> Well, no, they don't. Both the capital and the consumption originates from the intentions and motivations of the public at large. The interests of "corporations" -- which are, again, just coordinated patterns of human activity -- are pursued by actually satisfying the motivations of the people around them. You can't get capital without offering a return to your investors; you can't get customers without offering a value proposition that's worth more to them than the price you're charging, etc.
Well, yes, they do. If you use the law to legislate this or that, you are directing the infrastructure. A great example is that people in general don't want phones/cars/fridges that spy on them, they simply want the phone/car/fridge. However, the simple option is not on offer. The regulatory capture provides us with the government mandate that data be captured, so it seems that corporate hands are tied. The consumer cannot find the option they would like.
All this can happen while offering a return to investors. In fact, licensing businesses, creating moats that small companies cannot bridge, ensures that large corporations have an unassailable position. They can investigate the maximum extraction from the consumer, rather than price a product according to cost. Wait till we all start to experience personalised pricing, where each person is offered a different price according to who they are.
Finally, you distinguish between corporate and political interests. I don't. These are the same creature to me. We already live in a fascist environment, where the government + business operate together. Whether you vote red or blue will do nothing for issues where the outcome is predetermined - such as the complete loss of privacy.
Free market competition makes sense. Lowest prices.
What we see right now in the USA, though, is a mafia. That has nothing to do with capitalism as such. It is a racket, a ponzi scheme. There are many variants of capitalism. Even the chinese adapted their variant to sinomarxistic ideals (to certain extent; I don't think today's main China is purely capitalistic nor purely sinomarxistic as it once used to be).
The market abhors competition. The free market, absent government regulation, will always trend towards anticompetitive consolidation because it's far more profitable.
Cory Doctorow wrote about this: "Capitalists Hate Capitalism"
> Capitalists hate capitalism. They don’t want to be exposed to the risks entailed by competition, and feel the goad of that insecurity. They want monopolies, or platforms, or monopoly platforms. They want assets, not businesses.
Individual participants in the market may abhor competition, but the market itself is made of competition.
Government intervention is the principal mechanism by which powerful participants restrain other partipants' market activity, and insulate themselves from competition.
Unchecked Capitalism always leads to Mono/Duopolies aka Mafia. The best of both World is maybe called Social-direct-democratic-capitalism.
>What we see right now in the USA, though, is a mafia. That has nothing to do with capitalism as such.
Has everything to do with unchecked Capitalism, go too far and both extremes end in a ~Monopoly, in Socialism/Communism it's mostly the State (China, USSR, Cuba etc.) in Capitalism a massive conglomerate of Enterprises (S.Korea, again "new" China, Russia, USA, India)
China didn't adapt it o "sinomarxistic ideals", whatever that is. Deng Xiaoping understood the failure of marxism, in almost all ways, so started ripping the band-aid.
But he also wasn't interested in major political change.
So we've got something that I'm surprised Europeans don't recognize; state-backed champions and heavy government intervention in various markets, and almost total free markets in sectors that the government doesn't really care about. But at no point can any one company or industry even attempt to undermine the central authority, because Deng wanted to get China out of the economic gutter, not lose power.
> Nearly all the material goods around me and a ton of services were provided by corporations
But the issue is not about corporations - or companies - per se.
The issue is how they relate to the general population. You can have good corporations and bad corporations. When billionaires buy legislation then something is wrong. When a corrupt elite invades countries and kills people - that's bad.
So the problem with corporations is that governments sometimes do bad things that benefit them?
The problem of "billionaires buying legislation" is that billionaires get money from market activity to buy it with, not that it's up for sale by politicians or that the limits on the scope of legislation are insufficient?
When a military force marches into another country, that's the work of a vague "corrupt elite" and not the political officials in charge of the military?
This is another theme I notice in this same cohort: It is not permissible to even suggest that they’re doing anything wrong. Any time someone highlights behaviors or beliefs that have problems or are inconsistent, someone will pop up and blame that on the corporations, too.
So even when these people have turned into a broken clock about being anti-corporate to the point that they’re anti-open-projects, someone will always come along to explain why we everything is the fault of corporations. A normal working class person can not be faulted for their beliefs in this model, because every fault will be transformed into something that can be blamed on a corporation.
Personally I find the erasure of individual thought in this model to be demeaning. You can’t blame everything every individual does on corporations having either made them do it or forced them to believe it through their actions. At some point we have to admit that people’s thoughts and actions are their own.
If someone becomes so bitter that they’re becoming anti-OSM or anti-Wikipedia or anti-OSS, I’m fully okay with holding them to account for their chosen beliefs.
> This is another theme I notice in this same cohort
> Personally I find the erasure of individual thought in this model to be demeaning.
The fact that you are describing a behavior that you believe to be shared among a sizable group of people seems to contradict your claim that their beliefs are due to individual failings rather than some broader social forces that caused them to believe these things, no?
The historical left/marxist view is essentially: look at someone's social context and where their money comes from, and you'll know how they probably think. The American ideology is: everyone is an individual and a tramp can be a philosopher.
The second is much more appealing to us as individuals, and to our sense of self-determination and independence. And people do have agency---some people succumb to despair, others don't; some work hard, some don't; some rebound from setbacks, some don't.
But if you look at large groups of people, the first one starts to have strong explanatory power. Look at US coverage of foreign elections, and that second view is almost all you see.
US coverage of foreign elections can't indulge in personality based coverage or leverage the audience's in-built understanding of culture and politics, so you get broad statements about how urban professionals voted for party X but the rural poor voted for party Y.
I think GP pretty clearly states it's due to broader social forces:
> They’ve been trained, usually by a social media niche
I don't think that was a complicated point, but maybe you think you were asking something else, while trying to still blame whatever "social forces" TikTok has told you to blame.
Lol, I don’t use (have never used) TikTok; I generally think I have arrived at my current belief mostly through reading books.
I’m responding primarily to this sentiment:
> At some point we have to admit that people’s thoughts and actions are their own.
I generally find that placing blame on individuals for views that one believes are wrong is not constructive. Clearly there are reasons that they believe the things that they do, and this is especially true when you disagree not with an individual but with an entire group.
Of course anyone is free to get angry at anyone else for their individual beliefs, and I believe that individually people’s minds can be changed. But blaming individuals _who you have never met_ for behaviors that you are stereotyping from an entire group seems wholly unproductive. This is not going to change the group’s minds, and is only going to make you bitter.
When discussing group behavior, it only makes sense to discuss social influences.
Sure, individuals can have wrong beliefs. Of course. So what? Should we consider people who have beliefs that we believe the be wrong bad people and disassociate from them? Or should we try to understand their point of view and why they believe the things that they do so we can either reevaluate our own beliefs or change theirs?
You engage in confessions as accusations when ignoring the possibility, it could be you who is wrong.
The problem isn't "corporations", it's capitalism. The economic system forces corporations to behave in anti-social ways.
Similar goes with the trope you peddle, individuals were to blame. They're not. The system they live in, and never had any say in shaping, forces them to engage in behaviors short term that ultimately run counter to their own interests long term.
Contributing to open source software or commons like Wikipedia definitely is questionable. Those contributions get monopolized and their benefits privatized. That's not a "belief".
What do you mean capitalism? As in the system of private ownership, free exchange, and due process, spanning back to the dawn of agriculture?
Which bits do you object to? The idea that people should be able to form going concerns that outlive any individuals (e.g. investing in the construction of a fishing boat)? That several individuals should be able to share in the risk and profit of such a venture (e.g. a group investing in the construction, and receiving shares of the profit of each catch)? Or that they should be able to hire others on a free market for a wage or share of profits (e.g. hiring a crew for the boat)? Or that if they should have a dispute, there should be a formal, legal, process to resolve it?
The trouble is that there is no human system in which the agents who distribute the resources are perfectly aligned with the agents to whom resources are distributed. This is nowhere more obvious than in the staggering planning, execution, and communication, failures of the Soviet Union. This is a general case of the alignment problem, which is fundamentally unsolved. I would argue that it's un-solvable as long as your agents are living organisms competing in an ecosystem.
Niches exist to be exploited. As long as the niches exist, they will be exploited. Resenting that is akin to resenting the biggest fish in the pond for being so damn aggressive - it's pointless. We live in a pond, and we should focus on maintaining the nonviolent and often ecosystem-benefitting nature of our exploitation (since it is hard-won and precarious), rather than resent the inescapable reality of its existence.
You point out aspects you like about capitalism, but those maybe aren't the problematic parts to begin with? You imply, there were no viable alternatives, but that's just ignorance on your part.
When you refer to "private ownership", you unreflectedly endorse things like individuals "owning" land.
The consequence of that negligence are things like environmental destruction, capturing of arable land by rent-seeking individuals and on and on. A substantial part of what currently goes wrong on the macro-scale.
"Free exchange" is a misnomer in the same vein. The "freedom" leaves people to willfully avoid asking whether they really should in the first place. More importantly, it favors people with money to impose their will upon those without.
"Due process" isn't tied to capitalism to begin with and all these things don't "span back to the dawn of agriculture".
You put up the straw man of the Soviet Union, prepping it up to the height of serving as the epitome of what humans could conceive of as alternatives (or modifications) of the existing system. That's a declaration of intellectual bankruptcy, not higher insight.
Territorial (read: assertion of exclusive rights to the use of land) behaviour is not unique to humans. My point is that "capitalism" is an abstraction that includes pre-existing human behaviour and motivations, and that many of these in turn are emergent from the constraints of natural world.
> environmental destruction, capturing of arable land by rent-seeking individuals and on and on
> asking whether they really should in the first place?
> it favors people with money to impose their will upon those without
All of these criticisms reflect a total naivety to ecosystem dynamics at play, and the motivational landscape that they create. As long as these behaviours continue to create a competitive advantage for the organisms that display them, they will continue to emerge and perpetuate. There is no method of social organization that can remove the advantages of resource surplus.
You'll also note that environmental destruction, resource hoarding, and interference competition are all widespread behaviours in the natural world. We are part of that world, and are subject to the constraints that it produces.
It's like trying to overcome a bug in the CPU instruction set by writing JavaScript. The "problems" are part of the fundamental substrate and aren't addressable at the proposed layer of abstraction.
Territorial behavior in animals is no justification for anything?
When you abstract, you leave things out. You claim to abstract from cave people. How is that the best we can do?
You pretend, humans were cells competing mindlessly. Then you conclude, any other approach than mindless behavior was naive.
You again observe animals and justify your behavior (on a vastly greater scale) by it.
How do you manage not to see the absurdity in that? You're not an animal, you have a conscious mind, capable of rational thought and according foresight.
> You claim to abstract from cave people. How is that the best we can do?
Because that is, in a very fundamental and immutable way, who we are.
I'm saying that we live in an ecosystem, and that creates emergent properties and behaviours. Resource hoarding and interference competition are among those. No amount of consciousness, rational thought, or foresight, can change that.
As long as (e.g.) hoarding resources today makes it more likely for your offspring to succeed tomorrow, the traits that influence people to hoard resources will continue to perpetuate. It's also why, for example, we have the dark tetrad - it works:
Too high of trust creates opportunities for liars. Too many liars lowers trust to the point that it's not profitable to lie. There exists between these two points a stable equilibrium between zero liars and everyone lying all the time, and it's at neither extreme. The same is true for all other behaviours you moralize.
I'm not justifying anything, I'm simply observing the constraints of the system we live in, and inferring that any mode of social organization that ignores or opposes these constraints is doomed.
In your imagination apparently, but that is clearly divorced from reality.
Apart from debatable (but real) genetic differences you don't know about, the crucial point is culture. We're not cave people as we don't share their culture and don't have to.
Your idea of our environment predisposing us for capitalism is simply false. Notably, the premise rests solely on your posturing here.
Your ideas about people being automata beholden to their genetic programming beyond their control is even more absurd. And lacks any basis in evidence.
You apparently have never heard about ethics. There is a difference between morals and ethics. Lying isn't wrong because "arbitrary morals" say so, it is because realistic, objective consequences tell you so.
Your idea of an "equilibrium of all behaviors" presupposes mindless automata, again.
"Culture" also exists in an ecosystem, and is subject to evolutionary pressure. It's why things like religious zeal self-perpetuate - armies of fanatical maniacs tend to win wars against armies of pragmatic atheists.
Human societies are meta-organisms - they modify themselves over time, and compete with each other for finite resources. Any culture which sacrifices competitive advantage for any reason is simply out-competed and absorbed by other societies which make no such sacrifice. There is no escaping this reality. This is referred to as cultural group selection.
> Your idea of our environment predisposing us for capitalism is simply false. Notably, the premise rests solely on your posturing here.
I'm not saying it predisposes us to capitalism though, I'm saying it predisposes us to maximize resources and engage in competitive behaviour. This is supported by the fact that very nearly every organism in nature also engages in resource maximization and competitive behaviour (r-Selection). There is no altruism (going against genetic self interest) in nature, it's simply not sustainable.
> Your ideas about people being automata beholden to their genetic programming beyond their control is even more absurd. And lacks any basis in evidence.
I'm making no such claim. I'm simply claiming there are constraints in the system, and ignoring them doesn't make them go away.
> Lying isn't wrong because "arbitrary morals" say so, it is because realistic, objective consequences tell you so.
Any yet, no matter how hard we try, we've not managed to eliminate lying (or even agree what specifically it means). Are you really suggesting that some yet-undiscovered set of rules will create a society in which no one will ever lie? Doesn't that sound a bit.. unrealistic?
> This is another theme I notice in this same cohort: It is not permissible to even suggest that they’re doing anything wrong.
Not taking a side in this particular discussion, but this specific sentence looks like a self-fulfilling statement: if people disagree with you, you take it as proof that they are unable to evaluate your claim fairly.
If you translate "corporations" into it's actual meaning, then substitute it into your sentence, it becomes apparent how silly that is.
"Or maybe they just feel that organizational methodologies used by people to coordinate complex multi-participant activities are actively trying to harm them and this is the logical response?"
Much of the open source movement has its roots in anti-corporate culture too. Given that open source is now largely funded by corporations is a win for the ideals of open source but also a corruption of the early ethos; It’s very easy to equate open source with corporatism.
systemd is a lot less complex than legacy init systems, in the Rich Hickey sense of systems that are linked together in irregular and noisy ways.
A million lines of C supporting 2k lines of declarative unit files is less complex from the user's perspective than 50k lines of custom bash scripts. Of course it would be better if it did the same thing in, say, 100k lines or in Rust, but perfect is the enemy of good. systemd exists today and it works fine.
Everything is regular, predictable, documented and easy to read. A file made for one distro only needs trivial changes to run on another. That's what simple really means. I would never go back to init scripts.
> Everything is regular, predictable, documented and easy to read. A file made for one distro only needs trivial changes to run on another. That's what simple really means. I would never go back to init scripts.
OpenRC, s6, rc.d (the BSD), are more simpler than the systemd ecosystem which is feature ladden and not easy to use on the common line. They are also way easier to hack upon, especially when you want to run a lean system (small vm, containers). systemd feels like running windows server for a small php application. The happy path is easy, anything outside of that is torture.
I think that's a natural sort of cognitive tendency for young people. We grow out of it. And fighting the corporations is a logical step at this point. Nice thing about open source is it'll wait patiently and grow when it can.
Whether this behavior makes sense (putting aside the fact that these social media networks are usually run by the same corporations) depends just on facts.
If indeed, their contributions serve mainly to enrich corporations that then contribute to the subversion of the political system through corruption, anti-democratic measures and so on, that's an entirely reasonable response.
New opportunities and directions open up all the time! AI is opening a whole new salient to attack the gatekeepers.
Craft is Wikipedia / OSM for software. We're building an open source AI software factory to agentically remake everything.
We're going to open source all the apps, turn platforms into protocols, build open infra, and help assist open weights.
Everything will be rewritten as high quality open source software. And once we've covered the space of everything people use, we'll turn the components into highly reusable open source libraries that can be reshaped into new workflows in real time.
We're going to make a seamless bridge between local and cloud AI, we're going to make a rich set of primitives for fine tuning and sharing.
Not just applications. Data, infra, hardware, the whole of technology.
> "AI is opening a whole new salient to attack the gatekeepers. Everything will be rewritten as high quality open source software."
Can you explain how you will resolve the tension between "high quality" without moderation who turn into Reddit "nazi moderators" or StackOverflow meanies, and without turfing out all moderators and turning into 4chan of old, trolling, and low quality overrun with ads and noise?
What social structure, organization, review, moderation, do you think will solve that tension?
https://streetcomplete.app/ I think is a pretty good example of OSM making it easy to contribute. Maybe try it as an on-ramp? It doesn't record driving or anything, just gives you little quests for your area
Unironically, try asking Claude to make it for you.
Then please publish it. Others can ask Claude too but it's stupid, and one central repository will have everyone's bugfixes and feature recommendations.
Do you have suitable aerial imagery available? Because if it that's the case (and this is the case in most countries) aligning 30 or so roads is an evening of mapping once you've bitten the bullet and learned to use JOSM (which is really not hard for most people with some technical background).
Did you ask for help in the community group for your country?
> That could be fixed easily if there was a convenient app that recorded my driving and uploaded it to a central source, processed it, and converted that into edits for me to confirm.
Mapping requires more than that. GPS traces can be useful in areas where no recent aerial imagery is available, but automated importing of that would cause a lot of errors.
Record your driving using any app that can export a GPX file (e.g. Strava, RideWithGPS, or Komoot). Import that GPX file into the standard OSM web editor and trace the displayed tracks.
Have your phone camera pointing at the road as you drive, uploading shots to Mapillary. Mapillary will automatically detect signs from the photos. In JOSM you can toggle an imagery layer of those detected signs. This is how speed limits, stop/give-way signs, maxweight and other details have been mapped in many regions.
The kids are alright (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Zeloof). They are putting up more of a fight than you can imagine. The root cause of centralization is the way we do hardware manufacturing (as explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49690354). I think it will take about 5 years to make fabs into home appliances, then the entire stack will decentralize from the bottom up. The future is most likely solar/cypherpunk, at least in America.
I personally think most people become disengaged from the side of things like OSM because they literally don't have visibility to the problem. It becomes even worse when there are literally trillions of dollars of market value derives from the good work of open source, but people only see the badge of product and not all of the layers of onion beneath it.
I really wish the world recognized and provided tax income to these projects because they have been the backbone of our ever-complex technological society for probably about thirty years. Rather than what we have now where large corporations will take a foothold in an open-source project and hollow it out for parts then sell it as a "turnkey" product like we have seen time and time again.
Funny you mention that. I spend half of every year cycling the world, editing OSM while I do so. I am well aware I am about the only person doing so for a given region of countryside, and it could be years before another mapper comes along after me. I can look back at places I mapped before Covid and see almost no additions, even though the given routes draw a lot of cyclists or overlanders.
Most of my peers in the bicycle-travel community are uninterested in mapping, or even totally unaware of where maps come from. Apps like Komoot became standard tools for cyclists, but only a minority ever learned that its data derives from OSM and anyone can edit it.
People volunteer and crowdsource driven by ideals, and then others involve themselves seeking fame, control, power -- slowly the idealism dies, and eventually only a husk remains.
Too bad we have people in the world seeking fame, control, and power. What humans could accomplish then would be unimaginable. Hopefully AI doesn't adopt those same human traits.
I think AI and spread of technology both suppresses and supercharges crowdsourcing inclinations. Once AI is better than the best researchers, who would manually maintain a Wikipedia? There might still be random manual human audits, but something like Grokipedia seems inevitable.
I think this will be the case for other things too. OpenStreetMaps won't need as many contributors as more sensors come online, eg. sensors and footage from hobby drones and people's phones augment how much information a single person can enter about a city.
The power of these tools is their governance structure not the means in which articles are edited. This is why musks Wikipedia clone will not amount to much of anything besides being a lazy attempt at making sloppified Wikipedia articles with a right wing bent.
> The power of these tools is their governance structure not the means in which articles are edited.
The power of any tool is its reliability to produce a useful result. Governance structure is a human construct intended to ensure reliability of human social interactions to produce useful results, but AI does not necessarily need human constructs to ensure the same or better outcomes.
> fan wikis have almost all consolidated onto the ad riden, unreadable monstrosity that is fandom
Minecraft, GTA, League of Legends, Valorant, Overwatch, Fortnite, Warframe and RuneScape (OSRS too) all moved off Fandom because they started forcing ads even harder. They're now hosted by a nonprofit that takes money from Riot to host their official wikis and uses it to pay for the rest.
I am so tired of people taking things 100% literally so they can make a counter point even though clearly I don’t mean literally every single one. Yes there are wikis that are not on fandom, do I really need to say that? The point is that the vast majority are. I said “almost all,” that should be sufficient.
I really don’t want to do that thing where I have to couch every single statement I make with parentheticals and qualifiers explaining the exact meaning and making sure to add a dozen “not” and “to be clear” statements in anticipation of this kind of responses
It’s also not a new belief. I remember all of the skepticism about Wikipedia being possible when it was a new idea.
What’s interesting is that most younger people I interact with now have a better idea of what’s possible through crowdsourced collaboration than older people. In the tech world, people who grew up with crowdsourced sites have seen the end state of Stack Overflow and its moderation, or they’ve seen enough controversies around Wikipedia edit wars where controversial topics become battlegrounds to see which moderators can wield the site’s rules more effectively to revert edits they don’t want on the page. On a long enough timeframe, community projects are at high risk of turning into fiefdoms for power hungry moderators.
The younger people grow up seemingly seeing the same things, but having a different experience about what it means. Talk to any younger generation gamer and they’ll have stories about Discord or Minecraft communities collapsing under power tripping moderators. But in the newer world where internet resources are cheap and now that LLMs can help migrate things, they may have established a new Discord or moved the community to a new game server by the end of the week. Their favorite game emulator or other project may have been forked 4 times already and the community will move to another fork again at the first signs of the new maintainer not doing what they like.
Totally agree, with AI it feels like we will actually accelerate that or be able to take on more ambitious projects as per the things you mentioned, its been a laborious effort by mankind. Now imagine we really want to do open maps, communication, even search. There are all sorts of possible ways we can do some large scale crowdsourced effort and its probably going to be realtime news e.g video streaming live events on an open platform not owned by corporations. Where there is no misinformation. No one can lie to us, we can see it happening.
> Totally agree, with AI it feels like we will actually accelerate that or be able to take on more ambitious projects as per the things you mentioned, its been a laborious effort by mankind. Now imagine we really want to do open maps, communication, even search.
But then it'll just be your AI slop and no one will care. If they want one they'll slop one up themselves instead of using yours.
> There are all sorts of possible ways we can do some large scale crowdsourced effort and its probably going to be realtime news e.g video streaming live events on an open platform not owned by corporations. Where there is no misinformation. No one can lie to us, we can see it happening.
That's a fantasy. The trend is towards more corporate ownership and more misinformation (or if there's less, it will only be because the corporate overlord AIs will suppress misinformation that's against their interests, and promote other misinformation that suits them better).
Exactly. Erosion of the Internet's commons by spam, abuse, botting etc. were always a problem they had to contend with, but it's gotten way worse recently, to the point where several are either failing to cope or already dead (like StackOverflow).
I'm guessing that most commenters here didn't read the article, and the headline itself was abridged by omitting the word "quite" in "quite like". The article isn't saying that nothing vaguely shaped like Wikipedia will never be created again. It's saying that there will probably be no room for a similar human-written encyclopedia in the future because the internet is changing shape and is morphing into something not conductive to having human-curated websites:
"AI’s absorption of Wikipedia means that more people than ever are reading its content. Yet it also means that fewer people are visiting the site itself. When a Wikipedia link is suggested by a search engine, nearly a tenth of users click through. When Wikipedia is cited by an LLM, the clickthrough rate is only 0.33% (and not all credit their sources)."
There's just not enough people you can attract with the pitch of "let's edit a training dataset for OpenAI together".
Some folks saying are saying that AI will only accelerate the creation of future Wikipedias, and that's obviously missing the point. Yes, there might be Grokipedia-style entities, probably a number of them.
There are two critical points for a wikipedia level project:
1. the culture of sharing your work
2. the sense of usefulness and purpose
I'm not sure the newest generation share the 1, but in any case LLM companies destroy the 2.
Why would you thanklessly work for free and for the community if your work is pillaged and sold for a lot of money by AI companies before the project even reaches a critical mass ?!
StackOverflow used to be one of the big ones in that area and that is as good as dead. I see the same coming to TVTropes, fandom wikis, movie dbs and Co. once AI gets a good at interpreting video and getting access to some sizable movie libraries. When it comes to /r/tipofmytongue/ style questions AI is already much better than large groups of humans together, though only if the necessary information is available on the public Web.
Lack of access to content outside the Web is really what is hampering progress so far, but that could go away very quickly whenever any of the big players decides to let AI run wild on whatever libraries they have.
As for humans, I just don't see how they could compete. Wikipedia took decades to write, millions of volunteers and Grokipedia (despite being a bit of an unmaintained mess) caught up to its article count in a few months. On top of that comes that all those projects aim for a neutral POV, which is very non-human to begin with and only going to benefit AI.
> On top of that comes that all those projects aim for a neutral POV, which is very non-human to begin with and only going to benefit AI.
LLMs are not more neutral than humans. Not only because their learning material is biased but also because they can develop unexpected biases due to the non-deterministic and emergent nature of generative AI.
The idea that an LLM would be more neutral and less partial than a human is a very dangerous and very wrong one. It misunderstands the very nature of generative AI.
And while some people are able to tolerate AI generated text, a lot of people would never read Grokipedia. I would not. Despite great progress, generative AI is not able to create images that don't look absolutely disgusting in the eyes of actual artists. And the same is true for text output for anyone who cares about writing.
It’s almost like it’s not that difficult to scrape Wikipedia and turn its articles into LLM generated slop. I wouldn’t call musks wiki clone catching up by any means to Wikipedia and definitely not politically neutral.
And yet you listed only things created quite some time ago.
I also feel like the web of today (and the people using it) have much less the mindset for these things to appear. People used to see the internet as a big place to share knowledge whereas now the proportion of people seeing it as a market where to do business is much, much more the majority.
It always existed but I feel like the proportions have changed a lot.
I think we're going to see a significant decline in human contributions to data sets that is ultimately just vacuumed up and regurgitated by AI with fewer and fewer people visiting the original sites. There's just much less personal motivation to do it, and less ability to get resources from traffic needed to mention a site that's primarily scraped by AI bots.
Sites like WikiHow have seen a significant decline in traffic, and even more so in organic search.
If someone wants to learn to accomplish something tangible in the real world, there's probably no better place than YouTube, TikTok, etc.
Yes there are ads, yes there's slop, and yes it still remains a trove of practical human knowledge which would astound a 1926 American far more than Wikipedia ever did.
I love to read and have spent more of my life reading than probably anything else. It's my favorite way to learn. Most people do not love to read and would rather learn from another person.
I think humans will never create another Wikipedia because we're already creating something better. YouTube is just the lucky torchbearer, I think. Now that people know they can film themselves teaching or doing something they're good at, and other people will positively engage and maybe even pay them real money, there's no stopping the firehose.
In 10,000 years I imagine the 2020s will be seen less like the end and more like the beginning of human knowledge sharing.
The wikipedia images are incredibly easy to follow for me and I like that it is easy to copy and paste the info or download a copy, search it, annotate it/modify it, etc. Just recently, there was a thread here about different ways to ties your shoes laid out similarly with images. Many people talked about easily trying them out.
Even if you are the type of learner who requires a video to learn, online video platforms, like youtube and tiktok, with ads & overlays when you pause them (and it might be hard to pause while your hands are full of silk...), with no out of the box way to download the videos, autoplay to who knows what next video, etc., are terrible vehicles for that. You can't search or annotate them. The quality varies as you stream it.
Youtube and tiktok will not be better than wikipedia because the primary goal, the raison d'etre, of these products is to make money, track your behavior, sell your data to the highest bidder and show you ads based on it. I'm not naive to the fact that Wikipedia does this, but it's obvious that wikipedia is primarily a collective effort and not a corporate product, and I have more faith in a collective group of people than a tech CEO.
Lastly, a video is a video. It is not another person. A person you can ask questions to, they can offer real time advice. Teaching someone how to tie a tie, your child, grandchild, nephew, etc., learning how to be an adult from a role model, is famously a rite of passage. If you think a video from a company trying to sell you clothes, hosted on Alphabet's servers, is a substitute for another person, especially in this age of AI generated content, I suggest you take a step back and reflect on what human connection really means.
Learning to tie a necktie ≠ learning how to be an adult.
Not everything (I'd wager most things) requires a human to ask questions to. It's just a process. I learned programming from videos and static documentation a decade before I had a school class with a teacher. The "human connection" didn't make me a better programmer.
> Lastly, a video is a video. It is not another person
Was this earnestly your takeaway? I'm not sure you'll find anyone interested in arguing that a video is equivalent to a person.
When I fix snowmobile engines I'd obviously prefer the company of a free and patient instructor showing me on his own machine right in front of me. This is not something that is available, so I settle for videos.
> If you think a video from a company trying to sell you clothes, hosted on Alphabet's servers, is a substitute for another person, especially in this age of AI generated content, I suggest you take a step back and reflect on what human connection really means
Yeah, nobody believes that. A human is a human and a video is a video.
This was a really bizarre strawman, dude, you didn't need to write so much about a position nobody's remotely trying to argue.
> There is no mechanism whatsoever on youtube to incrementally improve a video or understanding of a topic.
Yes there is? You've been able to trim and append end screens for years. Usually when understanding on a topic changes people upload newer videos.
Do you expect the books on your shelf to update every year? What a baffling relationship with media you must have.
> Youtube does not reward or otherwise provide provenance and incremental improvement.
I don't think that Wikipedia rewards provenance either? The "reward" seems to be seeing your own beliefs put to text. I suppose that's what you're getting at?
And there is no need to, because we already have Wikipedia.
If we get to the more general idea of "can humans collaborate in the same way they collaborated to make Wikipedia". I see no reason why not. Collaborative projects similar in spirit to Wikipedia pop up all the time.
I can't think of any. But the thing is, but 4 years (after 2022) is not much, that's how long it took for Wikipedia to take off, most similar project I can think of: OpenStreetMap, Linux, GNU, arXiv... took longer than that. You can't judge success in 4 years.
After a quick search I stumbled upon Wikifunctions (2023), but do Wikimedia projects that are not Wikipedia count? A bit more controversial would be Anna's Archive (2022).
We have to think about the needs too. There was a need for an online encyclopedia, Wikipedia took it. What need do we have now that is currently unanswered and can be answered by a collaborative effort similar to Wikipedia?
Also, open source projects, so many come out every year that it is hard to count.
> And there is no need to, because we already have Wikipedia.
I became a Wikipedia editor not long after the 2nd version of the site, before they even had logins, IIRC.
I was banned from the site probably 7 years ago or so by a troll who collaborated with the admins. The review "process" was more like The Trial and the ban was quite terrible, because not only did they install some deep cookie in the browser, but they permabanned the IP address.
Wikipedia is gone. Whatever it even was, it is not now.
> Wikipedia is gone. Whatever it even was, it is not now.
The title evokes a romantic sense of wikipedia as a well governed, neutral egalitarian multicultural collaboration. But anyone who has been marginalized by the cabal knows it was not most of those things.
Exactly this. People are holding up Wikipedia as some shining light in the free world. They obviously are not aware of all the controversies there have been over the years of both rogue editors and restrictive controlling admins. It has also been called out for censorship many times before. I think everybody still has the idea that Wikipedia is free and collaborative for everyone, when in fact it has changed significantly from what it was. Your experience is testament to that.
> because not only did they install some deep cookie
We dont use "deep" cookies, just normal cookies. If memory serves, 7 years ago Wikipedia didn't use cookies at all in the block process, it was purely ip based back at that point.
The weirdest thing I've seen about wiki nowadays is that "they" (admins? editors? chief editors? dunno) get to decide what makes a "worthy" article for wikipedia. Which is bananas, in the era of "free" storage.
I get everything about slop/spam/etc. but deciding a page about a small band in SmallTown Canada isn't "worthy" of wiki is silly beans. That's the whole point of a collaborative, anyone can contribute wiki. Having people decide what "makes the cut" or not is silly.
They could have gone with a "edu" / "core" wiki that gets to include only certain articles, and the rest are "community" or something, but literally removing articles for anything other than quality/sources/spam is not what wiki started as. And it's not what I donated for, but that's another can of worms...
A while ago I thought it was some ploy to carve out business niche for these "fandom" wikis, or pokemon wikis, because list of all the pokemons was not noble enough for grand old wikipedia.
There (wikimedia) public financials aren't particularly detailed, just the base required, but even they are damning.
The spent $4,767,366 on hosting. Sounds like a lot?
It's there smallest expense.
They spent $6,768,621 on travel and conferences, $9,645,387 on donation processing, $20,373,682 on professional services, and $127,467,261 on salaries/wages.
There financials do not support the "woe is us we're dieing worse than ever before and no one supports us" banners.
Ok so they're a fairly large organization. Compared to other similarly sized tech companies, they pay pretty far below market rates. They're not exactly looting the coffers.
They are doing pretty well financially, yes, and they have done well with their endowment, but it's not like they have an order of magnitude more money then they are letting on.
Are their banners obnoxious? Yes. Are they effective? Apparently.
What would you rather have? Do you really want Wikipedia to be destitute? "Hey guys Jimmy here we don't really need any money but I guess you can give us some?"
No one knows what the future holds. A strong endowment fund today isn't a guarantee for tomorrow.
I'm glad they're striking when the iron is hot. I hope they build up enough wealth to operate for generations upon generations. Of the things on the modern Internet that offend my senses, the fundraising banners on Wikipedia probably rank dead last.
I don't get how people can be so negative about such an overwhelmingly positive contributor to society.
edit: you know what? Fuck it: I hope they make far more than enough money to pay everyone who works there an incredibly comfortable salary so they can all focus in improving humanity's knowledge. You just convinced me to donate.
I personally don't really mind any of it, but having working in non-profit, I was certain that the messaging was...superlative.
The ASPCA and St Judes don't get money from "we're doing amazing shit with this pile of money you've given us". They get money from "look at these dieing children and pets".
Wikimedia is no different. The mission is worthwhile, and they have been overwhelmingly effective in their pursuit of that goal. The bickering over a few articles getting deleted or volunteers being banned is just par or the course for such a large org with such a large mission.
One could argue that the ASPCA could save more dogs if they didn't spend so much on execs and ads, but we can't know that to be true. What if saving that many dogs really does require million dollar c-suites and multi-million dollar ad-campaigns?
If I were choosing where to put my money, Wikimedia wouldn't be on the list for other reasons. I prefer smaller local orgs where the people managing the money have to interact directly with their neighbors who support their missions as I find the social pressure effective and it doesn't represent a cost to the organization like an accounting or accountability firm would. $1000 to my local library does more for my community than $1000 to wikipedia would ever do.
That's why I prefer federated national non-profits as well. Donating to say my local Habit for Humanity does support the national org to some degree, but most of the donation stays to support local efforts.
wiki-p/m-edia is a great mission, it just isn't my mission.
_Because_ Wikipedia is community driven and independent of any corporation, shareholder, or stock exchange, I tend to view it as something no commercial encyclopedia could ever have competed with.
Now, let’s imagine the same thing happening with LLMs and AI. Local, open-source models will build better things than any commercial LLM or AI could ever create.
Yes, this is mostly a dream as of today. But will The Economist still be alive to validate this idea that humans, stripped of the money schemes, will have built greater (aka create a project like Wikipedia) things than ever ?
Wikipedia needed a very small tech infra and legal support to run back in the day. I have a feeling that now any project needs much more infra AND world wide legal support given the larger amount of laws and complexity involved. Just a feeling.
I predict the opposite: Humans will collectively create something like an LLM, but curated. That will be next level for Wikipedia-like project.
Think about it - LLM is just a computer program that predicts a next word. So it has a very detailed, formal description of each concept it can represent in its residual vector.
I think humans will understand (perhaps with AI help) these formal descriptions and put them into a giant database.
Can you expect less from a magazine that prays at the altar of capitalism?
People make brilliant things out of altruism as long as they don't have the feeling they're being abused by corporate or monetary interests. That's why the BSD Unixes languished and Linux thrived. Programmers didn't feel the need to contribute for free when companies where the ones reaping the benefits of their work.
Here's a shout-out to OpenStreetMap and its contributors.
many "fandom" wikis have alternatives. If you can spare the time, scroll a little bit further down in your search results. They exist! And for the ones that do not have a "fandom" wiki, there are alternative readers.
Fandom is truly cancerous. I have not checked whether they are affiliated with Wikimedia, but I would not be surprised if that was the case!
Wikipedia was made from the free labor of IT admin staff and disabled people, both had free time in a typical day to build and curate it.
If I were to make wikipedia today it would contain only bullet pointed facts with sources for each. Articles would have unlimited length. Pagination if an article gets over a million lines.
Writ broadly. Last time I looked into who was editing Wikipedia on my own academic discipline, it was several people who had an obsessive autistic fixation on the subject, but whose autism was apparently so socially debilitating they couldn't gain employment, not even in academia with its somewhat greater accommodation for oddballs. The upside is that they could channel their interest productively into WP. The downside of this is as outsiders to a field where much consensus is found only at real-life conferences and lecture handouts, their info was often years behind the state of the art (and, of course, WP demands that citations be to secondary sources, even if obsolete).
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadYou might be surprised to learn that not all challenges are purely technological. The biggest challenges with such megaprojects are political, economical, and social. A Wikipedia clone is completely worthless if nobody is willing to contribute - it would just be an empty database!
As an aside. When the Eifel Tower was built it was considered tacky by many and assumed to be temporary. Maybe some of the most remembered things of our time will be taken for granted. Maybe some huge data center will be a museum.
Why doesn't it? The owner isn't buried in it?
> The biggest challenges with such megaprojects are political, economical, and social
Indeed; this is why we moved on from piling rocks in a formation that didn't fall down easily, and put all those things you list into cathederals, hydroelectric dams, the Apollo missions, etc.
Several hours later, I realise we have many things which would seem like much more impressive versions of the pyramids, in the event of the collapse of industrial civilisation followed by a second renaissance and future archeological digs looking at us as we looked upon the tombs of Tutankhamen: artificial hills made by covering landfill likely contain a lot more precious metal than a pharaoh's tomb.
Isn't that the point of TFA and this whole conversation?
Wikipedia became popular despite its programming. Anyone who has ever tried to edit a Wiki page knows its editor is absolute garbage, for example. Want to create your own basic DIY wiki in 2026? Just set up a GitHub Pages which auto-accepts pull requests, you'll be up and running in less than 30 minutes.
Besides, nobody is forcing to to use the current programming paradigms. A classic LAMP stack will still work.
The economists, the website site, second.
Humans will never fly, etc. Third.
(Extra point for the paywall).
But the future will raise the bar. Perhaps we'll see wiki of wikis, or something else getting the web closer to truly semantic knowledge.
”We should respect freedoms and not restrict them arbitrarily… except when I do not like the people using those freedoms.“
It is always a weird take to me. Pick a license that matches your preferences, like the GPL. Do not pick MIT/whatever and then complain when corps make use of the freedoms you afforded them.
But you can also take a noncommercial GPL software, slightly modify and put your logo and name on it, do some marketing and get cash out of it without contributing anything significant. You just can't make it proprietary. But it's still an unfair situation.
If you don't want your software used commercially, don't Open Source (or Free Software) it. Maybe a CC-NC license if you want to give it away for noncommercial use.
The rest of us will continue to use and make OSS and enjoy it without worrying about what others are doing with it.
But the GPL goes even further than that, and this appears to be the source of your confusion. The GPL stops people redistributing the software under terms that would restrict or prohibit use, including commercial use. The GPL guarantees that anyone receiving the software now or in the future has the same rights you have.
Companies like Microsoft with huge marketing departments hate the GPL because they don't like their users to be free. It's part of their business strategy to keep people locked in. That alone should tell you it's probably not for for you. Sadly you seem to have been taken by their bs, though.
Someone can absolutely fork your software and use it commercially. That's what FOSS is about: You shall not limit what other people can do with the software.
You may however restrict others from putting restrictions on derivative works of your software. That's what the GPL is all about. You enforce reciprocity and ensure that all works based on your software allow the user the essential freedoms of free software.
(Alternately, Google for people trying to get the full sourcecode to their Android phones from Samsung and see how difficult it can be).
Many human problems could be solved if humans were less willing to compromise with greedy people, but unfortunately authors are too nice in general to do that.
What does stick in the craw with many of us, however, is that Meta, Mapbox, and various other bigcos have nonetheless decided to disregard the attribution requirements of what is a fairly permissive licence, simply because they're sufficiently big that they can say to the OSM Foundation (annual turnover about £3.27) "suck it, we dare you to sue us".
It’s the same thing with freedoms
> younger generations raised on corporate platforms and their phone apps are less aware of non-corporate alternatives
All the new guys I work with are trapped in the app store/play store bubble. If it's not available directly through the device's software distribution system it's not getting used.
> might even be suspicious of libre and altruistic movements
All my boomer bosses think that anything that is outside the Windows/O365 ecosystem, or doesn't come with a $150 yearly license, is clearly pirate hacker software that will give your e-mail a virus and steal your bitcoin.
It is increasingly frustrating when we have a problem that could be fixed with GNU corutils and a bash script, or a raspberrypi/arduino translating between 2 serial devices, but we end up getting some $1500 black box from the 'official' vendor. It teaches the newer guys that step one is not to think about the problem, it's to grab your wallet and call a salesman.
</tangent>
It's the whole reason management consultancies exist. If Deloite tell you to do X, or Gartner say buy Y, and you do, you aren't going to have the blame. Even when you end up losing half a billion as our last CxO did, you'll just get a golden handshake and a move to another company.
Turn it all off, bury it in concrete, toss the concrete in a river and hurl the river into space, and maybe then IT will be happy with the security.
I understand your frustration but I’ve given up fighting with IT and just let them sort it out
What would be a sensible fee to do support on 1000 lines of code you didn't write?
Of course, all the software in the distro repo is there because somebody went against this tendency.
I get why people might not be motivated to join us in the tragedy of the commons.
Then the project loses visibility to end users. I don't know if that is worth the occasional commercial contributions from them to satisfy their own requirements.
This post box is no longer there. "I'll drive round and check", "no need I'm stood there, it has gone". "I'll drive round tomorrow"...I got the impression i was on someone else's patch and gave up
But with regard to bodies of water, there are systems that monitor OSM and warn if someone has tried to "move them to the right place". These details were often added to OSM from professionally surveyed maps, so they are in the right place. However, ordinary people's consumer GPS is typically a few meters off, and they end up moving things to the inaccurate coordinates on their screens.
Anecdotally, I’ve had a lot of experiences like this with newer generations of people on topics like open source software or community projects: They’ve been trained, usually by a social media niche, to believe that the only good fight is to actively harm corporations. Their idea of the world is a very clear black and white contrast with people on one side and corporations on the other.
Such a clean separation of the world only exists in ideas they get from social media and movies. Encountering a project like OSM or an open source project where the largest users (and for OSS, maybe the largest contributors) are people involved with corporations doesn’t fit into their worldview, so they file it in the “corporate” side of the divide and dislike it.
However on the other hand, it has been drilled into your head repeatedly that wanting compensation for work is "bad" and antithetical to social movements. You work for the whole, not for yourself. Besides, you (along with everyone else) gets to enjoy the fruits of others free work.
But then after dwelling on it, you realize that 90% of the people holding you to this ideology aren't contributing much if anything at all, and just gorging themselves on the work of a few.
So now you either consolidate power into your hands (nazi mods), lose motivation (project decays), or become an "evil" capitalist(start charging money for access).
Any ideology built on this premise is doomed to failure. Successful movements are ones that align the particular interests of individuals with the broader goals of the community.
Dogmas that set individual interest and public interest at odds with each other will always debilitate the effectiveness of the entire movement, and subject it to never-ending internal conflict.
The free software/open source ecosystem has successfully demonstrated how public-interest idealism and for-profit commercial pursuits can not just coexist, but actually complement and reinforce each other. Anyone who's arguing for one side of the ecosystem in opposition to the other is asking for the entire thing to collapse.
This is something I've noticed as well.
- Movies made after WWII that needed villians often made them Nazis.
- During the cold war, evil villians were communists or Soviet spies.
- Movies made after the fall of the Soviet Union often make their villians evil faceless corporations.
A generation or two has been raised by Hollywood and Disney on business always being evil, while simultaneoulsy choosing to consume and make themselves dependent on giant corporate content.
It’s fascinatingly devilish, isn’t it? They control the outrage and profit from it. I’m reminded of Bill Hicks’ bit on marketing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHEOGrkhDp0
We’ve been very lucky that the incentive structure has them doing a lot of useful things for us, but that doesn’t mean we have to be happy about having so much of our lives being ruled by these amoral aliens.
Oh hollywood and disney, not the behaviour of Standard Oil, DeBeers, Nestle, Coca Cola, banks in the sub-prime mortgage crisis, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, OPEC, DuPont, Chemie Grünenthal, an "epidemic" of wage theft in America estimated in the tens of billions per year, the trends towards enshittification, nickel-and-diming, rent-extraction and grifting of most products and services over time, health insurance companies, the lived experience of millions of workers being devalued, insulted, and treated like cattle?
Or maybe they just feel that corporations are actively trying to harm them and this is the logical response?
I don't think that's unfair at this point.
So I don't know that it's fair? Nearly all the material goods around me and a ton of services were provided by corporations, which are largely composed of regular people glued together at scale by bureacracy.
My issue would be with the corporations, which I see as the new estates. Except that they are far larger and far more powerful than what we had two centuries ago. Their perks include: regulatory capture, political access, access to finance. Ie powerful corporations run the infrastructure for capital movement and consumption - in their interests.
It just seems really odd to look at "regulatory capture" and "political access" as problems originating from people engaging in commercial activity in the broader economy, rather than correctly seeing them as originating from insufficient or ineffective safeguards on the concentration and assertion of political power.
> Ie powerful corporations run the infrastructure for capital movement and consumption - in their interests.
Well, no, they don't. Both the capital and the consumption originates from the intentions and motivations of the public at large. The interests of "corporations" -- which are, again, just coordinated patterns of human activity -- are pursued by actually satisfying the motivations of the people around them. You can't get capital without offering a return to your investors; you can't get customers without offering a value proposition that's worth more to them than the price you're charging, etc.
> Well, no, they don't. Both the capital and the consumption originates from the intentions and motivations of the public at large. The interests of "corporations" -- which are, again, just coordinated patterns of human activity -- are pursued by actually satisfying the motivations of the people around them. You can't get capital without offering a return to your investors; you can't get customers without offering a value proposition that's worth more to them than the price you're charging, etc.
Well, yes, they do. If you use the law to legislate this or that, you are directing the infrastructure. A great example is that people in general don't want phones/cars/fridges that spy on them, they simply want the phone/car/fridge. However, the simple option is not on offer. The regulatory capture provides us with the government mandate that data be captured, so it seems that corporate hands are tied. The consumer cannot find the option they would like.
All this can happen while offering a return to investors. In fact, licensing businesses, creating moats that small companies cannot bridge, ensures that large corporations have an unassailable position. They can investigate the maximum extraction from the consumer, rather than price a product according to cost. Wait till we all start to experience personalised pricing, where each person is offered a different price according to who they are.
Finally, you distinguish between corporate and political interests. I don't. These are the same creature to me. We already live in a fascist environment, where the government + business operate together. Whether you vote red or blue will do nothing for issues where the outcome is predetermined - such as the complete loss of privacy.
Free market competition makes sense. Lowest prices.
What we see right now in the USA, though, is a mafia. That has nothing to do with capitalism as such. It is a racket, a ponzi scheme. There are many variants of capitalism. Even the chinese adapted their variant to sinomarxistic ideals (to certain extent; I don't think today's main China is purely capitalistic nor purely sinomarxistic as it once used to be).
> Capitalists hate capitalism. They don’t want to be exposed to the risks entailed by competition, and feel the goad of that insecurity. They want monopolies, or platforms, or monopoly platforms. They want assets, not businesses.
https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-capitalists-hate-...
Government intervention is the principal mechanism by which powerful participants restrain other partipants' market activity, and insulate themselves from competition.
Unchecked Capitalism always leads to Mono/Duopolies aka Mafia. The best of both World is maybe called Social-direct-democratic-capitalism.
>What we see right now in the USA, though, is a mafia. That has nothing to do with capitalism as such.
Has everything to do with unchecked Capitalism, go too far and both extremes end in a ~Monopoly, in Socialism/Communism it's mostly the State (China, USSR, Cuba etc.) in Capitalism a massive conglomerate of Enterprises (S.Korea, again "new" China, Russia, USA, India)
But he also wasn't interested in major political change.
So we've got something that I'm surprised Europeans don't recognize; state-backed champions and heavy government intervention in various markets, and almost total free markets in sectors that the government doesn't really care about. But at no point can any one company or industry even attempt to undermine the central authority, because Deng wanted to get China out of the economic gutter, not lose power.
But the issue is not about corporations - or companies - per se.
The issue is how they relate to the general population. You can have good corporations and bad corporations. When billionaires buy legislation then something is wrong. When a corrupt elite invades countries and kills people - that's bad.
The problem of "billionaires buying legislation" is that billionaires get money from market activity to buy it with, not that it's up for sale by politicians or that the limits on the scope of legislation are insufficient?
When a military force marches into another country, that's the work of a vague "corrupt elite" and not the political officials in charge of the military?
Shock horror, people tend to care most about things that they feel personally affect them.
Samesame after a while if unchecked, just play cyberpunk 2077 ;)
So even when these people have turned into a broken clock about being anti-corporate to the point that they’re anti-open-projects, someone will always come along to explain why we everything is the fault of corporations. A normal working class person can not be faulted for their beliefs in this model, because every fault will be transformed into something that can be blamed on a corporation.
Personally I find the erasure of individual thought in this model to be demeaning. You can’t blame everything every individual does on corporations having either made them do it or forced them to believe it through their actions. At some point we have to admit that people’s thoughts and actions are their own.
If someone becomes so bitter that they’re becoming anti-OSM or anti-Wikipedia or anti-OSS, I’m fully okay with holding them to account for their chosen beliefs.
> Personally I find the erasure of individual thought in this model to be demeaning.
The fact that you are describing a behavior that you believe to be shared among a sizable group of people seems to contradict your claim that their beliefs are due to individual failings rather than some broader social forces that caused them to believe these things, no?
The historical left/marxist view is essentially: look at someone's social context and where their money comes from, and you'll know how they probably think. The American ideology is: everyone is an individual and a tramp can be a philosopher.
The second is much more appealing to us as individuals, and to our sense of self-determination and independence. And people do have agency---some people succumb to despair, others don't; some work hard, some don't; some rebound from setbacks, some don't.
But if you look at large groups of people, the first one starts to have strong explanatory power. Look at US coverage of foreign elections, and that second view is almost all you see.
US coverage of foreign elections can't indulge in personality based coverage or leverage the audience's in-built understanding of culture and politics, so you get broad statements about how urban professionals voted for party X but the rural poor voted for party Y.
I think GP pretty clearly states it's due to broader social forces:
> They’ve been trained, usually by a social media niche
I don't think that was a complicated point, but maybe you think you were asking something else, while trying to still blame whatever "social forces" TikTok has told you to blame.
I’m responding primarily to this sentiment:
> At some point we have to admit that people’s thoughts and actions are their own.
I generally find that placing blame on individuals for views that one believes are wrong is not constructive. Clearly there are reasons that they believe the things that they do, and this is especially true when you disagree not with an individual but with an entire group.
Of course anyone is free to get angry at anyone else for their individual beliefs, and I believe that individually people’s minds can be changed. But blaming individuals _who you have never met_ for behaviors that you are stereotyping from an entire group seems wholly unproductive. This is not going to change the group’s minds, and is only going to make you bitter.
When discussing group behavior, it only makes sense to discuss social influences.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood
The problem isn't "corporations", it's capitalism. The economic system forces corporations to behave in anti-social ways.
Similar goes with the trope you peddle, individuals were to blame. They're not. The system they live in, and never had any say in shaping, forces them to engage in behaviors short term that ultimately run counter to their own interests long term.
Contributing to open source software or commons like Wikipedia definitely is questionable. Those contributions get monopolized and their benefits privatized. That's not a "belief".
Which bits do you object to? The idea that people should be able to form going concerns that outlive any individuals (e.g. investing in the construction of a fishing boat)? That several individuals should be able to share in the risk and profit of such a venture (e.g. a group investing in the construction, and receiving shares of the profit of each catch)? Or that they should be able to hire others on a free market for a wage or share of profits (e.g. hiring a crew for the boat)? Or that if they should have a dispute, there should be a formal, legal, process to resolve it?
The trouble is that there is no human system in which the agents who distribute the resources are perfectly aligned with the agents to whom resources are distributed. This is nowhere more obvious than in the staggering planning, execution, and communication, failures of the Soviet Union. This is a general case of the alignment problem, which is fundamentally unsolved. I would argue that it's un-solvable as long as your agents are living organisms competing in an ecosystem.
Niches exist to be exploited. As long as the niches exist, they will be exploited. Resenting that is akin to resenting the biggest fish in the pond for being so damn aggressive - it's pointless. We live in a pond, and we should focus on maintaining the nonviolent and often ecosystem-benefitting nature of our exploitation (since it is hard-won and precarious), rather than resent the inescapable reality of its existence.
As far as I can tell none of these things existed before modern times. Mostly people were under authoritarian rule.
When you refer to "private ownership", you unreflectedly endorse things like individuals "owning" land.
The consequence of that negligence are things like environmental destruction, capturing of arable land by rent-seeking individuals and on and on. A substantial part of what currently goes wrong on the macro-scale.
"Free exchange" is a misnomer in the same vein. The "freedom" leaves people to willfully avoid asking whether they really should in the first place. More importantly, it favors people with money to impose their will upon those without.
"Due process" isn't tied to capitalism to begin with and all these things don't "span back to the dawn of agriculture".
You put up the straw man of the Soviet Union, prepping it up to the height of serving as the epitome of what humans could conceive of as alternatives (or modifications) of the existing system. That's a declaration of intellectual bankruptcy, not higher insight.
> environmental destruction, capturing of arable land by rent-seeking individuals and on and on
> asking whether they really should in the first place?
> it favors people with money to impose their will upon those without
All of these criticisms reflect a total naivety to ecosystem dynamics at play, and the motivational landscape that they create. As long as these behaviours continue to create a competitive advantage for the organisms that display them, they will continue to emerge and perpetuate. There is no method of social organization that can remove the advantages of resource surplus.
You'll also note that environmental destruction, resource hoarding, and interference competition are all widespread behaviours in the natural world. We are part of that world, and are subject to the constraints that it produces.
It's like trying to overcome a bug in the CPU instruction set by writing JavaScript. The "problems" are part of the fundamental substrate and aren't addressable at the proposed layer of abstraction.
When you abstract, you leave things out. You claim to abstract from cave people. How is that the best we can do?
You pretend, humans were cells competing mindlessly. Then you conclude, any other approach than mindless behavior was naive.
You again observe animals and justify your behavior (on a vastly greater scale) by it.
How do you manage not to see the absurdity in that? You're not an animal, you have a conscious mind, capable of rational thought and according foresight.
Because that is, in a very fundamental and immutable way, who we are.
I'm saying that we live in an ecosystem, and that creates emergent properties and behaviours. Resource hoarding and interference competition are among those. No amount of consciousness, rational thought, or foresight, can change that.
As long as (e.g.) hoarding resources today makes it more likely for your offspring to succeed tomorrow, the traits that influence people to hoard resources will continue to perpetuate. It's also why, for example, we have the dark tetrad - it works:
Too high of trust creates opportunities for liars. Too many liars lowers trust to the point that it's not profitable to lie. There exists between these two points a stable equilibrium between zero liars and everyone lying all the time, and it's at neither extreme. The same is true for all other behaviours you moralize.
I'm not justifying anything, I'm simply observing the constraints of the system we live in, and inferring that any mode of social organization that ignores or opposes these constraints is doomed.
Apart from debatable (but real) genetic differences you don't know about, the crucial point is culture. We're not cave people as we don't share their culture and don't have to.
Your idea of our environment predisposing us for capitalism is simply false. Notably, the premise rests solely on your posturing here.
Your ideas about people being automata beholden to their genetic programming beyond their control is even more absurd. And lacks any basis in evidence.
You apparently have never heard about ethics. There is a difference between morals and ethics. Lying isn't wrong because "arbitrary morals" say so, it is because realistic, objective consequences tell you so.
Your idea of an "equilibrium of all behaviors" presupposes mindless automata, again.
Human societies are meta-organisms - they modify themselves over time, and compete with each other for finite resources. Any culture which sacrifices competitive advantage for any reason is simply out-competed and absorbed by other societies which make no such sacrifice. There is no escaping this reality. This is referred to as cultural group selection.
> Your idea of our environment predisposing us for capitalism is simply false. Notably, the premise rests solely on your posturing here.
I'm not saying it predisposes us to capitalism though, I'm saying it predisposes us to maximize resources and engage in competitive behaviour. This is supported by the fact that very nearly every organism in nature also engages in resource maximization and competitive behaviour (r-Selection). There is no altruism (going against genetic self interest) in nature, it's simply not sustainable.
> Your ideas about people being automata beholden to their genetic programming beyond their control is even more absurd. And lacks any basis in evidence.
I'm making no such claim. I'm simply claiming there are constraints in the system, and ignoring them doesn't make them go away.
> Lying isn't wrong because "arbitrary morals" say so, it is because realistic, objective consequences tell you so.
Any yet, no matter how hard we try, we've not managed to eliminate lying (or even agree what specifically it means). Are you really suggesting that some yet-undiscovered set of rules will create a society in which no one will ever lie? Doesn't that sound a bit.. unrealistic?
well, other systems were tried and were worse (feudalism, communism etc)
in practice capitalism with some regulations is better than known alternatives
> Contributing to open source software or commons like Wikipedia definitely is questionable
what is not questionable then?
Worse, you mistake the bounds of your personal knowledge as the borders of the world.
Even if there was no currently "known" alternative, the proper course of action is to research that and find one?
please test it properly before putting it in production, communism went poorly
> Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.
note that I am not arguing that better system is impossible - that would be silly
but "destroy capitalism" attempts went remarkably badly so far
The idea, you would have to produce a turn-key solution, beta-tested on "somebody else" is obvious nonsense and pure deflection.
In the given dire situation, you have to do the best you can, not wait for some imaginary perfect escape hatch to appear.
Not taking a side in this particular discussion, but this specific sentence looks like a self-fulfilling statement: if people disagree with you, you take it as proof that they are unable to evaluate your claim fairly.
"Or maybe they just feel that organizational methodologies used by people to coordinate complex multi-participant activities are actively trying to harm them and this is the logical response?"
No, it's quite illogical.
A million lines of C supporting 2k lines of declarative unit files is less complex from the user's perspective than 50k lines of custom bash scripts. Of course it would be better if it did the same thing in, say, 100k lines or in Rust, but perfect is the enemy of good. systemd exists today and it works fine.
Everything is regular, predictable, documented and easy to read. A file made for one distro only needs trivial changes to run on another. That's what simple really means. I would never go back to init scripts.
OpenRC, s6, rc.d (the BSD), are more simpler than the systemd ecosystem which is feature ladden and not easy to use on the common line. They are also way easier to hack upon, especially when you want to run a lean system (small vm, containers). systemd feels like running windows server for a small php application. The happy path is easy, anything outside of that is torture.
If indeed, their contributions serve mainly to enrich corporations that then contribute to the subversion of the political system through corruption, anti-democratic measures and so on, that's an entirely reasonable response.
Craft is Wikipedia / OSM for software. We're building an open source AI software factory to agentically remake everything.
We're going to open source all the apps, turn platforms into protocols, build open infra, and help assist open weights.
Everything will be rewritten as high quality open source software. And once we've covered the space of everything people use, we'll turn the components into highly reusable open source libraries that can be reshaped into new workflows in real time.
We're going to make a seamless bridge between local and cloud AI, we're going to make a rich set of primitives for fine tuning and sharing.
Not just applications. Data, infra, hardware, the whole of technology.
https://github.com/storytold
https://discord.gg/artcraft
Can you explain how you will resolve the tension between "high quality" without moderation who turn into Reddit "nazi moderators" or StackOverflow meanies, and without turfing out all moderators and turning into 4chan of old, trolling, and low quality overrun with ads and noise?
What social structure, organization, review, moderation, do you think will solve that tension?
The full list is at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Editors
Then please publish it. Others can ask Claude too but it's stupid, and one central repository will have everyone's bugfixes and feature recommendations.
Did you ask for help in the community group for your country?
> That could be fixed easily if there was a convenient app that recorded my driving and uploaded it to a central source, processed it, and converted that into edits for me to confirm.
Mapping requires more than that. GPS traces can be useful in areas where no recent aerial imagery is available, but automated importing of that would cause a lot of errors.
I really wish the world recognized and provided tax income to these projects because they have been the backbone of our ever-complex technological society for probably about thirty years. Rather than what we have now where large corporations will take a foothold in an open-source project and hollow it out for parts then sell it as a "turnkey" product like we have seen time and time again.
It is, however had, true, that the interaction pattern changed. So many walled ghettos about nowadays - look at Facebook and Google (via youtube).
There is quite a lot of open cooperation between national mapping agencies and OpenStreetMap, at least in Europe.
As for updating the name of the latest pop-up shop, the owner will just have to sort it out himself.
Most of my peers in the bicycle-travel community are uninterested in mapping, or even totally unaware of where maps come from. Apps like Komoot became standard tools for cyclists, but only a minority ever learned that its data derives from OSM and anyone can edit it.
I think this will be the case for other things too. OpenStreetMaps won't need as many contributors as more sensors come online, eg. sensors and footage from hobby drones and people's phones augment how much information a single person can enter about a city.
The power of any tool is its reliability to produce a useful result. Governance structure is a human construct intended to ensure reliability of human social interactions to produce useful results, but AI does not necessarily need human constructs to ensure the same or better outcomes.
OSM still has major gaps that seem to be getting worse actually, and fan wikis have almost all consolidated onto the monstrosity that is fanwikis.
Minecraft, GTA, League of Legends, Valorant, Overwatch, Fortnite, Warframe and RuneScape (OSRS too) all moved off Fandom because they started forcing ads even harder. They're now hosted by a nonprofit that takes money from Riot to host their official wikis and uses it to pay for the rest.
I really don’t want to do that thing where I have to couch every single statement I make with parentheticals and qualifiers explaining the exact meaning and making sure to add a dozen “not” and “to be clear” statements in anticipation of this kind of responses
What’s interesting is that most younger people I interact with now have a better idea of what’s possible through crowdsourced collaboration than older people. In the tech world, people who grew up with crowdsourced sites have seen the end state of Stack Overflow and its moderation, or they’ve seen enough controversies around Wikipedia edit wars where controversial topics become battlegrounds to see which moderators can wield the site’s rules more effectively to revert edits they don’t want on the page. On a long enough timeframe, community projects are at high risk of turning into fiefdoms for power hungry moderators.
The younger people grow up seemingly seeing the same things, but having a different experience about what it means. Talk to any younger generation gamer and they’ll have stories about Discord or Minecraft communities collapsing under power tripping moderators. But in the newer world where internet resources are cheap and now that LLMs can help migrate things, they may have established a new Discord or moved the community to a new game server by the end of the week. Their favorite game emulator or other project may have been forked 4 times already and the community will move to another fork again at the first signs of the new maintainer not doing what they like.
But then it'll just be your AI slop and no one will care. If they want one they'll slop one up themselves instead of using yours.
> There are all sorts of possible ways we can do some large scale crowdsourced effort and its probably going to be realtime news e.g video streaming live events on an open platform not owned by corporations. Where there is no misinformation. No one can lie to us, we can see it happening.
That's a fantasy. The trend is towards more corporate ownership and more misinformation (or if there's less, it will only be because the corporate overlord AIs will suppress misinformation that's against their interests, and promote other misinformation that suits them better).
They do show signs of stopping.
"AI’s absorption of Wikipedia means that more people than ever are reading its content. Yet it also means that fewer people are visiting the site itself. When a Wikipedia link is suggested by a search engine, nearly a tenth of users click through. When Wikipedia is cited by an LLM, the clickthrough rate is only 0.33% (and not all credit their sources)."
There's just not enough people you can attract with the pitch of "let's edit a training dataset for OpenAI together".
Some folks saying are saying that AI will only accelerate the creation of future Wikipedias, and that's obviously missing the point. Yes, there might be Grokipedia-style entities, probably a number of them.
Wikis by article count:
Wikipedia: 65 million (English: 7.2 million)
Baidu Baike: 30 million
Hudong Baike: 15 million
Namuwiki: 8.7 million
Fandom: 40 million
In fact, the Everquest 2 wiki dwarfs the Yongle encyclopedia at ~400k articles.
1. the culture of sharing your work 2. the sense of usefulness and purpose
I'm not sure the newest generation share the 1, but in any case LLM companies destroy the 2.
Why would you thanklessly work for free and for the community if your work is pillaged and sold for a lot of money by AI companies before the project even reaches a critical mass ?!
StackOverflow used to be one of the big ones in that area and that is as good as dead. I see the same coming to TVTropes, fandom wikis, movie dbs and Co. once AI gets a good at interpreting video and getting access to some sizable movie libraries. When it comes to /r/tipofmytongue/ style questions AI is already much better than large groups of humans together, though only if the necessary information is available on the public Web.
Lack of access to content outside the Web is really what is hampering progress so far, but that could go away very quickly whenever any of the big players decides to let AI run wild on whatever libraries they have.
As for humans, I just don't see how they could compete. Wikipedia took decades to write, millions of volunteers and Grokipedia (despite being a bit of an unmaintained mess) caught up to its article count in a few months. On top of that comes that all those projects aim for a neutral POV, which is very non-human to begin with and only going to benefit AI.
LLMs are not more neutral than humans. Not only because their learning material is biased but also because they can develop unexpected biases due to the non-deterministic and emergent nature of generative AI.
The idea that an LLM would be more neutral and less partial than a human is a very dangerous and very wrong one. It misunderstands the very nature of generative AI.
And while some people are able to tolerate AI generated text, a lot of people would never read Grokipedia. I would not. Despite great progress, generative AI is not able to create images that don't look absolutely disgusting in the eyes of actual artists. And the same is true for text output for anyone who cares about writing.
I also feel like the web of today (and the people using it) have much less the mindset for these things to appear. People used to see the internet as a big place to share knowledge whereas now the proportion of people seeing it as a market where to do business is much, much more the majority.
It always existed but I feel like the proportions have changed a lot.
Sites like WikiHow have seen a significant decline in traffic, and even more so in organic search.
Yes there are ads, yes there's slop, and yes it still remains a trove of practical human knowledge which would astound a 1926 American far more than Wikipedia ever did.
Compare the Wiki article with step by step PNGs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Windsor_knot
To the thousands of examples one can find on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tying+a+half+wi...
I love to read and have spent more of my life reading than probably anything else. It's my favorite way to learn. Most people do not love to read and would rather learn from another person.
I think humans will never create another Wikipedia because we're already creating something better. YouTube is just the lucky torchbearer, I think. Now that people know they can film themselves teaching or doing something they're good at, and other people will positively engage and maybe even pay them real money, there's no stopping the firehose.
In 10,000 years I imagine the 2020s will be seen less like the end and more like the beginning of human knowledge sharing.
Even if you are the type of learner who requires a video to learn, online video platforms, like youtube and tiktok, with ads & overlays when you pause them (and it might be hard to pause while your hands are full of silk...), with no out of the box way to download the videos, autoplay to who knows what next video, etc., are terrible vehicles for that. You can't search or annotate them. The quality varies as you stream it.
Youtube and tiktok will not be better than wikipedia because the primary goal, the raison d'etre, of these products is to make money, track your behavior, sell your data to the highest bidder and show you ads based on it. I'm not naive to the fact that Wikipedia does this, but it's obvious that wikipedia is primarily a collective effort and not a corporate product, and I have more faith in a collective group of people than a tech CEO.
Lastly, a video is a video. It is not another person. A person you can ask questions to, they can offer real time advice. Teaching someone how to tie a tie, your child, grandchild, nephew, etc., learning how to be an adult from a role model, is famously a rite of passage. If you think a video from a company trying to sell you clothes, hosted on Alphabet's servers, is a substitute for another person, especially in this age of AI generated content, I suggest you take a step back and reflect on what human connection really means.
Not everything (I'd wager most things) requires a human to ask questions to. It's just a process. I learned programming from videos and static documentation a decade before I had a school class with a teacher. The "human connection" didn't make me a better programmer.
Was this earnestly your takeaway? I'm not sure you'll find anyone interested in arguing that a video is equivalent to a person.
When I fix snowmobile engines I'd obviously prefer the company of a free and patient instructor showing me on his own machine right in front of me. This is not something that is available, so I settle for videos.
> If you think a video from a company trying to sell you clothes, hosted on Alphabet's servers, is a substitute for another person, especially in this age of AI generated content, I suggest you take a step back and reflect on what human connection really means
Yeah, nobody believes that. A human is a human and a video is a video.
This was a really bizarre strawman, dude, you didn't need to write so much about a position nobody's remotely trying to argue.
1. Wikipedia is not wikihow. It is not an aim of wikipedia to teach you how to tie a knot.
2. Youtube does not reward or otherwise provide provenance and incremental improvement.
Look at the revision page for the windsor knot: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Half-Windsor_knot...
There is no mechanism whatsoever on youtube to incrementally improve a video or understanding of a topic.
Yes there is? You've been able to trim and append end screens for years. Usually when understanding on a topic changes people upload newer videos.
Do you expect the books on your shelf to update every year? What a baffling relationship with media you must have.
> Youtube does not reward or otherwise provide provenance and incremental improvement.
I don't think that Wikipedia rewards provenance either? The "reward" seems to be seeing your own beliefs put to text. I suppose that's what you're getting at?
If we get to the more general idea of "can humans collaborate in the same way they collaborated to make Wikipedia". I see no reason why not. Collaborative projects similar in spirit to Wikipedia pop up all the time.
Name one started after 2022, with at least a modicum of success.
After a quick search I stumbled upon Wikifunctions (2023), but do Wikimedia projects that are not Wikipedia count? A bit more controversial would be Anna's Archive (2022).
We have to think about the needs too. There was a need for an online encyclopedia, Wikipedia took it. What need do we have now that is currently unanswered and can be answered by a collaborative effort similar to Wikipedia?
Also, open source projects, so many come out every year that it is hard to count.
I became a Wikipedia editor not long after the 2nd version of the site, before they even had logins, IIRC.
I was banned from the site probably 7 years ago or so by a troll who collaborated with the admins. The review "process" was more like The Trial and the ban was quite terrible, because not only did they install some deep cookie in the browser, but they permabanned the IP address.
Wikipedia is gone. Whatever it even was, it is not now.
The title evokes a romantic sense of wikipedia as a well governed, neutral egalitarian multicultural collaboration. But anyone who has been marginalized by the cabal knows it was not most of those things.
"Whatever it was[, which was really was really not all that,] it is not [even] now."
We dont use "deep" cookies, just normal cookies. If memory serves, 7 years ago Wikipedia didn't use cookies at all in the block process, it was purely ip based back at that point.
I get everything about slop/spam/etc. but deciding a page about a small band in SmallTown Canada isn't "worthy" of wiki is silly beans. That's the whole point of a collaborative, anyone can contribute wiki. Having people decide what "makes the cut" or not is silly.
They could have gone with a "edu" / "core" wiki that gets to include only certain articles, and the rest are "community" or something, but literally removing articles for anything other than quality/sources/spam is not what wiki started as. And it's not what I donated for, but that's another can of worms...
They provided an email address to send a message for appeal to the board, which I didn't bother.
Spirit is not sufficient. I can start a new project with the same spirit and a user base of one.
Scale is part of what makes Wikipedia. What projects are similar in spirit and scale?
> This gift link has expired. Register to access this article
copy paste the html into https://codebeautify.org/htmlviewer
They pretend it is a charity, but it isn't. It all just goes to shareholders.
What is this nonsense? It's a non-profit. There are literally no shareholders.
There (wikimedia) public financials aren't particularly detailed, just the base required, but even they are damning.
The spent $4,767,366 on hosting. Sounds like a lot?
It's there smallest expense.
They spent $6,768,621 on travel and conferences, $9,645,387 on donation processing, $20,373,682 on professional services, and $127,467,261 on salaries/wages.
There financials do not support the "woe is us we're dieing worse than ever before and no one supports us" banners.
Ok so they're a fairly large organization. Compared to other similarly sized tech companies, they pay pretty far below market rates. They're not exactly looting the coffers.
They are doing pretty well financially, yes, and they have done well with their endowment, but it's not like they have an order of magnitude more money then they are letting on.
Are their banners obnoxious? Yes. Are they effective? Apparently.
What would you rather have? Do you really want Wikipedia to be destitute? "Hey guys Jimmy here we don't really need any money but I guess you can give us some?"
No one knows what the future holds. A strong endowment fund today isn't a guarantee for tomorrow.
I'm glad they're striking when the iron is hot. I hope they build up enough wealth to operate for generations upon generations. Of the things on the modern Internet that offend my senses, the fundraising banners on Wikipedia probably rank dead last.
I don't get how people can be so negative about such an overwhelmingly positive contributor to society.
edit: you know what? Fuck it: I hope they make far more than enough money to pay everyone who works there an incredibly comfortable salary so they can all focus in improving humanity's knowledge. You just convinced me to donate.
The ASPCA and St Judes don't get money from "we're doing amazing shit with this pile of money you've given us". They get money from "look at these dieing children and pets".
Wikimedia is no different. The mission is worthwhile, and they have been overwhelmingly effective in their pursuit of that goal. The bickering over a few articles getting deleted or volunteers being banned is just par or the course for such a large org with such a large mission.
One could argue that the ASPCA could save more dogs if they didn't spend so much on execs and ads, but we can't know that to be true. What if saving that many dogs really does require million dollar c-suites and multi-million dollar ad-campaigns?
If I were choosing where to put my money, Wikimedia wouldn't be on the list for other reasons. I prefer smaller local orgs where the people managing the money have to interact directly with their neighbors who support their missions as I find the social pressure effective and it doesn't represent a cost to the organization like an accounting or accountability firm would. $1000 to my local library does more for my community than $1000 to wikipedia would ever do.
That's why I prefer federated national non-profits as well. Donating to say my local Habit for Humanity does support the national org to some degree, but most of the donation stays to support local efforts.
wiki-p/m-edia is a great mission, it just isn't my mission.
BUT, let me slide on the off topic borders.
_Because_ Wikipedia is community driven and independent of any corporation, shareholder, or stock exchange, I tend to view it as something no commercial encyclopedia could ever have competed with.
Now, let’s imagine the same thing happening with LLMs and AI. Local, open-source models will build better things than any commercial LLM or AI could ever create.
Yes, this is mostly a dream as of today. But will The Economist still be alive to validate this idea that humans, stripped of the money schemes, will have built greater (aka create a project like Wikipedia) things than ever ?
Think about it - LLM is just a computer program that predicts a next word. So it has a very detailed, formal description of each concept it can represent in its residual vector.
I think humans will understand (perhaps with AI help) these formal descriptions and put them into a giant database.
Can you expect less from a magazine that prays at the altar of capitalism?
People make brilliant things out of altruism as long as they don't have the feeling they're being abused by corporate or monetary interests. That's why the BSD Unixes languished and Linux thrived. Programmers didn't feel the need to contribute for free when companies where the ones reaping the benefits of their work.
Here's a shout-out to OpenStreetMap and its contributors.
Fandom is truly cancerous. I have not checked whether they are affiliated with Wikimedia, but I would not be surprised if that was the case!
If I were to make wikipedia today it would contain only bullet pointed facts with sources for each. Articles would have unlimited length. Pagination if an article gets over a million lines.
No exceptions.
An absolute source and collation of human truth.
Writ broadly. Last time I looked into who was editing Wikipedia on my own academic discipline, it was several people who had an obsessive autistic fixation on the subject, but whose autism was apparently so socially debilitating they couldn't gain employment, not even in academia with its somewhat greater accommodation for oddballs. The upside is that they could channel their interest productively into WP. The downside of this is as outsiders to a field where much consensus is found only at real-life conferences and lecture handouts, their info was often years behind the state of the art (and, of course, WP demands that citations be to secondary sources, even if obsolete).