Have Wikipedia and Mozilla passed a point of inevitable decline?
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@evan well, you deleted your post, but what I can say after reading some amount of all that is:
if the wikipedia team honestly thinks pageviews is a reliable metric for anything I'm slightly more worried than beforebut I still think the site's in good shape, especially after the recent decision to reject AI contributions
@anime_reference I'll add them back when the poll is over! I broke my own rules about polls, so I deleted them.
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Have Wikipedia and Mozilla passed a point of inevitable decline?
@evan I don't like to think anything's inevitable. I've been disillusioned with both for different reasons, but a turnaround is always possible. Still use Wikipedia heavily and Firefox as my primary browser.
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Have Wikipedia and Mozilla passed a point of inevitable decline?
@evan Mozilla yes, Wikipedia no. Wikipedia is a lot more than user traffic. When someone wants to actually check the sources of AI they have to go to the source.
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Have Wikipedia and Mozilla passed a point of inevitable decline?
@evan I went with both.
I think they're both in decline currently, and perhaps this state was inevitable. However I do think it would be possible for both of them to reinvent themselves into something that works in the current era.
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Have Wikipedia and Mozilla passed a point of inevitable decline?
I'm a long-time Wikipedian, Firefox and Thunderbird user. I voted for Mozilla only, but hope I'm wrong on that.
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@evan Mozilla yes, Wikipedia no. Wikipedia is a lot more than user traffic. When someone wants to actually check the sources of AI they have to go to the source.
Agreed on the importance of Wikipedia, but it's important to recognize that the encyclopedia itself is meant to be a tertiary source. To really check the sources, you need to go to the citations on the Wikipedia pages.
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Have Wikipedia and Mozilla passed a point of inevitable decline?
@evan Mozilla and Wikipedia are the absolute worst standard barrers for open source technology, apart from all the others.
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@evan I'm really worried about wiki, but there's still a chance of recovery; it would also be significantly easier to fork wiki compared to forking Firefox (from a development aspect at least... legal questions in licensing not so much)
What do you mean when you say "fork wiki", and how would it be in any way easier than forking a web browser? Do you mean something like Grokipedia (which I certainly do not recommend)?
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Have Wikipedia and Mozilla passed a point of inevitable decline?
@evan I think it's important to remember that you don't always have to answer a poll just because you see one. If you're really not sure, you can skip answering!
I share this message for the benefit of everyone.
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@funcrunch @evan Sure, no objection about that.
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@pizaaman Are we playing Questions?
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@evan well, you deleted your post, but what I can say after reading some amount of all that is:
if the wikipedia team honestly thinks pageviews is a reliable metric for anything I'm slightly more worried than beforebut I still think the site's in good shape, especially after the recent decision to reject AI contributions
@anime_reference Wikipedia edits depend on page views. People edit the the pages when they read something that's untrue, clumsy, or misspelled. If they don't get page views, they don't get edits.
Wikimedia Foundation revenue depends on page views. People donate to Wikimedia when they land on a Wikipedia page with a donation request banner. If there aren't page views, WMF doesn't get donations.
Page views are a very big deal for Wikimedia.
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Have Wikipedia and Mozilla passed a point of inevitable decline?
I like playing video games and board games with an economic component. In these games, you build farms or factories or mines or whatever, and they generate resources that you can use to build armies or research centres or monuments, which in turn let you build more farms and mines and so on.
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I like playing video games and board games with an economic component. In these games, you build farms or factories or mines or whatever, and they generate resources that you can use to build armies or research centres or monuments, which in turn let you build more farms and mines and so on.
There's a moment, when you're losing this kind of game, that you realize you don't have the resource generation needed to drive growth, or even to maintain what you have. The orc armies are moving in, and you don't have enough manganese to make Armoured Infantry II. So you lose those wheat fields you do have to the orcs, and now you have even less resources, which gives you even less optionality for defence or growth.
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There's a moment, when you're losing this kind of game, that you realize you don't have the resource generation needed to drive growth, or even to maintain what you have. The orc armies are moving in, and you don't have enough manganese to make Armoured Infantry II. So you lose those wheat fields you do have to the orcs, and now you have even less resources, which gives you even less optionality for defence or growth.
It'd be nice to play games where you can have a little barley field and a little wood lot and a little university and you just chill and eat mushroom barley soup and write poetry by your wood fire. But usually in these games, if you don't grow, others will. The world changes around you. And they will overlook you for a while if you keep a low profile, but eventually they'll come take what little you have.
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It'd be nice to play games where you can have a little barley field and a little wood lot and a little university and you just chill and eat mushroom barley soup and write poetry by your wood fire. But usually in these games, if you don't grow, others will. The world changes around you. And they will overlook you for a while if you keep a low profile, but eventually they'll come take what little you have.
Technology is not a game, but it kind of also is. Mozilla had a great product, Firefox, which ran on Open Source and open standards. At its peak, in the late 2000s, it had about 30% of the global browser market. That gave Mozilla a lot of optionality for generating resources -- resources it could invest in other projects that reflected its values.
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Technology is not a game, but it kind of also is. Mozilla had a great product, Firefox, which ran on Open Source and open standards. At its peak, in the late 2000s, it had about 30% of the global browser market. That gave Mozilla a lot of optionality for generating resources -- resources it could invest in other projects that reflected its values.
But Mozilla hasn't been able to use Firefox to level up. It tried a lot of things -- Firefox OS being the biggest bet -- that for one reason or another didn't pan out. Meanwhile, their resource base was eroding from 30% of all Web users to about 2% today. Their biggest customer, Google, which paid them for access to browser users, built their own Open Source and open standards browser, which became much more popular.
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But Mozilla hasn't been able to use Firefox to level up. It tried a lot of things -- Firefox OS being the biggest bet -- that for one reason or another didn't pan out. Meanwhile, their resource base was eroding from 30% of all Web users to about 2% today. Their biggest customer, Google, which paid them for access to browser users, built their own Open Source and open standards browser, which became much more popular.
Mozilla is so dependent on Google today that they begged US courts not to enforce antitrust laws against Google, because it would hurt their only source of revenue.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/internet-policy/google-search-deals-and-browser-choice/
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Mozilla is so dependent on Google today that they begged US courts not to enforce antitrust laws against Google, because it would hurt their only source of revenue.
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/internet-policy/google-search-deals-and-browser-choice/
I don't know if Mozilla is definitively boxed in at this point. Maybe there's an act 3 for them somewhere. I use their VPN and it's fine. They have a few other paid products.
They've repeatedly failed to leverage their Firefox userbase to build other products -- the mobile OS, of course, but also Mozilla Social, which they shut down without ever really launching it.
Eventually, that userbase is going to be too small to launch anything off of.
