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Yup. I think a better question that everyone should be asking, is -- how is Wikipedia succeeding SO IMPRESSIVELY in light of all the other failures we see and can we apply this model to other "websites, which at their essence, do nothing more than allow people to share information."


Wikipedia is not for profit, the incentives are incomparable.


Right. I don't care about profit, and therefore also not about incentives. I care about the idea of -- hey could there exist something like "Medium" as a non-profit, especially given that pretty much everything that has tried this for profit ends up going the way of (as mentioned below) "enshittification?"


Maybe this is exactly the difference that makes it work.


There’s no competition for Wikipedia yet. As soon as search is killed by AI and AI starts providing answers of similar quality without driving traffic to sources, Wikipedia will either completely fade to irrelevance or will be quasi-acquired by AI providers, which will see it as a training ground for AI and fund it on such terms that allow this use case.




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