Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks

Posted by leotravis10 9/4/2025

Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks(www.theverge.com)

601 points | 458 commentspage 3

hungmung 9/4/2025|

Honestly Wikipedia+Archive.org remaining online have national security implications (not just USA, but any democracy). Though I'd wager the current administration would take a different view.

GartzenDeHaes 9/5/2025||

Getting ready for doomsday? You need a solar powered, wifi-enabled, offline wikipedia server.

https://piwithvic.com/offline-wikipedia-with-kiwix/

IAmBroom 9/4/2025|||

I can see the national security implications for countries like Russia and China, that are widely known for pushing false histories backed up with state punishment, but in high-functioning democracies the state does not control public speech.

jacobgkau 9/4/2025|||

> national security implications (not just USA, but any democracy)

That's not really "national," is it?

hungmung 9/4/2025||

National security doesn't just refer to USA...?

France has national security considerations, just like the UK, Uruguay and Uganda. They'd all benefit from having open access to verifiable information.

jacobgkau 9/5/2025||

That's fine, it just seems more like a "societal security consideration," "democratic consideration," or just a general "consideration" than specifically "national security," which has the scope of a nation.

cormorant 9/5/2025|||

There are mirrors and backups of Wikipedia. Archive.org has no substitute.

zahlman 9/5/2025||

archive.today at least allows people to preserve snapshots of selected websites, which is often important for being able to demonstrate that mainstream sources have edited or deleted content without proper acknowledgment.

Interestingly enough, Wikipedia once (I haven't checked if it's still in effect) blacklisted links to there, with compelling evidence (if you read any of the discussion behind the scenes) that it was actually about certain admins and power users trying to maintain control over the bias in main-space article content.

em-bee 9/4/2025||

what are the implications?

hungmung 9/4/2025||

We've always been at war with Eurasia. Not all threats are external.

lenerdenator 9/4/2025||

This is because of the lack of a profit motive and sane expectations on salary from the people running the Wikimedia project.

I think that starting in the 1980s, people started to expect anything involving information technology created immediately-accountable monetary value on a massive scale after seeing the fortunes of people like Gates, Wozniak, Jobs, et al. This was further boosted by the Dotcom bubble.

The fact is, a significant fraction of IT is indeed profitable, but applying the model of perpetual growth is not appropriate for all of that significant fraction, and there's the other fraction of the IT world that isn't directly profitable. More people need to realize that their work falls in the latter two fractions instead of the first.

submeta 9/5/2025||

Does it survive though? I haven’t opened Wikipedia in years. And young folks rather ask Chatgpt for their homework instead of Wikipedia. And that’s the crux. Llms are vacuuming the content of Wikipedia, just like Google is doing the same with Web content.

Aachen 7 days ago|

It's dirt cheap to host text contributed by volunteers compared to audiovisual media or newspapers written by paid people

Which is not to say free and without challenges, definitely not at Wikipedia's scale, but compared to how much donation money they get it's peanuts, not even the same ballpark (the vast majority of the money they get via Wikipedian beg banners goes to projects other than Wikipedia)

Also, personal opinion but

> I haven’t opened Wikipedia in years.

sounded like someone proudly telling a group of supposedly cool friends how they don't read stuffy books anymore now that they've discovered one-page summaries online. This might fall on deaf ears but there's value in reading the actual thing including following references where relevant

bloomingeek 9/4/2025||

<In 1967, Hannah Arendt published an essay in The New Yorker about what she saw as an inherent conflict between politics and facts.

Wow, she was ahead of her time, no? I admit to have never contributed to Wikipedia, that is about to change.

blackhaz 9/5/2025||

Would the Age of Encyclopaediae be next, with human information safeguarded by the selected, several giant egregors taking shape and competing for world views?

seyz 9/5/2025||

Opening the page... eyes burned... closing the page. Ouch.

Labo333 9/5/2025||

archive.is breaks the styling and doesn't execute the js

But archive.org has the subscription popup...

https://web.archive.org/web/20250905062805/https://www.theve...

hoshi73 9/5/2025||

Many call Wikipedia "the last good place on the internet", but that's really only true of the English edition. Non-English versions are generally filled with political misinformation and propaganda from people trying to politicize a nation's history, which, frankly, makes them not worth bothering with:

https://slate.com/technology/2021/03/japanese-wikipedia-misi...

Aachen 7 days ago|

The difference between English, Dutch, and German Wikipedias is also very interesting. I used to never open the Dutch one unless there was a near-zero chance of the English one having any article on the topic at all (like how to make vlaai or idk). It has way fewer articles, has virtually no references for anything, is written more casually by fewer people, and everyone who needs information in the Netherlands speaks English (under 55yo) or German (over 55yo) or both (those in border-nearing retail) so nobody bothers

(Even tinier is the Limburgian dialect that have their own Wikipedia. It seems to mostly be an exercise in how to write this spoken language than to make actually useful articles with unique content. Literally nobody can read that who can't also read Dutch, since it has no spelling or even a dictionary that'd work for more than a few square kilometres. But I digress)

The Germans on the other hand, I've been amazed that there exists, not infrequently, articles in German with more information than in English. It seems like such a shame to me to put all this effort into a niche language, yet it's there. There are well-maintained silos of information out there if you know where to find them!

lz400 9/5/2025|

This reminds me of donating again, thanks

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