ok, I woke up with another reason why this wikipedia sell out has me so angry...

@susankayequinn More context, maybe: https://bsky.app/profile/r1zmy.bsky.social/post/3mcihrljhs22z

@vivtek The original: https://enterprise.wikimedia.com/blog/wikipedia-25-enterprise-partners/

Means that they make the scraping by these companies legal and take money for it which is invested in Wikimedia Foundation. Before, they scraped without paying.

@susankayequinn

@NatureMC @vivtek

and if you really want to be horrified, read this: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Schiste/what-now

@susankayequinn Well, due to time constraints, I could only skim through it and am not particularly shocked now (perhaps I overlooked some aspects). However, I find the comparison problematic: "the internet is growing, but our traffic is not".
The internet is growing due to vast amounts of AI slop. The rest is becoming invisible thanks to search engines like Google. And people ask LLMs instead of Wikipedia. This is a problem for *all* of us who depend on traffic. However, it would be

@vivtek

@susankayequinn naive to believe that AI could be abolished again. It's not going away. We urgently need political regulations and alternatives, e.g. for search engines. This includes requiring these companies to pay for their scraping and only allowing them to do so if it is legal. That's what the Wikimedia deal is all about.

In Europe, e.g., we discuss a system that AI corps have to pay into our authors and artists collecting societies who then distribute.

Or did I misunderstand it?

@vivtek