Better Offline - Wikipedia Is All The Web Has Left ft. Molly White

Episode Date: April 3, 2024

Wikipedia, a non-profit encyclopedia that anybody can edit, remains one of the few trustworthy and reliable websites left online. Ed Zitron is joined by critic, researcher and 18-year veteran of the Wikipedia editing community Molly White to discuss how Wikipedia actually works, and why you should care about its future.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host, Ed Zetron. Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia used by over a billion people a month, one that despite being maintained entirely by an army of free and at times anonymous contributors, remains one of the most reliable sources of information on the internet. Wikipedia's 62 million articles are edited by over 100,000 contributors. and these contributors have somehow done a better job maintaining the quality and validity of the information

than any of the information provided by any of the major platforms today. Wikipedia is funded entirely through the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organisation funded through public donations and grants and has the staff of over 700 people. Yeah, I'd argue most people have absolutely no idea how intricate the Web's Encyclopedia is, and today I'm joined by Guerrilla Warfare, a Wikipedia editor that's made over 130,000 edits in the span of 18 years across two accounts.

You'll likely know her better as researcher and critic Molly White, the creator of the citation-needed newsletter and Web 3 is going great. All right, Molly, thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me. So, I don't know how else to ask this, but why should people actually care about Wikipedia today? Well, I mean, I think Wikipedia is one of the highest quality resources there is on the web today. I think everyone uses it, sometimes without even realizing it, given that Wikipedia data powers so much of, you know, AI chat GPT responses or home

assistants that are answering your questions or Siri. And so I think keeping the quality of information on Wikipedia high or even improving it even further is one of the most important things that we need to be focusing on. But one of the big critiques of it, and I know, and this is very much a podcast for people who might be techie, but people also who are just being exposed to tech outside of the consumer realm, how is it reliable? Because that is the big, that's the big question. How is this something you can trust? Well, I think, like a lot of things, you need to take it with a grain of salt and understand that there is variation on Wikipedia between, you know, some very high-quality

articles that have been reviewed by hundreds of people versus some that are fairly new and, you know, being created still. So I think it's important to realize that there is the possibility that whatever you're reading is not reliable and there is some onus on the reader to verify that what they're reading is correct. But I think that generally speaking, the quality control and Wikipedia is actually pretty good. There are a lot of editors who are constantly maintaining the platform, making sure that the material on there is, you know, well-sourced. It's coming from high-quality, reputable publications, and that, you know, it is meeting the criteria that Wikipedia puts in place. And I think the result of that is that the content

on Wikipedia tends to be very high-quality. And how does the actual model? moderation work. So what goes into a Wikipedia page? Well, it's a little bit ad hoc. There's not really a process in which every page has to go through a set of criteria or anything like that. Generally speaking, anyone can edit Wikipedia and contribute to the best of their ability. And when someone does something that is not in line with Wikipedia's requirements, then hopefully, you know, idea is that hopefully someone will come along and notice that revert the change or improve it so that it does meet the criteria. And I realize that sounds very like slapdash and it is to some extent. But because of the sort of processes that have developed over the years, it actually

works pretty well where most pages do you get a fairly strong set of people who are, you know, taking a look at the changes that are coming in, making sure that they are. appropriate for the encyclopedia and allowing them to remain or, you know, discussing them and reverting them if necessary. Talk to me a little bit about that process, though. What happens? Well, someone, you know, if someone goes and makes an edit to a page, generally speaking, there are, you know, a fair number of people who are patrolling recent changes to the encyclopedia, you know, not necessarily even watching that page specifically, but just looking at new edits that are coming in and, you know, checking them for reliability, you know, is there a source included?

Does the edit pass the, you know, the smell check? There's also some automated processes involved that will try to filter out edits that are abusive or, you know, match certain patterns. And then there's the, you know, there's a lot of editors who have, you know, various pages that they're interested in or they have expertise in. on what's called their watch list. And so they take a look at changes to those pages every once in a while and see if, you know, everything looks all right or if there needs to be improvements or edits to, you know,

what's been added to bring them back into line with the quality that we expect. So is there an organization? I know there's the Wikimedia Foundation. We know that. But is there a, is there a moderator chat? Is there a place where people congregate? Or is this just entirely, I don't want to say decentralized, but. disorganized? Well, it's certainly disorganized. There, yeah, so there are, there are actually kind of a bunch of

places where people congregate, and some people use some of them and some people don't. But, you know, there's, there are various places on the encyclopedia that are, you know, project-specific pages where people discuss issues that are coming up or flag, you know, things that need more attention. Not everyone has the ability, for example, to block an editor who's being disruptive, so editors who can't do that themselves will report it for people who can. And then there's more real-time places. Like, we still use IRC, believe it or not. But there's also...

And for listeners, by the way, IRC is, what, a 30-year-old shareware product? Yeah, it's basically one of the first online chat protocols. I was a polaris IRC guy, but for listeners as well, Discord is very much, I believe Discord is actually somehow built on IRC. That's a different episode though. I'm not sure if it actually is or if it just interoperates well with it, but there's also Wikipedia Discord now for people who don't want to go figure out how IRC works. So, you know, there's a bunch of different places where people can chat and talk about working on the project, different formats.

And there's no compensation of any kind. Correct. Not unless you are, you know, an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation who is, you know, writing the actual Media Wiki software or, you know, performing one of those tasks. But that's a very small organization in comparison to the number of people who edit the encyclopedia, the vast majority of whom do so for, you know, for free. technically there are some people who edit Wikipedia articles for pay as a part of like PR strategies and stuff, but that's a whole can of worms and it's somewhat controversial. Well, that's actually a good question. So I run a PR firm and I know that people will come along on both sides and say, can you get me a Wikipedia page? And then others will say, for this incredibly large sum of money, I can do this for you. And it feels like those people are fighting a losing battle.

It's one of the rare cases where capitalism can't really win. And how is it the Wikipedia is so resistant to that kind of stuff? Right. So there's a lot of resistance from the Wikimedia community towards people who are editing for promotional purposes. Because the whole point of the project is it's supposed to be an encyclopedia, not an advertising space, not a resume, you know, not a place to promote your business or your product.

But of course, people want information on Wikipedia about them. And so there are some people who are able to sort of tread that line where they understand Wikimedia policies very well. They understand, you know, what is allowed as far as writing about, you know, a company without being promotional. They understand what that, you know, organization or company or person would need to accomplish in order to, you know, achieve those notability requirements, and then they can

write about them. And they do so very transparently. You know, they disclose that they are doing so for compensation, you know, that they've been hired by that person or organization. And they go through the process and it's very, you know, carefully orchestrated. But there are also a bunch of people who do so sort of on the, you know, on the sly. And they don't really

disclose that they're doing it for pay. Those are often the people who will sort of cold call you. Like if you've gotten emails, they're like, hey, I can make your Wikipedia page. A lot of those are sort of scammy, not so reputable organizations. And, you know, generally speaking, they actually have a pretty hard time doing what they claim that they can do because they don't tend to understand the policies well. They try to shoehorn articles into Wikipedia about subjects that are not notable or that are too promotional. And so they tend to get taken down. much to the dismay of the people who pay them quite a lot of money.

So if you're listening to this and you've heard from one of those people, I would not recommend hiring them. Just become more important, which I guess is kind of the question. How does Wikipedia actually judge notoriety? What is important? Yeah. So generally speaking, the notability requirements is, you know, it basically goes on how much coverage a subject has received in reliable

sources that are independent of the subject. So, you know, if a big newspaper or several newspapers write about you in detail, chances are you might be notable enough for a Wikipedia article. On the flip side, if you're just publishing press releases, that's not independent of you. That probably doesn't qualify. If there's just one brief mention of you in a reliable source someplace, that's probably not sufficient. So that's sort of the general guideline. There are other sort of more specific requirements for some sorts of like specific types of topics, you know, like sports players and things like that. But generally speaking, even if someone meets one of those guidelines, they've already met that general guideline where, you know, it's just

about the amount of coverage in reliable sources. And that can be press, that can be academia, it can be books, you know, anything that sort of qualifies as a reliable source. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide. Not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an Acapella band with their between songs banter.

There's that worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The yard herds, right? That's the name.

The Harvard Yardt Yard. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged, one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcast.

Podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting.

Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. agency, the ability to know that we're the experts in our own body. On the podcast cultivating her space, Dr. Dom and Terry Lomax create a space where black women can show up fully and be heard. I wholeheartedly think, you know, you hit 30, you shouldn't have to share one with anybody. Mm-hmm. From navigating friendships and healing to setting boundaries and prioritizing your mental health.

These are real, honest conversations. We don't always get to have out loud. totally unreasonable with different parts of life, right? Like, oh, have all three meals and make sure you're mindful during all of them? Absolutely not. During one meal, I'm standing. I'm standing and handing my children food. Because healing, empowerment, and resilience aren't just ideas, their practices.

And this Mental Health Awareness Month, there's no better time to pour back into yourself. Listen to cultivating her space on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Now, recently C-Net, one of the largest tech sites, actually found itself downgraded in reliability? Were you aware of that situation? Did you see that happen? I saw the conversations about it. I wasn't a participant in them, but I sort of watched it happen. Yeah. So for the listeners, C-Net has hundreds of millions of views a month. It's one of the most notable websites, frankly, and has been for decades. So what happened there?

Why was this significant website considered less reliable by Wikipedia? Yeah. So Wikipedia has these discussions pretty frequently about different sources and whether or not those sources are generally reliable or sometimes reliable or usually not reliable. And in order to sort of prevent people from having to have that same conversation every single time they want to cite a source that's heavily cited, you know, like CNET or, you know, the New York Times or something like that. We have this list of very commonly discussed sources where we just discuss, you know, we outline the general reliability of that source. And what you're referring to

is a recent discussion where some editors decided we really needed to revisit the general reliability of CNET, which was previously considered fairly reliable for sourcing on Wikipedia. And the reason for that is that there had been a pretty noticeable change in the quality of the material that they were publishing where it, you know, it no longer had the level of accuracy that it once did. You know, the articles that were being published didn't seem to be being edited well or fact-checked well. And so we decided that, you know, if you're just, if you're planning to use C-Net as a source, you should really consider this and consider that it's probably not even as reliable as it once was and maybe use something else

because they've started using AI generated content and stuff like that that has noticeably affected the quality of the articles that they publish. And what are the ramifications of that downgrading? What does that mean practically? It means that if you're writing a new article on Wikipedia and you want to use CNET as a source, you are somewhat discouraged from doing so now. It means that where CNET has been used as a source already, editors are going to be looking to improve that sourcing, generally by swapping it out with something that's more reliable. Although, you know, as notability changes

in these publications, sometimes older content that was written or published prior to a change at the organization will be considered reliable, whereas newer content that's being created now and might be using, you know, AI or other tools is not considered reliable anymore. So, for example, we have a couple of sources where we'll say that, you know, anything they published before 2015 is fine, but anything after that you should take with a grain of salt. So I think that's partly the case with CNET now as well. So why do you think that Wikipedia is so much better at quality control than, I don't know, Google? Well, I think there's a very different set of incentives at play.

You know, Google is a profit-driven corporation. They have other motivations besides providing the person who is using their search engine with the most relevant results. You know, that is ostensibly what they do, but they also have motivations around generating ad revenue and clicks for, you know, different groups that are using their service or advertising with them. Wikipedia doesn't have those sometimes conflicting incentives. You know, the goal of Wikipedia is to deliver the highest quality information that we can.

And we're not, you know, there's no advertisements. We're not trying to surface some specific set of content for people based on who is paying, you know, or not paying. it's really just that one incentive. And I think that simplifies things because we can all sort of get behind that one goal. And we aren't trying to juggle multiple things that are sometimes very much in conflict with one another. As I think we've seen with Google, where that goal of providing the highest quality information to the search user has been very much challenged by the other incentives at play. So you've edited Wikipedia for about 18 years.

I think the simplest question is, why do you still do it? Why did you start? Why do you continue? Well, I started because I was a curious kid who discovered that I could, and that was exciting for me. And I have, I don't know, I think there are just some people out there who have like a very specific type of brain where Wikipedia just like sort of tickles it just right, you know, and like doing that kind of editing and, you know, curation just a preamination. just appeals to me. I find it really enjoyable. But I also think that, you know, the project is a really wonderful creation, you know, and I think it provides a really important service to the people who have access to it, which is almost anyone. I mean, it's anyone with an internet connection, and there are even ways to get access to Wikipedia without an internet connection. And so I think that, you know, maintaining a quality source of high, you know, reliability,

material is incredibly important and arguably getting only more important as other sources of that same type of content, you know, are becoming degraded in the way that you just described with Google, for example. So, you know, I'm very passionate about it. I think providing high quality information to everyone is one of the most important things that sort of humanity needs to achieve. And so I find that very strongly motivating. And is there any pressure at all from the Wikimedia Foundation. Do they push people around at all? I'm not going either way. I'm just wondering what influence they have on the platform. Yeah, it's kind of an unusual relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation and the editing community. It's sometimes a little bit adversarial, which is

sometimes a little confusing to people who are new to the project. But I would say no, the Wikimedia Foundation generally takes a pretty hands-off approach towards the projects that, you know, it kind of supports. The Wikimedia Foundation almost never comes in and says, hey, you need to delete that or you need to, you know, do something very specific with the content. There are some very edge cases with like legal requests and things like that where they can sometimes do that, but they are very, very conservative on when they will do that. And for the most part, they take, that very hands-off approach. The Wikimanii Foundation is mostly concerned with, you know,

paying the bills, keeping the site online, developing the software that actually powers the encyclopedia and the editing infrastructure and all that, and then, you know, trying to contribute and grow the editing community and that type of thing. But they are pretty hands-off when it comes to editing, which I think is actually quite good. It allows the community to, you know, organically develop its own

policies and protocols and things like that and, you know, without the Wikimedia Foundation sort of putting its thumb on the scale. So a more practical question. As an editor, what do you do? Is it just editing? The reason I ask this is, you provided me with your Wikipedia editor page and there's things like unblock, reblock, blog, thanks. What do you do as an editor?

What are these numbers about? because it feels like there's kind of a niche social network hidden inside it. Yeah, there's a lot that happens behind the scenes besides just, you know, opening up a page and writing something new. I do do some of that, you know, I do write pages from scratch once in a while or I'll go in and edit something if a page is missing something or needs something. But there's also a whole bunch of other sort of administrative work, I guess, that goes on behind the scenes where I will sometimes, you know, patrol,

articles. That's sort of what I described earlier, where people will watch the recent changes to the project and try to just filter out anything that looks abusive or, you know, disruptive or, honestly, just less than productive. Sometimes I try to, you know, go around and welcome new editors who are just joining the project. Sometimes they need help. And so I'll try to sort of, you know, show them the ropes a little bit. And then there's, you know, the blocking and deletion and things like that where people who are known as administrators on the project can block an editor who is regularly being disruptive or delete a page if it doesn't meet the requirements that we have defined in our policies and things like that. And so I do some of that as well. So how does one

become an administrator? So there's a whole process called Request for Admanship where you either put yourself up, you nominate yourself as a candidate or someone else who thinks that you would be a good administrator will do so. And then there's a long process where you answer some questions and then the Wikimedia community votes pretty much on whether or not you have the experience, the mindset, basically the right attitude towards contributing. And then there's a vote pretty much. and if you pass the threshold, then you are nominated or, you know, you become an administrator at that point. So it's something that happens, you know, fairly regularly. I did it in 2010, I think.

But, you know, various people go through it pretty often. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter. There's the worst singer in the group.

The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group. The yard birds, right? That's the name.

The Harvard yard, but they're open to change. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle. A one erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smygel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny.

Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two. combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at IHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. Agency, the ability to know that we're the experts in our own body. On the podcast, cultivating her space, Dr. Dom and Terry Lomax create a space where black women can

show up fully and be heard. I wholeheartedly think, you know, you hit 30, you shouldn't have to share one with anybody. Mm-hmm. From navigating friendships and healing to setting boundaries and prioritizing your mental health. These are real honest conversations. We don't always get to have out loud. Totally unreasonable with different parts of life, right? Like, oh, have all three meals and make sure you're mindful during all of them?

Absolutely not. During one meal, I'm standing. I'm standing and handing my children food. Because healing, empowerment, and resilience aren't just ideas. They're practices. And this Mental Health Awareness Month, there's no better time to pour back into yourself. Listen to cultivating her space on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Have you seen more people joining as editors or is there more people or less people editing these days?

I would say there's been sort of a slow decline in the number of people who are joining. If you look at people who join as like a user and then continue to edit somewhat frequently versus, you know, I'm not just talking about people who like correct a typo once in a while, but the sort of like regular contributors is sort of, yeah, it's it's either flatlining or declining to some extent. And it has been for a really long time. And so it's sort of this continual discussion that happens within Wikipedia about, you know, what do we do about that? How do we encourage more people to join? How do we make the project more welcoming to new people who want to get involved? You know, it's something that I try to focus on as well, just because I think it's really important to not only contribute to the encyclopedia, but make sure that other people are aware that they can and, you know, doing so if they have the desire to do so. Are they training materials? Is there an onboarding process?

There are. In fact, there are many of such things that different people have created. And the Wikimedia Foundation themselves has gotten a little more involved in recent years and trying to make that sign-up process a little bit more friendly. So, you know, when you first create an account, it doesn't just drop you into the editor, like, good luck, you know, which is kind of what it used to do. now there's some little widgets and things that will guide you through making your first edit and finding an article that maybe needs some improvement so you can give it a shot. Those types of things are being developed.

And then there's community resources to try to encourage people to do the same, which are just created by different editors for various purposes. Is there any automation? Yep. There's quite a lot. There are Wikipedia editing bots that perform various tasks, everything from fixing vandalism to introducing archive links so that if a source link goes down, you know, you can still get a copy of that source material. All kinds of things like that. There's anti-spam stuff, you know, where it looks for spammy links and removes it.

So, yeah, there's quite a bit of automation both by community members. Well, so some of it's, yeah, some of it's. community members who, you know, create bots and maintain them. I would say it's probably the majority community members, but there, you know, is also the Media Wiki software itself, which is maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation. But they don't really do much of the editing side of things. So most of the editing stuff is community-based. Has there been any discussion of AI or integrating AI or anything like that? There has been quite a lot of discussion of AI. And it's mostly been around, two things, the sourcing situation.

So can you consider AI-generated material to be a reliable source? Generally speaking, the answer has been no, that you have to be very cautious when, you know, typing something into chat GPT, because a lot of times you'll get back something that is not accurate at all. And then there's also been discussion around, can you use AI-generated content, you know, as, you know, can you tell chat GPT, or something like that to go make an edit for you?

You know, can you use content that ChatGPT has written as, you know, content that you put into a Wikipedia article? And the answer there has largely been, yeah, you can, but you have to be really careful about it. And you have to sort of take full responsibility for anything that you have generated and put into a Wikipedia article because, you know, it's still up to you to fact check it and things like that. as far as integrating AI into Wikipedia to try to, I don't know, generate article content or something more generally, that is not something that the community has seemed particularly interested in doing. And I suspect it would introduce a lot of problems. There were some sort of past attempts at doing things sort of like that in the translation space, where the Wikimedia software would try to encourage people to translate articles. from one version of Wikipedia to another. And that was a largely unsuccessful experiment, I think,

where too many people were just pasting in machine translation or not doing the right kinds of quality control. So we have to be really cautious around that type of thing. So I think it was a year or two ago. Elon Musk said he wanted to buy Wikipedia for a billion dollars. Just so we're clear, that is impossible, right? Yeah, I mean, Wikipedia is. not for sale. I don't think there's any, you know, genuine interest on either side for Wikipedia

to be sold. I think Elon is also particularly not interested in it. He just has a longstanding beef with Wikipedia. Which understandably, because they tell the truth, which is not a big thing for Mr. Musk. So you've done a lot of advocacy recently about editing and saying why people should become editors. But I kind of want to hear yourselves. Why should the average person, person edit Wikipedia? Well, I mean, I think honestly there's probably 100 answers for that, and it depends very much on the person. You know, I do it because I love it. I find it really enjoyable. Some people do it because they think that the resource of Wikipedia is incredibly important and needs

to be maintained. You know, that's also a factor for me. But I think it's okay to also just do it just for fun. You know, I think you don't have to have some big driving motivation behind it. But I do think that, you know, especially now as the web is somewhat under threat from this sort of AI-generated junk that's being, you know, becoming so prevalent in search results in any particular website that you go visit, it's really important to make sure that there is this, you know, human-reviewed material out there that is as high quality as possible and that really value. use the quality of information, accuracy, reliability, you know, neutral point of view, those types of things above just, you know, spitting out as much content as possible with little regard for its accuracy or reliability. And so I think that, you know, now more than ever, projects like Wikipedia are incredibly important. And, you know, maintaining them as other parts of the web begin to degrade is going to only become, you know, a more important thing to do.

kind of feels like as this prevalence of AI generated content grows, we kind of need user generated content more than never as it's being killed off. Yeah, it's kind of ironic, I think, you know, that we're starting to see this proliferation of this AI generated content that's really just quantity over quality. And in doing so, it's sort of killing the quality content that is often the source material for the AI itself. You know, we're seeing this decline in journalism, for example,

where some outlets are laying off their media teams, you know, instead hoping that they can use AI to just churn out articles. But, you know, the same AI tools that they're using were trained on journalism. They were trained on the types of stuff that is no longer being created. And so you end up with this potentially really circular situation where AI could start, ingesting AI-generated content and entering this really massive quality spiral, I think. It's what Jathan Sadowski calls Habsburg AI. Yeah.

The inbreeding about it. Keep going, sorry. Yeah, no, it's a great term. He always has great terms for things. But, yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, we really, people are very excited about AI, and they believe that AI will just continue to get better and better and better without really thinking that critically about what is required to create a high-quality, you know, large language model. And something like Wikipedia is honestly, like, incredibly important to creating any quality large language model. I mean, I think every large language model out there pretty much uses Wikipedia as a source material. Yeah, chat GPT was trained on it, right? Yeah, I mean, I think

basically all of them were. And so, you know, if you enter that very circular loop where that training material gets worse and worse and worse, I think AI will get worse and worse and worse. And so making sure that there is, you know, very high quality information out there that is not being insidified to use Cory Dr. Rose term by this AI, you know, junk that's being created is, I think, very important just to, you know, general knowledge. But also, I think it should be very important to those people who care so much about AI. Yeah, it's ironic as well because the sources of information we've come to rely upon, like, Google and being to some extent, I guess, are so dependent on user-generate content, but really are just, they've choked it. They're choking it as we speak. Is Wikipedia seeing less traffic or more traffic? How is this affecting it? I honestly don't know. I guess I could look at Wikipedia traffic. That's my job.

Yeah, but I mean, I think there is, you know, to some extent with Google and these various software projects that ingest Wikipedia data, you know, sometimes they do draw that attention away from the source, you know, where they'll just highlight the first paragraph of Wikipedia in search results and people never click through to the Wikipedia article. That's a pretty common phenomenon. You know, news sources are sometimes upset about that also. But I think one thing that's useful about Wikipedia is that Wikipedia doesn't really have the same incentive to draw clicks as, you know, an ad-supported news source might. And so to some extent, it's like to some extent, as long as the information is getting out there, we don't really care how. And so, you know, I guess there's some question of like, is it actually bad for traffic to be redirected away from Wikipedia? I could probably make that argument in both directions. Well, Molly, thank you so much for joining me today.

Where can people find you? You can find me at mollywhite.net. I also write a newsletter at citation needed. Well, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having me. Now, listeners, I'm going to do something a little bit off-paced, if you will. Molly and I just talked about Wikipedia, and I realize it feels weird to advocate for something

on a objective media platform, though I think we all agree that I have my biases and my things that I care about more and that I'm angry about. I think we all do. But I must state how important keeping Wikipedia alive is. This platform, despite the fact it's editable by everyone, is more reliable than Google is at the moment. It's more reliable than a lot of media publications. As we speak, the user-generated internet is being destroyed. It is being sold off for parts.

It's being turned into a rot economic catastrophe. Something like Wikipedia is truly important. I realize, again, it's weird to advocate for any product or thing. But I encourage you, and I know it's weird to say, but please go and edit Wikipedia. Please sit down and edit whatever it is. Learn the ropes. This is one of the few community-organized internet things that actually exist that we can help with. It's a thing you can do today to change the internet, to fight for what's right.

And yeah, these publications are funded in part by tech publications. The Wikimedia Foundation has taken money from Google. But as you've heard from Molly, who I trust deeply and you should do, they do have a firewall between them. This is one way you can fight back. And I implore you to do so. Even if it's one editor, even if it's one page you keep an eye on. Follow the training documents.

Join the party. Please try. I understand that it's impossible to ask for money and I should never do so. But your time, your attention on Wikipedia is genuinely important. It sounds silly. I know we've all kind of thought, I was just Wikipedia or anyone credits it. But I'm worried. I'm worried for the internet as it stands.

I'm worried that internet sources are going to become more centralized, more focused on the big tech platforms. Please protect what's left of the good internet. there. Edit Wikipedia today, I'm serious. At times it can feel a little hopeless out there. It can feel like there's nothing we can do against these trillion-dollar enterprises. And to some extent, there's nothing we can do. We really can't. We can't stop Sundup Ashai. We can't stop Sam Orman. What we can do is help reinforce what made the internet great. What we can do is contribute to open source. What we can do is edit Wikipedia, even a little. Even a little. Even a little. Even

those little contributions matter. This is what made the internet what it is today. And we can fight for it, and we can protect it. Thank you for listening. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects

at Mattosowski.com. You can email me at easy at betteroffline.com or check out Better Offline.com to find my newsletter and more links to this podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite.

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