The cycle is thus.....
Cory doesn't believe this is happening to Wikipedia, because he apparently doesn't think Wikipedia has shareholders and thus there is nobody who is worrying about value.Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Clearly that dumb bastard hasn't been reading Wikipedia's strategic reports, which as we have seen, are now talking this year about how the Wikipedia "brand" is losing value among the readers (who are Wikipedia's "users") and thus they aren't paying for Wikipedia in the form of donations, which means the platform is in danger of dying.
The Wikipedia business is all about sustaining brand value.
Put simply, if people stop donating to Wikipedia, the website dies. Wikipedia as a concept dies.
For what that dumb bastard (and Wikipediocracy) don't seem to realise, it long ago ceased to be relevant that the Wikipedia "content" is legally free (and thus can be copied by anyone wholesale). In reality, the content of Wikipedia is now so absolutely intertwined with bespoke templates and code that generates stuff on the fly, that a wholesale copy of Wikipedia results in something that doesn't look like Wikipedia at all. It will have error messages and broken links and weirdly formatted pages, all things that will make a "user" mistrust the content.
Add to that the fact anyone who copies it cannot call it Wikipedia because the "brand" is all that Wikipedia owns, as well as some servers and office chairs, and you soon realise that Wikipedia is a tech giant in exactly the same way as Facebook is. They have created a monopoly. Their product is (allegedly) information.
So, where do "business customers" come into all this? It's simple. The business customers are the editors. The dumb bastards who got addicted to Wikipedia and added the content. They were all "users" at first, but as anyone who knows Wikipedia knows, the number of "editors" has only ever been a teeny tiny fraction of the number of readers.
Wikipedia catered to users (readers) first, because if they didn't have anyone reading their shite, they couldn't extract value from the brand. They wouldn't attract donations. So they were good to readers at first. They gave them information for free. Just Google a term and there would be a Wikipedia page on it. They let them copy it and use it for whatever they wanted. If there was no page, users could quickly and easily create one, and Google would make it available instantly. No questions asked.
This was unheard of in a world before Wikipedia. A world of books and websites whose contents were copyrighted, whose layout and format was proprietary, and who, rightfully so, asked something of the reader in return for the information. Which until Wikipedia came along, was actually quite hard to produce to a standard that the reader would find acceptable. Either the reader was expected to directly pay for it (purchase/subscribe), or pay with their eyeballs (adverts).
Wikipedia did away with all that. They effectively harnessed the fact editors had lots of time on their hands and no respect for other people's hard work or economic rights, to steal other people's work (see this website for a good case study) and present it as Wikipedia content.
Just as Facebook/Google/YouTube/Twitter/TikTok etc monetized other people's content creation, so did Wikipedia. Just because Wikipedia has a different way of collecting the money (donations), doesn't make it any less of an exercise in Silicon Valley capitalism. Just because Wikipedia isn't turning that money into shareholder value in the traditional way (dividends), doesn't mean it isn't happening.
Wikipedia returns dividends from the "value" of the brand in the form of staff wages and grants. It has famously been so good in the past at doing this, it has had more money coming in that it knew how to spend. So they expanded far beyond their original goals.
If Wikipedia wants to be seen as a force for good, a "public utility" as that dumb bastard sees it as, they could choose tomorrow to stop taking donations at all, and instead fund its actually very meagre basic overheads from their actual commercial arm, the part of Wikipedia that sells priority access to bulk users like Google and Amazon. This arm was of course created when Wikipedia started to realise it was in an enshitificaction cycle and wanted to hedge against donations drying up completely.
The won't do that, because that risks other people's shareholders asking, well, what fucking value are we getting from Wikipedia really? What the fuck are we actually paying for here?
You're paying for pure shit, you dummies. Terabytes of information that is unreliable by default. Biased by default. Incomplete by default. Worthless by default. You're paying for it because in large part the world is still blind to the reality of what Wikipedia information actually is. Pure shite.
And so it was. Once Wikipedia had gone viral and the presence of readers was assured such that brand value was assured, as per the enshitification cycle, Wikipedia switched focus from users (readers) to businesses customers (editors).
Wikipedia started making it harder to edit Wikipedia, so that the hard-core editors felt like they were special. In a stark illustration of where Wikipedia went wrong, It is frankly inarguably that editors soon became more important than readers. Internal policy shifted to being about what makes editors happy. It started to be all about identifying threats to editor's self esteem, rather than content quality.
For people unfamiliar with Wikipedia, this is hard to spot. Wikipedia editors for a start, intentionally deceive outsiders by always talking about what's best for the readers, when in reality they mean themselves. And while it may seem like Wikipedia editors making a big fuss about paid editors, POV pushers, and lunatic charlatans, is about readers, it really isn't.
Paid editors are hated by the volunteer editors because their presence reminds them that Wikipedia is exploiting volunteers, getting them to give for free what can quite easily be done as a paying gig. POV pushers are hated because the POV being pushed is usually contrary to the one many editors joined Wikipedia to push. Lunatic charlatans are hated because their presence reminds everyone of Wikipedia's basic model - letting anyone edit means what it says. Wikipedia is written by anyone, and so by definition that includes grifters and snake oil salesmen, as well as Nazis and paedophiles.
This has been a steady process, culminating where we are today. Users (readers) are entirely irrelevant. Their needs and opinions are totally ignored. Citation needed tags for example, a very basic indicator of a serious issue, are added by users with a bare bones knowledge of editing, and are then ignored by the community for over a decade. Editors now simply remove them rather than fix the issues. Drives to improve quality are largely ignored. Editors are as free as they have always been to indulge their selfish whims. Reflecting the basic reality that if you don't pay people, you can't tell them what to focus their energies on.
This is enshitification in action. Readers became less and less important as focus shifted to businesses customers (being the creators of the brand value), and are now completely irrelevant. After all, what does Wikipedia care if a user has a bad experience now? The brand has been estsblished, a monopoly created. So where are they gonna go? The monopoly ensures there is no viable alternative. As that dumb bastard laid out as the depressing reality for users of the more obviously commercial Big Tech sites, users only hope for a better service is if the platform dies and a replacement springs up in its stead (or the internet as a whole is completely reformed).
Which brings us to the next stage in the enshitification cycle. Almost as soon as Wikipedia had started prioritising editors over readers, you could find examples of editors complaining that their needs were now being overlooked as Wikipedia abused them in the relentless pursuit of value.
The entire existence of Wikipediocracy is merely to facilitate this pathetic, selfish whining of established and experienced editors who are unhappy to have realsied, as all Wikipedia editors must eventually realise, the owners of Wikipedia aren't really interested in their needs at all.
Why would they be? How can you have any respect for people stupid enough to donate for free what they could be monetizing themselves? And you surely have even less respect when you realise, and people like Hemiauchenia are a perfect example of this, that they are only volunteering for Wikipedia because they are too dumb and talentless to get paid for writing/researching elsewhere. Wikipedia gives these utter no-marks a power and platform they could have only dreamed of before Jimmy Wales ruined the internet for everyone.
And so it was. Year after year, Wikipedia has since focused on how they could better exploit their dumb ass volunteers to extract brand value from their efforts, being acutely aware that time is running out. Precisely because Wikipedia has abused these editors, they are leaving.
Less editors, and indeed more and more content being looked after by fewer and fewer editors, only makes it more obvious to users that the brand is increasingly worthless. Incredibly, Wikipedia is failing to meet the expectations of people who already knew that the trade off for not having to pay for Wikipedia, is that it has very low standards.
We are at the beginning of the end of the cycle. Having abused the editors, the value of the brand is fatally damaged, and Wikipedia is now dying. Donations are falling. For the first time ever, Wikipedia is making budget cuts. Like a failed state, the propaganda put out by the people paid by the state, and indeed the words of the highest placed volunteers, are entirely at odds with reality on the ground.
Some editors still waffle on about what is best for readers, still dreaming of a day when Wikipedia will give a shit.
It was farcical long ago. Things are now becoming delusional.
This summer saw Ferrari win the world famous motor race the 24 Hours of Le Mans for the first time in fifty odd years, at their very first try. The event is attended by thousands, and broadcast around the world. Ferrari quite rightly invested billions of dollars in that effort.
Wikipedia barely even noticed, completely failing this year to even put the article on the front page, despite endlessly telling each other in their delusional internal circle jerks that "In The News" isn't about being a news ticker, it's about showcasing high quality articles Wikipedia has about topical events.
The article simply wasn't ready in time. And in truth, nobody was even really looking.
Wikipedia has always had flaws that work against it when trying to do this critical task. Systemic bias means that things which traditionally aren't the main stay of the Anglosphere, get less attention. The 24 Hours is a race held in France and run by a French sporting organization, so it has always had a continental flavour, despite attracting entries from around the world. It is virtually ignored in British sporting media, even though because it is not that far away, Brits flock to it in their thousands, and British teams and manufacturers have had many successes in it.
Due to enshitification, a tipping point has been reached. Readers of these articles long ago ceased to be a priority. But now even editors are lacking.
It is necessarily hard to write about this event to any great standard. It is one of the few things you can still get paid to do. And so, rather obviously, the people writing it and the people consuming it, for very different reasons, have taken their symbiotic relationship elsewhere.
For them, the Wikipedia brand carries no value.
