I didn't know about the stats, I just checked and found it's saved me over 3 days. I assume that's local to this machine, so that's just in the last year.

we also have 19% of constributors every week who have been submitting for over 3 years! I think that's a pretty impressive number, especially when it is so easy to reset your account by reinstalling the extension because we don't use traditional emails and passwords.

Any are welcome, so far as I know having not checked their submission criteria, to spin it up and contribute tags to the SponsorBlock community. I'd wager there are people already doing so.

I think it would be more useful to more people to utilize the existing solution because it runs in a very small footprint for the end user. Most people wouldn't be able to run an entire TTS/LLM workflow without processing videos in the background or waiting some multiple of real-time in order to watch a video.

You could maybe do it with just LLM tagging the transcript, but that's still a ton of processing just to watch a video.

God that'd be so much wasted energy if every person wanting to skip in-video ads was running an entire LLM to do so.

> corporations got onboard both as OSM users and stakeholders, and then some idealistic anti-capitalistic people have asked why they should contribute if the map can benefit corps,

Anecdotally, I’ve had a lot of experiences like this with newer generations of people on topics like open source software or community projects: They’ve been trained, usually by a social media niche, to believe that the only good fight is to actively harm corporations. Their idea of the world is a very clear black and white contrast with people on one side and corporations on the other.

Such a clean separation of the world only exists in ideas they get from social media and movies. Encountering a project like OSM or an open source project where the largest users (and for OSS, maybe the largest contributors) are people involved with corporations doesn’t fit into their worldview, so they file it in the “corporate” side of the divide and dislike it.

Many longtime OSM mappers like myself are acutely aware of various corporations making big bucks on the back of our volunteered time and effort. Often times without contributing anything. Recently made worse by horrible API abuses.

I get why people might not be motivated to join us in the tragedy of the commons.

The kids are alright (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Zeloof). They are putting up more of a fight than you can imagine. The root cause of centralization is the way we do hardware manufacturing (as explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49690354). I think it will take about 5 years to make fabs into home appliances, then the entire stack will decentralize from the bottom up. The future is most likely solar/cypherpunk, at least in America.

I personally think most people become disengaged from the side of things like OSM because they literally don't have visibility to the problem. It becomes even worse when there are literally trillions of dollars of market value derives from the good work of open source, but people only see the badge of product and not all of the layers of onion beneath it.

I really wish the world recognized and provided tax income to these projects because they have been the backbone of our ever-complex technological society for probably about thirty years. Rather than what we have now where large corporations will take a foothold in an open-source project and hollow it out for parts then sell it as a "turnkey" product like we have seen time and time again.

<tangent>

> younger generations raised on corporate platforms and their phone apps are less aware of non-corporate alternatives

All the new guys I work with are trapped in the app store/play store bubble. If it's not available directly through the device's software distribution system it's not getting used.

> might even be suspicious of libre and altruistic movements

All my boomer bosses think that anything that is outside the Windows/O365 ecosystem, or doesn't come with a $150 yearly license, is clearly pirate hacker software that will give your e-mail a virus and steal your bitcoin.

It is increasingly frustrating when we have a problem that could be fixed with GNU corutils and a bash script, or a raspberrypi/arduino translating between 2 serial devices, but we end up getting some $1500 black box from the 'official' vendor. It teaches the newer guys that step one is not to think about the problem, it's to grab your wallet and call a salesman.

</tangent>

Is "they don't use OSM-based apps because the they're just not as good" not a possible explanation?

Well, my son is an avid user of CoMaps. Better than Google Maps around here.

As long as there are walkers and cyclists to fix this one path in the woods, everything will be fine;

There is quite a lot of open cooperation between national mapping agencies and OpenStreetMap, at least in Europe.

As for updating the name of the latest pop-up shop, the owner will just have to sort it out himself.

OSM is still too difficult to contribute to for mass engagement. I spent an entire day trying to figure out how I could contribute fixes to the map for my corner of the country. There are 30 roads nearby with inaccuracies that would take me weeks to correct by hand. That could be fixed easily if there was a convenient app that recorded my driving and uploaded it to a central source, processed it, and converted that into edits for me to confirm. Such a system might exist, but I wasn't able to figure out where it was or how to use it. If they want more users to contribute the system needs to be easier. Same for Wikis.

speaking of OSM... I've been part of teams at _certain country_'s _certain municipalities_ and teams working on GIS projects. so little among those people, who consume OSM content on a daily basis, even think about giving back, that even though I am not an OSM contributor, I start to get outraged at their total ignorance and disregard for crowd-sourced content, and the fact that someone put some work to have it there. same people are then getting royalties delivering this content to third parties. this is so wrong on so many levels, and I can't think of a way to make it work in a future where data is more precious than software packages.

You are correct about phone apps, but many of us still use desktop computer systems. I do, for instance. Most gamers also do.

It is, however had, true, that the interaction pattern changed. So many walled ghettos about nowadays - look at Facebook and Google (via youtube).

New opportunities and directions open up all the time! AI is opening a whole new salient to attack the gatekeepers.

Craft is Wikipedia / OSM for software. We're building an open source AI software factory to agentically remake everything.

We're going to open source all the apps, turn platforms into protocols, build open infra, and help assist open weights.

Everything will be rewritten as high quality open source software. And once we've covered the space of everything people use, we'll turn the components into highly reusable open source libraries that can be reshaped into new workflows in real time.

We're going to make a seamless bridge between local and cloud AI, we're going to make a rich set of primitives for fine tuning and sharing.

Not just applications. Data, infra, hardware, the whole of technology.

https://github.com/storytold

https://discord.gg/artcraft

I was done with OSM within a few days. I fixed some streams to be in the right place, reverted.

This post box is no longer there. "I'll drive round and check", "no need I'm stood there, it has gone". "I'll drive round tomorrow"...I got the impression i was on someone else's patch and gave up

> then some idealistic anti-capitalistic people have asked why they should contribute if the map can benefit corps, too

”We should respect freedoms and not restrict them arbitrarily… except when I do not like the people using those freedoms.“

It is always a weird take to me. Pick a license that matches your preferences, like the GPL. Do not pick MIT/whatever and then complain when corps make use of the freedoms you afforded them.

I look forward to human curation to be reinvented in some way. Social media algos are a tyranny. I think something new will be driven by people's desire to be different and niche.

We need a dev voucher system. Persist it across projects and time. Belonging to a vouching chain with a rogue dev down the chain loses you points the closer you are to it. Anything else is just too unreliable imo.

In the end there's no foolproof way, so we'll just have to converge on the idea that quality is what matters.

Good AI contributions are better than lazy crap or trolling from humans, right?

You've discovered some sentient non humans have you?

Power attracts the corruptible

> On top of that comes that all those projects aim for a neutral POV, which is very non-human to begin with and only going to benefit AI.

LLMs are not more neutral than humans. Not only because their learning material is biased but also because they can develop unexpected biases due to the non-deterministic and emergent nature of generative AI.

The idea that an LLM would be more neutral and less partial than a human is a very dangerous and very wrong one. It misunderstands the very nature of generative AI.

And while some people are able to tolerate AI generated text, a lot of people would never read Grokipedia. I would not. Despite great progress, generative AI is not able to create images that don't look absolutely disgusting in the eyes of actual artists. And the same is true regarding text output for anyone who cares about writing.

It’s almost like it’s not that difficult to scrape Wikipedia and turn its articles into LLM generated slop. I wouldn’t call musks wiki clone catching up by any means to Wikipedia and definitely not politically neutral.

The food shelf I volunteered at yesterday is a lot more than 20 years old. There'll probably not be another Wikipedia, because we already have Wikipedia. There's no point in having a second. Assembly for other things listed. We have one. Why would we need a second one to do that?

I don't know what the future will be, but the future people who live in it will know and they're going to do something. I can say that with confidence, even without knowing exactly what they're going to do.

edit: grammar - see reply for old/wrong version.

Exactly. Erosion of the Internet's commons by spam, abuse, botting etc. were always a problem they had to contend with, but it's gotten way worse recently, to the point where several are either failing to cope or already dead (like StackOverflow).

> fan wikis have almost all consolidated onto the ad riden, unreadable monstrosity that is fandom

Minecraft, GTA, League of Legends, Valorant, Overwatch, Fortnite, Warframe and RuneScape (OSRS too) all moved off Fandom because they started forcing ads even harder. They're now hosted by a nonprofit that takes money from Riot to host their official wikis and uses it to pay for the rest.

The power of these tools is their governance structure not the means in which articles are edited. This is why musks Wikipedia clone will not amount to much of anything besides being a lazy attempt at making sloppified Wikipedia articles with a right wing bent.

> Totally agree, with AI it feels like we will actually accelerate that or be able to take on more ambitious projects as per the things you mentioned, its been a laborious effort by mankind. Now imagine we really want to do open maps, communication, even search.

But then it'll just be your AI slop and no one will care. If they want one they'll slop one up themselves instead of using yours.

The people building these technologies do not have a good understanding of humanity (they have some oversimplified view focused on reducing friction), and even if they did their goal is not to help communities from but rather extract the most profit for themselves out of society. They won't maintain the friction that helps communities form and keeps them cohesive, just like they won't maintain the friction that keeps us healthy as individuals.

> There are all sorts of possible ways we can do some large scale crowdsourced effort and its probably going to be realtime news e.g video streaming live events on an open platform not owned by corporations. Where there is no misinformation. No one can lie to us, we can see it happening.

That's a fantasy. The technological trend is towards more corporate ownership and more misinformation (or if there's less, it will only be because the corporate overlord AIs will suppress misinformation that's against their interests, and promote other misinformation that suits them better).

I think you're generalizing a brief summer, when the web was new and the power-that-be had not yet muster their resources to control it, as the natural state, when it was really a happy but unsustainable state.

Seems it's still there but Wikipedia has

>70x the Citations, 1615x the Traffic https://ahrefs.com/blog/wikipedia-vs-grokipedia/ (mar 2026)

reviews so so https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/11/elon-musks-grokipedia-is-l... - long badly written error prone but some facts Wikipedia misses

I'm confused. It seems pretty clear to me that search-equipped LLMs have vastly improved the availability of high-quality knowledge to the average person, who no longer needs to go to Wikipedia and find a page and then look at the sources on that page (which is the most reliable part of WP) - especially because nobody reads the sources to begin with.

Isn't that availability of information the entire point of Wikipedia? Heck, wasn't that the point of Google before they turned evil?

I contribute occasionally to Wikipedia and it doesn't worry me if the LLMs copy it. It's always been creative commons.

The closest I can think of is OpenStreetMaps.

Exactly this. People are holding up Wikipedia as some shining light in the free world. They obviously are not aware of all the controversies there have been over the years of both rogue editors and restrictive controlling admins. It has also been called out for censorship many times before. I think everybody still has the idea that Wikipedia is free and collaborative for everyone, when in fact it has changed significantly from what it was. Your experience is testament to that.

> Wikipedia is gone. Whatever it even was, it is not now.

The title evokes a romantic sense of wikipedia as a well governed, neutral egalitarian multicultural collaboration. But anyone who has been marginalized by the cabal knows it was not most of those things.

May I ask what username you used?

> because not only did they install some deep cookie

We dont use "deep" cookies, just normal cookies. If memory serves, 7 years ago Wikipedia didn't use cookies at all in the block process, it was purely ip based back at that point.

The weirdest thing I've seen about wiki nowadays is that "they" (admins? editors? chief editors? dunno) get to decide what makes a "worthy" article for wikipedia. Which is bananas, in the era of "free" storage.

I get everything about slop/spam/etc. but deciding a page about a small band in SmallTown Canada isn't "worthy" of wiki is silly beans. That's the whole point of a collaborative, anyone can contribute wiki. Having people decide what "makes the cut" or not is silly.

They could have gone with a "edu" / "core" wiki that gets to include only certain articles, and the rest are "community" or something, but literally removing articles for anything other than quality/sources/spam is not what wiki started as. And it's not what I donated for, but that's another can of worms...

Forgot to mention they deleted all of my edit history and comments on the talk page.

They provided an email address to send a message for appeal to the board, which I didn't bother.

I can't think of any. But the thing is, but 4 years (after 2022) is not much, that's how long it took for Wikipedia to take off, most similar project I can think of: OpenStreetMap, Linux, GNU, arXiv... took longer than that. You can't judge success in 4 years.

After a quick search I stumbled upon Wikifunctions (2023), but do Wikimedia projects that are not Wikipedia count? A bit more controversial would be Anna's Archive (2022).

We have to think about the needs too. There was a need for an online encyclopedia, Wikipedia took it. What need do we have now that is currently unanswered and can be answered by a collaborative effort similar to Wikipedia?

Also, open source projects, so many come out every year that it is hard to count.

So why have we stopped building pyramids for thousands of years? We have the technology and knowledge to do it, so where are all the new pyramids? And no, that Las Vegas monstrosity doesn't count.

You might be surprised to learn that not all challenges are purely technological. The biggest challenges with such megaprojects are political, economical, and social. A Wikipedia clone is completely worthless if nobody is willing to contribute - it would just be an empty database!

Thanks, but I'm getting this error:

> This gift link has expired. Register to access this article

archive.is is having a screenshot of the error for this article

Is this a joke?

In the hope that I'm not attacked for having the wrong motivations and beliefs, I'll name the page. This all went down years ago and I won't be tracking down names and edits.

I should also preface this by saying I was involved in a community which is often stereotyped and denigrated by those on the "online left." When I was younger my parents divorced and my dad was treated very badly by the courts, by friends, and by society. He is a good man and I saw the ways in which he was systematically marginalised and outright discriminated against. It helped me understand why male suicide is so high. This led me to learning more about the men's rights movement. Nothing like the "manosphere," men's rights is interested in the many issues men face as a group. The various ways in which society and the law discriminate, and how men might adapt and help each other through some very difficult periods. For many men, it is mostly a support group. A place where they can talk about how they were raped and then the police laughed at them at the station. Or about how the judge awarded their wife full custody of their three children because she lied about being abused. Or about how they lost limbs in unsafe workplaces and no one cared. Or about how they feel suicidal. Etc. I organised support groups online and in real life. It was very positive and I believe we helped many men through some very dark times.

Apologies for the preamble, but I wanted to provide some context. In the 2000s, I began updating the Men's Rights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_rights_movement) Wikipedia page. Mostly statistics around things like suicide, homelessness, likelihood of being assaulted and murdered, disparities in the educational systems and courts, the high rates of workplace death and injury, etc. Always cited with peer reviewed or governmental data, and sometimes with "accepted" news articles. My goal was to inform people about the facts. Some time in the late 2000s and early 2010s, questionable edits began happening. For example, suicide statistics were removed periodically. The reasons were generally specious. Sometimes arguing about semantics. Sometimes the source. Sometimes procedural. One editor argued that the statistics should be contained as a subsection of the Feminism page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism), for example. They also tried to remove the page entirely. I began to notice that the people making the edits were frequent editors of related pages like Feminism.

It is at this point that I should point out that feminists and men's rights advocates don't always see eye to eye.

The questionable edits became malicious edits. Administrators began selectively enforcing rules. For example, applying a higher standard for sources on the Men's Rights page than they do on the Feminism page. They applied a banner at the very top of the page directing people to a feminist friendly page called the "men's liberation movement." They removed countless statistics and examples of inequalities in law and education. They changed the language in all sections to suggest or imply that the people involved in the movement are incorrect or mistaken. For example, the entire second paragraph (of only two) in the introduction is a refutation of the movement. Compare with the Feminism page. Criticisms are now located at the very bottom of the page in a sub-sub-section which doesn't even have its own anchor. It's a few small paragraphs now on a page with tens of thousands of words. In the "Suicide" section now they include, "studies have also found an over-representation of women in attempted or incomplete suicides and men in complete suicides." Just to make sure that no one could make the mistake of caring about men, unless it's framed in relation to how women might be affected.

I could go on but the stark differences between these pages should be extremely clear. They have not been edited for clarity or truth, but for ideological reasons. This is just one of millions of pages on which ideological wars are being waged. Unfortunately, the war is lost. WikiProjects, Arbitration Committees, and Administrators are all some version of far to extremely far left wing Americans. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger now calls the site "propaganda." (https://www.foxnews.com/media/wikipedia-co-founder-larry-san...) It's clear that many like this bias, but for those of us who used to be involved, we can confidently tell you that you should never, ever take what Wikipedia has to say at face value. It is much closer to propaganda than it is factual.

Okay, [see my comment above.](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50429580)

Probably that the companies that benefit the most also pay it back. Though I'm not convinced that's due to the GPL 2, since the binaries rarely need to be shipped outside of the company's own server farms the legal distinction between BSD and GPL is largely moot.

> encrypt the passwords securely

Uh oh.

In 2003-2004 the benefit of php was really php.net letting you comment on any function

Sure. Check the Wikipedia rules for citation. Primary sources are all but prohibited. (See Wikipedia for details.)

This violates the principles of empiricism. If I state as a matter of empirical fact that you've asked a question and I refer someone else to your question for viewing as evidence that you did in fact do so, that's what we call a primary source. This is logically the best evidence of a fact, still according to the most modern principles of scientific philosophy. (See Locke, Hume, etc. Or search "scientific empiricism" and follow philosophers into modern time to see that this principle is widely agreed upon in the forum.)

Conversely Wikipedia establishes that it's better for me to instead cite the BBC or other news outlet (secondary source) for their opinion about your question, rather than use a primary source.

Implicitly, contribution is confined to a strict subset of sources, especially those controlled by a small group of corporations and colored by interpretation rather than those exhibiting empirical fact.

More importantly, this is logically unscientific.

The work of countless unpaid contributors should not be used to distract from the shady organization profiting off their work.

"It all just goes to shareholders"

What is this nonsense? It's a non-profit. There are literally no shareholders.

You mean the Internet Archive.

On the bright side, as encyclopedias go that's much more up to date than my parents' World Book from the 1960s or even my CD of Encarta 1996.

Not "most searches." Wikipedia was (probably still is!) the the most common #1 result.

"#1 result for most searches" would mean 50% of all searches would have Wikipedia up top, and no site clears that bar.

Huh, yeah I guess so

Well, the ontologies are there inside LLMs, humans just don't know them. There is nothing that contradicts with bitter lesson to what I said.

> There is no mechanism whatsoever on youtube to incrementally improve a video or understanding of a topic.

Yes there is? You've been able to trim and append end screens for years. Usually when understanding on a topic changes people upload newer videos.

Do you expect the books on your shelf to update every year? What a baffling relationship with media you must have.

> Youtube does not reward or otherwise provide provenance and incremental improvement.

I don't think that Wikipedia rewards provenance either? The "reward" seems to be seeing your own beliefs put to text. I suppose that's what you're getting at?

Learning to tie a necktie ≠ learning how to be an adult.

Not everything (I'd wager most things) requires a human to ask questions to. It's just a process. I learned programming from videos and static documentation a decade before I had a school class with a teacher. The "human connection" didn't make me a better programmer.

> Lastly, a video is a video. It is not another person

Was this earnestly your takeaway? I'm not sure you'll find anyone interested in arguing that a video is equivalent to a person.

When I fix snowmobile engines I'd obviously prefer the company of a free and patient instructor showing me on his own machine right in front of me. This is not something that is available, so I settle for videos.

> If you think a video from a company trying to sell you clothes, hosted on Alphabet's servers, is a substitute for another person, especially in this age of AI generated content, I suggest you take a step back and reflect on what human connection really means

Yeah, nobody believes that. A human is a human and a video is a video.

This was a really bizarre strawman, dude, you didn't need to write so much about a position nobody's remotely trying to argue. I would suggest you "take a step back" and reflect on whether you're trying to engage with what was written, or just trying to insert your derision towards a guy who doesn't exist.