Simon Willison’s Weblog

The Depths of Wikipedians (via) Asterisk Magazine interviewed Annie Rauwerda, curator of the Depths of Wikipedia family of social media accounts (I particularly like her TikTok).

There's a ton of insight into the dynamics of the Wikipedia community in here.

[...] when people talk about Wikipedia as a decision making entity, usually they're talking about 300 people — the people that weigh in to the very serious and (in my opinion) rather arcane, boring, arduous discussions. There's not that many of them.

There are also a lot of islands. There is one woman who mostly edits about hamsters, and always on her phone. She has never interacted with anyone else. Who is she? She's not part of any community that we can tell.

I appreciated these concluding thoughts on the impact of ChatGPT and LLMs on Wikipedia:

The traffic to Wikipedia has not taken a dramatic hit. Maybe that will change in the future. The Foundation talks about coming opportunities, or the threat of LLMs. With my friends that edit a lot, it hasn't really come up a ton because I don't think they care. It doesn't affect us. We're doing the same thing. Like if all the large language models eat up the stuff we wrote and make it easier for people to get information — great. We made it easier for people to get information.

And if LLMs end up training on blogs made by AI slop and having as their basis this ouroboros of generated text, then it's possible that a Wikipedia-type thing — written and curated by a human — could become even more valuable.