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Comment by tjrgergw | Hacker News Reader

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tjrgergw

Great, more chaos!

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I see a huge come back for encyclopedias looming on the horizon.

Writen by AI and printed on demand of course.

Why? Wikipedia is beating AI in every respect as far as I can tell.

That's because you don't see the disruptive innovation of my idea!

Seriously so, once AI writen content arrives at Wikipedia, the internet will become a lot less useful. Heck, I'd pay for a offline version of Wikipedia before it comes to that!

It's available already, for free: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

My internet connection will suffer this night! Thanks a lot!

My 40 Mbps connection can do all 20 GB of enwiki-latest-pages-articles-multistream.xml.bz2 in about an hour, shouldn't take all night. Unless you want to gently pull all the images from rsync://ftpmirror.your.org/wikimedia-images/, which will take a little longer.

Or you want to simplify by using a pre-built archive and reader app from, say, Kiwix, just grab all 96 GB of wikipedia_en_all_maxi_2023-09.zim in ~5 hours.

Really, what will suffer is your own sleep, as you figure out how to read and organize and serve and auto-update the content...

How much of Wikipedia Wil eventually become AI generated? I don't mean through an official integration like Quora, but how do you stop someone from using ChatGPT and submitting it as a user edit? What if they see that their favorite artist or tv show or flower is a stub article and ask ChatGPT to extend the article?

Facts on Wikipedia are supposed to have a verifiable reference, but most articles don't follow that rule.

Well see, you create the AI page first on some other site, then link it to the wiki. Tada, you've now created knowledge.

funny you should mention this, but Encyclopedia Britannica is online, free, and perhaps unsurprisingly does not often show up on SERP page 1.

Serious question - do you have experience to EB?

You mentioned SERP and I thought - doesn't matter to me, I have a custom search for Wikipedia that I use instead of google when I know there's a wikipedia for something (I've developed really good intuition for this).

But... the same isn't true for EB, but should it? Does EB ever have anything that's not on wikipedia? Like, ever?

For figures or issues mired in controversy, for better or worse, you never see edit wars.

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