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Comment by basilikum | Hacker News Reader

Mad props to the people at the Archive. You are the heros we need in a formerly open internet that is surrendering to evil big corps and closing down free access.

The Internet Archive is in a really bad spot being attacked from multiple sides at once. But — while service has not been consistent — they have maintained open access. I can still access anonymously from Tor without Cloudflare or some other centralized gatekeeper showing me the middle finger.

If you got some money to spare, consider donating to them. They need it.

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I donate to them every year b/c I fully agree they’re doing a thankless critical job very well.

Thank you for the inspiration! I just made my first donation.

I have a recurring donation, there is so much cool stuff in the archive. It really is the library of the internet, and I love it.

Finally signed up for 10$/month donation. Thanks for the inspiration!

I've been donating $5 to them monthly for I don't know how long. I've only recently bumped it up to $25. They're the heroes of the internet age

fully expect them and wikipedia to get assaulted by AI companies to monopolize data source access in the near future.

The future is bleak :\

I'm expecting a full court legal attack on Wikipedia at some point. It's just too good for information, and companies would rather you use their chatbot to regurgitate that info now that they have their own copies. Google was already built to pretend as if they had some magic system giving you "Answers" that were 95% just the text of the infobox they used to have for wikipedia on the side.

It's going to suddenly be extremely valuable that wikipedia didn't settle for having a small rainy day fund and instead ceaselessly grabbed every fucking donation they could for two decades so they can fight such a legal battle.

on what basis?

Wikipedia is not a challenge to the system. If it were, it would be excluded from search results, much like blogs are now.

This became obvious to me when from 2023-2025 they refused to call it anything other than "Israel-Hamas war"

It's since been renamed to "Gaza genocide", as it should have been all along - but it took forever to get there.

This is because of their policy of only mirroring what mainstream media outlets are saying.

It’s the only “genocide” in history where the population being genocided grew during their genocide.

this is not correct

Are you disputing that Gaza had more births than reported deaths during this period, or do you have other examples of “genocides” where the population grew during their genocide?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

Account created 1 hour ago and only made these two comments, no others. Dang should investigate where these bots are coming from.

Funny how you led with a desire to get Wikipedia to align with one side in a conflict, and an opposition to the “mainstream” having no diversity of opinion in your view, yet the moment you are confronted with alternative viewpoints and facts you refuse to engage with the content, and instead try to silence views that you don’t like.

This tells us more about your bias then Wikipedia bias, observe that WWII and Bosnian War have their own Wikipedia articles regardless of any genocide occurring in them.

I don't think there's much grounds for a serious legal attack at this point, and also it would look so horrible from a PR standpoint no non-desperate would dare it. Anyway, google has been steering enough traffic away, now that its AI jumps in with an answer and the wikipedia link which 99% of the response is based on is always hidden with a bunch of other overlaid icons. Google has surely managed to kill off a bunch of reddit and stackoverflow traffic with this trick.

Why would any chatbot provider attack Wikipedia *legally*? Captcha is fully solved, and agents are fully capable of acting as editors, pushing any agenda desired by the user.

Strangers can't really edit Wikipedia any more, especially if their edit is suspicious. It's a closed system despite the appearance. An anti-vandal bot or human will quickly revert your edit.

This is not really true in my experience aside from protected articles; however it is true that sometimes another human will make an edit which degrade the article quality or insist on keeping something that shouldn't be kept. Also, Articles on contentious subjects tend to be problematic.

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