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🎉 24 Jahre Wikipedia – ein Meilenstein für Freies Wissen! 🎂

Seit 24 Jahren ermöglichen Ehrenamtliche freien Zugang zu Wissen – gemeinschaftlich & kostenlos. 🌍📚 Die deutschsprachige Wikipedia startete nur einen Tag nach der Ankündigung neuer Sprachversionen und ist heute mit fast 3 Mio. Artikeln die zweitgrößte weltweit.

Ein riesiges Dankeschön an alle, die Wikipedia mitgestalten! 💛

"Anyone at an AI company who stops to think for half a second should be able to recognize they have a vampiric relationship with the commons. While they rely on these repositories for their sustenance, their adversarial and disrespectful relationships with creators reduce the incentives for anyone to make their work publicly available going forward (freely licensed or otherwise). They drain resources from maintainers of those common repositories often without any compensation. They reduce the visibility of the original sources, leaving people unaware that they can or should contribute towards maintaining such valuable projects. AI companies should want a thriving open access ecosystem, ensuring that the models they trained on Wikipedia in 2020 can be continually expanded and updated. Even if AI companies don’t care about the benefit to the common good, it shouldn’t be hard for them to understand that by bleeding these projects dry, they are destroying their own food supply.

And yet many AI companies seem to give very little thought to this, seemingly looking only at the months in front of them rather than operating on years-long timescales. (Though perhaps anyone who has observed AI companies’ activities more generally will be unsurprised to see that they do not act as though they believe their businesses will be sustainable on the order of years.)

It would be very wise for these companies to immediately begin prioritizing the ongoing health of the commons, so that they do not wind up strangling their golden goose. It would also be very wise for the rest of us to not rely on AI companies to suddenly, miraculously come to their senses or develop a conscience en masse.

Instead, we must ensure that mechanisms are in place to force AI companies to engage with these repositories on their creators' terms."

citationneeded.news/free-and-o

Citation Needed · “Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI
More from Molly White

Grouping Concepts Temporally Instead of Topically, Using Wikipedia Data

There's been so much talk about "vibes" in programming lately that it gave me an idea for a Wikipedia tool. If you accept the idea that Wikipedia page view data can be used as "fossilized attention" (indicators of public interest in a topic) then you can use information extracted from page view data -- like derivation from average views (z-score) -- as a benchmark of public interest.

calishat.com/2025/03/14/groupi

Continued thread

It would be wise for these companies to begin prioritizing the ongoing health of the commons. It would also be wise for the rest of us to not rely on AI companies to come to their senses or develop a conscience en masse, and instead force them to engage on creators’ terms.

Continued thread

The free and open access vision is inspiring, but there are instances in which people who freely license their work go “wait, no, not like that”. People reselling their free works, tech companies profiting off their FOSS code, and AI companies training on their material.

Newsletter: The real threat isn't AI using open knowledge — it's AI companies killing the projects that make knowledge free. The future of free and open access isn't saying “wait, not like that” — it’s saying "yes, like that, but under fair terms”.

citationneeded.news/free-and-o

Citation Needed · “Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI
More from Molly White

Stolpersteine goes Wikidata

Es gibt ein neues Projekt der Wiki-Community, „Stolpersteine goes Wikidata“. Dadurch sollen alle Informationen zu den Personen und den Verlege-Orten der Gedenksteine für die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus digital verfügbar werden.

In meinem Wohnort wurden gerade erst im letzten Monat vier Stolpersteine verlegt. Vielleicht kann ich das Projekt mit Bildern und Daten unterstützen.