This will be unpopular, but hear me out. Maybe the decline in visitors is only a decline in the folks who are simply looking for a specific word or name and the forgot. Like, that one guy who believed in the survival of the fittest. Um. Let me try to remember. I think he had an epic beard. Ah! Darwin! I just needed a reminder, I didn’t want to read the entire article on him because I did that years ago.
Look at your own behaviors on lemmy. How often do you click/tap through to the complete article? What if it’s just a headline? What if it’s the whole article pasted into the body of the post? Click bait headlines are almost universally hated, but it’s a desperate attempt to drive traffic to the site. Sometimes all you need is the article synopsis.
Soccer team A beats team B in overtime. Great, that’s all I need to know…unless I have a fantasy team.
Half my visits to Wikipedia are because I need to copy and paste a Unicode character and that’s always the highest search result with a page I can easily copy and paste the exact character from.
If you don’t check their name - Darwin - on Wikipedia, where do you check it? A random AI? When you’re on Facebook, their AI? When you’re on Reddit, their AI? How trustworthy are they? What does that mean for general user behavior in the short and long term?
When you’re satisfied with a soccer match score from a headline, fair enough. Which headline do you refer to, though? Who provides it? Who ensures it is correct?
Wikipedia is an established and good source for many things.
The point is that people get their information elsewhere now. Where it may be incomplete, wrong, or maliciously misrepresenting or lying. Where discovering more related information is even further away. Instead of the next paragraph or a scroll or index nav list jump away, no hyperlink, no information.
Personally, I regularly explore and verify sources.
I doubt most of those visits to Wikipedia were as shallow as finding just one name or term. Maybe one piece of information. Which may already go deeper than shallow term finding, and cross references and notes may spark interests or relevant concerns.
This will be unpopular, but hear me out. Maybe the decline in visitors is only a decline in the folks who are simply looking for a specific word or name and the forgot. Like, that one guy who believed in the survival of the fittest. Um. Let me try to remember. I think he had an epic beard. Ah! Darwin! I just needed a reminder, I didn’t want to read the entire article on him because I did that years ago.
Look at your own behaviors on lemmy. How often do you click/tap through to the complete article? What if it’s just a headline? What if it’s the whole article pasted into the body of the post? Click bait headlines are almost universally hated, but it’s a desperate attempt to drive traffic to the site. Sometimes all you need is the article synopsis. Soccer team A beats team B in overtime. Great, that’s all I need to know…unless I have a fantasy team.
Half my visits to Wikipedia are because I need to copy and paste a Unicode character and that’s always the highest search result with a page I can easily copy and paste the exact character from.
Em dash? Wikipedia.
Nice-looking quotes? Wikipedia.
Accented uppercase letters? Wikipedia.
(Yeah, I know. The last one can only be understood by Italian speakers; or speakers of other languages with stupid keyboard layouts)
If you don’t check their name - Darwin - on Wikipedia, where do you check it? A random AI? When you’re on Facebook, their AI? When you’re on Reddit, their AI? How trustworthy are they? What does that mean for general user behavior in the short and long term?
When you’re satisfied with a soccer match score from a headline, fair enough. Which headline do you refer to, though? Who provides it? Who ensures it is correct?
Wikipedia is an established and good source for many things.
The point is that people get their information elsewhere now. Where it may be incomplete, wrong, or maliciously misrepresenting or lying. Where discovering more related information is even further away. Instead of the next paragraph or a scroll or index nav list jump away, no hyperlink, no information.
Personally, I regularly explore and verify sources.
I doubt most of those visits to Wikipedia were as shallow as finding just one name or term. Maybe one piece of information. Which may already go deeper than shallow term finding, and cross references and notes may spark interests or relevant concerns.