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Ask HN: Is Wikipedia going to be obsolete soon?
2 points by piratesAndSons •                         
Recently they began showing a download-our-app ad at the top of the site, and it made me wonder: is the website going away soon? Wikipedia was a fixture of the Web 2.0 era, but now websites are changing.

Chatbots are taking massive traffic from websites. Young people don’t like reading text; they prefer watching videos and listening to podcasts. Websites are seen as the old way of doing things, which is why Wikipedia has begun building its own app, since Gen Z is trending this way.

topham •                         
Yes
gjvc •                         
no
herrkobold •                         
wikipedia is indispensable. therefore it will be dispensed
ckx •                         
Wikipedia has always had an app, Wikipedia is not going away, sure, it will recieve less traffic, but it has and always will be a staple of the Internet. If Wikipedia ever went down, millions of pages of human knowledge would disappear. It's not going away anytime soon.
spottedmarley •                         
Maybe
moomoo11 •                         
most wiki articles on current events are so politically slanted these days.

i hope so.

flippant •                         
I used to think that English Wikipedia is biased, but now I've realized that it's a consensus machine. Wikipedia is just downstream of biased reporting. The editors are good about following whatever facts are most reliably citable.

Using North Korea as an example because I assume it's not a polarizing topic for people on HN. NK is especially interesting because we only have access to reporting from external news sources. Sure there's anti-regime bias, but that's just reflective of Western consensus. It's fascinating to see exactly when the editors decide it's appropriate to call Kim Jong-Un a "dictator". And also fascinating to see the editors flip back and forth on the term "supreme leader".

I wish this kind of edit-history/timeline/diff existed nicely in Wikipedia, but the existing tool in Wikipedia is too granular. I think a month view is the best for this kind of analysis.

https://memoryhole.app/wiki-timeline/compare?title=Kim+Jong+...

devilsdata •                         
The truth is politically slanted too, according to some.
bwb •                         
Love Wikipedia, not going anywhere. The app with seeing places around you is amazing when traveling.
NeverJustBusy •                         
No, definitely.
NishanStepak •                         
Wikipedia is going to change with this. I expect more apps and video instruction to happen. There is no reason Wikipedia cannot expand Wikimedia and make it more effective. They have a huge amount of creative commons content already on Wikimedia. Wikimedia is already better than Wikipedia in many ways.
sdevonoes •                         
How would people update wikipedia if there’s no website? Via an app? Don’t think so
Muhammad523 •                         
I don't think so. I keep offline copies of Wikipedia using kiwix, maybe y'all should too.