Ask HN: Is Wikipedia going to be obsolete soon?

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.

2 points | by piratesAndSons 1 day ago

13 comments

  • ckx 20 hours ago
    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.
  • NishanStepak 9 hours ago
    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.
  • bwb 17 hours ago
    Love Wikipedia, not going anywhere. The app with seeing places around you is amazing when traveling.
  • NeverJustBusy 12 hours ago
    No, definitely.
  • gjvc 1 day ago
    no
  • herrkobold 23 hours ago
    wikipedia is indispensable. therefore it will be dispensed
  • spottedmarley 20 hours ago
    Maybe
  • topham 1 day ago
    Yes
  • RaelAles 1 day ago
    [dead]
  • artnap 18 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • bestdn4u 17 hours ago
    [dead]
  • moomoo11 18 hours ago
    most wiki articles on current events are so politically slanted these days.

    i hope so.

    [-]
    • flippant 14 hours ago
      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 7 hours ago
      The truth is politically slanted too, according to some.