Sorry but no. As profoundly unfair and undemocratic the US system is, it’s still more democratic than Russia where any serious opposition is literally murdered in broad daylight.

“The votes are for show” – do you mean to say that Trump’s victory in 2016, Biden’s in 2020 and Trump’s again in 2024 were prearranged by the central “powers that be”?

This is an important point in general. The old story of “voting with your wallet” is now more and more obviously mathematically absurd.

Fighting over Simple Article Summaries is just the latest fumble by the leadership, a sizable commitment of resources that’s tossed in the dump almost as soon as its off the press.

It wasn’t off the press, it was announced and in the works but still not close to shipping. Maybe Wikimedia could’ve talked about this great innovative project with the actual Wikipedia community before investing so much money into it.

International language support is… meh (one area where AI would be a huge benefit, as LLMs really shine in this field).

What would international language support entail? Translating articles into other languages?

To all the people downvoting the above comment, when was the last time you’ve read a WP article of 10k+ characters from top to bottom?

Article is not available without registering. As for the title, “destructive” book scanning means you cut off the binding and put the pages in a scanner which easily flips through them and takes the pictures. If you’re not scanning rare old books, this is a perfectly reasonable way to do it, because setting up a scanner for a normal book and manually turning each page to scan it takes a long time (Internet Archive has videos on how they do it, very nice and impressive, and logical since their original mission was scanning old public domain stuff, i.e. published before 1930 or so). If Anthropic will actually legally buy all those thousands upon thousands of books, that will be a pleasant precedent for an AI company.

Although I very much doubt that random uncritically gathered textual material can “teach their AI tool how to write well”. They’re still pushing for more and more training data, even though it’s clear actual advancement will have to happen (if it can happen) through more refined usage of / training on the data.

Fuck. Vimeo is used by many filmmakers and streaming services, moving all of that content elsewhere will be downright impossible to carry out completely. A lot of content will be irrecoverably lost once the company is really killed off.

Last year or so they disabled viewing other people’s profiles or even searching the website for users in the EU. I have to admit I haven’t seen any service being so actively destroyed by its owners.

Don’t spread this nonsense, please. All of Wikipedia’s content is already free, stays free and is still in the same place as ever. What has been sold to AI companies, that have already been scraping and using the site for years for free, is API access to WP’s material, suited to AI companies’ needs and hopefully less of a burden on WP’s normal infrastructure.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/wikipedia-will-share-content-with-ai-firms-in-new-licensing-deals/

The deals mean that most major AI developers have now signed on to the foundation’s Wikimedia Enterprise program, a commercial subsidiary that sells high-speed API access to Wikipedia’s 65 million articles at higher speeds and volumes than the free public APIs provide. Wikipedia’s content remains freely available under a Creative Commons license, but the Enterprise program charges for faster, higher-volume access to the data.

That’s honestly enraging!? Such data can be greatly valuable for learners, and the native speakers’ community, and linguistics.