That is a nice start, a rendering of GIS wikidata. Perhaps ask Wikimedia Foundation for funding :)
What I'd like to see is a more intimate marrying of OSM data and Wikipedia data. For example, if I go to zoom level 12 centred on London, UK on your page, there are about 80 text labels on the OSM layer itself. At minimum this is going to need OSM vector tiles. I'd expect to be able to click any of the OSM labels for the corresponding Wikipedia article, as well as adding in POIs for articles that don't have corresponding OSM links. And then you need OSM rendering style rules about which POIs you show at each zoom level, based on whether labels will run into each other or not.
The problem right now is that the WikiMiniAtlas treats all things, whether large areas or individual POIs, as POIs.
I wonder whether the emergence of a single, true Wikipedia competitor would actually put an end to this never-ending fundraising criticism (since people could simply donate to the competitor as a form of protest)
Projects like Wikipedia never have meaningful competition, because the social dynamics invariably converge to a single platform eating everything else.
Wikipedia is already dead, they just don't know it yet. They'll get Stackoverflowed.
The LLMs have already guaranteed their zombie end. The HN crowd will be comically delusional about it right up to the point where Wikimedia struggles to keep the lights on and has to fire 90% of its staff. There is no scenario where that outcome is avoided (some prominent billionaire will step in with a check as they get really desperate, but it won't change anything fundamental, likely a Sergey Brin type figure).
The LLMs will do to Wikipedia, what Wikipedia & Co. did to the physical encyclopedia business.
You don't have to entirely wipe out Wikipedia's traffic base to collapse Wikimedia. They have no financial strength what-so-ever, they burn everything they intake. Their de facto collapse will be extremely rapid and is coming soon. Watch for the rumbles in 2026-2027.
Wikipedia is not even in the game you are describing here. Wikipedia does not need billions of users clicking on ads to convince investors in yet another seed. They are an encyclopedia, and if fewer people will visit, they will still be an encyclopedia. Their costs are probably very strongly correlated with their number of visitors.
This. I'm really bothered by the almost cruel glee with which a lot of people respond to SO's downfall. Yeah, the moderation was needlessly aggressive. But it was successful at creating a huge repository of text-based knowledge which benefited LLMs greatly. If SO is gone, where will this come from for future programming languages, libraries, and tools?
You talk about news here like it's some irrefutable ether LLMs can tap into. Also I'd think newspapers and scientific papers cover extremely little of what the average person uses an LLM to search for.
This always feels to me like, an elephant in the room.
I’d love to read a knowledgeable roundup of current thought on this. I have a hard time understanding how, with the web becoming a morass of SEO and AI slop - with really no effort being put into to keeping it accurate - we’ll be able to train LLMs to the level we do today in the future.
> "I'm just not sure there's a good solution to this."
The democratization of local journalism, where anyone can become a reporter: reporting events in the field, interviewing key people, and publishing opinions. With the internet, anyone could set up their own news outlet.
This idea is quite well-tested in my local area, where audiences directly send donation money to individual reporters who run their own sole-proprietorship news outlets.
since i actually love the act of solving real-world problems by building programs (and not the act of programming itself), writing specs and shepherding robot monkeys with typewriters is an acceptable means to an end
I think you need to manage a real (and large) network that's connected to global internet traffic in order to "play" with BGP. Well, you can tinker with it at home, but only by using a network simulator.
I worked an internship where I spent the summer setting up new equipment for a large corp that was replacing everything that AT&T had installed and managed with their own stuff. Nearly every office had their own ASN, everyone else got regular broadband or just a box of aircards depending on the number of users. I knew nothing about networks other than setting up my own consumer router at home so it was a pretty fun learning experience. I always got a smile on my face when I finally got vRouter to peer with our dummy AS in the office then we'd pack it all up and bring it out for installation over the weekend. I got offered a job to come back after I graduated but turned it down for something that paid better and was a lot more interesting. Honestly, I probably would be making more money as a network engineer now if I stuck with it.
You can set up local BGP routers and peer them and play with it.
Another fun thing is to log into publicly available looking glass servers. Most ISPs (including very, very, very large ones) operate routers that have their full view of the BGP routing tables. They either run web interfaces that let you query those tables (more common) or make public ssh or telnet credentials to log in with roles that have very limited access to the available commands, but have read rights to those tables.
I've used BGP internally at my company for a decade, using AS65xxx range. At home I use BGP between the house, garage and shed, I much prefer it to OSPF.
Same! At previous company I worked at we used BGP for all internal/external routing about 15 years ago despite all the poo-pooing by using BGP as an IGP. It was nice having no route redistribution and one command to monitor sessions.
Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) is an "internal" routing protocol. Basically, it is a protocol for routers to share routes when all routers are managed by the same organization.
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) has the primary purpose of sharing routes between routers managed by different organizations. It can be used within an organization too. It has a lot more control over how and which routes it sends and receives.
Depends how much you want to know about how networks work. Never ceases to amaze me how ignorant modern software developers are of the underlying technology, I guess that's because I'm from the pre-2010s when "Information Technology" was a general field.
I took some comp-sci and majored in "IT" in the 2000s. Lower level CS did not go over routing protocols, and the IT side never got into compilation, linking, state machines, or pointers.
In the 2000 my team had to deal with everything from compilation problems to hardware answering arp answers with fake mac addresses. The team consisted of a wide range of skills and abilities and information obviously leaks. While the DBA didn't need to know anything about OSPF, just by being in the same team as the network person they pick up how things work.
Now it seems that teams seem to be far more specialised and there's less cross-specialist learning.
I have trained people on network technologies, including the younger generation. It never ceases to amaze me how much they can get done without a clue about the underlying technologies. Sometimes it feels like they have some super power, because I can't operate without that knowledge.
You don’t need a large network to participate to BGP. You just need a /24 (IPv4) or /48 (IPv6) allocation, AS number, and a business class Internet connection that can do BGP. Might be out of reach for most hobbyists but not impossible.
One of the biggest caveats of citizen participation programs like this is that, surprisingly, there's a subset of people who don't want to participate in the hassle and simply want to be served quickly. It really depends on how the majority of people in a specific area think about civic participation.
People have lots of things to do in their life. That 10 minutes to use the app is 10 minutes I can't spend on my wood carving (random made up hobby). This is why I'm against these programs - statisticians know lots of better ways to get data that is less biased to people who feel like making the time to submit information. (Statisticians can also tell you what biases they were unable to account for so you can make decisions on if you need to collect more data).
I thought "Personal Interlude: Lessons From My Quant Trenches" was just another business book title ready to be criticized. I wondered why the formatting was different on this one, then I slowly realized it wasn’t a business book title at all.
Sometimes, good writing is like an NP-complete problem, hard to create, but easy to verify. If you have enough skill to distinguish good output from garbage, you can produce reasonably good results.
> Sometimes, good writing is like an NP-complete problem, hard to create, but easy to verify.
Doesn’t this match pretty much all human creation? It’s easier to judge a book that to write it, it’s easier to watch a rocket going up in the space than to build it, it’s easier to appreciate some Renaissance painting or sculpture than to actually make it.
[1] : https://wd-nearbyitem.toolforge.org/
[2] : https://rtnf.substack.com/p/wd-nearbyitem
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