An electric cloud with quantum effects that we also don’t fully understand. There will always be a layer deeper that we just do not know the effects of or what actually exists there or “under there”.
Why would people who haven't contributed up to this point to Wikipedia contribute now? To save Wikipedia? People don't contribute because most users of volunteer/distributed media are leechers, not seeders. People view no value in contribution and even mock volunteers.
Yes, they literally put up banners that take half of your screen asking for random people to "contribute" all the time. They'll just swap out the money banner to an editors banner and change the color to blue or something.
Edit: They literally have this, the color is even blue. I was truly guessing, but it is a thing:
"There are no small contributions: every edit counts, every donation counts. Thank you."
If it were that easy to recruit new dedicated volunteers who would contribute a non-trivial amount of constructive work and stick with it over time, I'd be delighted and relieved, but it's not. Contributing to Wikipedia, at the level of many of the contributors who signed the petition, requires a lot of patience, enthusiasm, and time, and it requires building quite a lot of specialized skill. If you're doing it right, you get really quite good at a certain kind of research, writing, and reasoning. I've been an editor for 25 years, with 12k edits, and have not yet written an article that qualifies as a "featured article" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Featured_articles) - it's super tough!
But money contributions have no commitment, being a regular editor does. The editors striking here aren't doing trivial edits, and if they are then they are doing it in a large volume.
Wikipedia depends on people doing repetitive and semi-thankless work, such as vandalism patrolling. If no one patrols edits, then the entire wiki devolves into vandalism, edit battles and slop.
I think we are stuck with LLMs. They are already in a place where they can find these issues in the first place. They can access RSS feeds. You could cron an agent to look to see if you are pwned as frequently as you want at literally almost zero cost. When you do ingest the libraries, keep a list and of what version and that can help as well.
It’s all about tooling, if the ai can fetch data it can do something rad with it. Use something like an ai harness to have an mcp server and other tooling to improve the harness and the tools I made this for my own learning: GitHub.com/ralabarge/beigebox
Check out github.com/ralabarge/beigebox -- OSS AI Harness, started as a way to save all of my data but has agentic features, MCP server, point it at any endpoint (or use any front end with it as well, transparent middleware)
So far what I am finding is that you just get the basics working and then use the tool and inference to improve the tool.
That's what I've been heads down, HUNGRY, working on, looking for investors and founding engineers pst: https://heymanniceidea.com (disclaimer: I am not associated with heymanniceidea.com)
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