[painful]

This seems like a narrowly thought out proposal. Contrary to what Wikimedia may think and see today, Wikipedia is not the future. The future is something closer to robotopedia or machinepedia or autowikipedia, if you get what I'm saying. The name Wikimedia is fine.

I have seen the future, and there is no place for human writers in it.

[untog]

> The future is something closer to robotopedia or machinepedia, if you get what I'm saying

Can't disagree with that enough. Wikipedia owes its incredible quality to the human editors doing thankless work behind the scenes. A machine-driven alternative would be awful.

[CM30]

See Cpedia, Cuil's hilariously awful attempt at building just that.

https://marco.org/2010/04/12/the-mechanized-madness-of-cuils...

[vokep]

As long as machine writing is below human level quality, yes.

But that won't be the case for too many more years.

[untog]

I'm not convinced of that. It feels very much like self driving cars: people look back 5 years, see X amount of progress, and assume that at least X amount more will be done 5 years from now. Reality rarely tracks that way.

[MrLeap]

He's probably right about nlp robot garbage being the future. Same as how we don't build pyramids anymore. Brick buildings have given way to toothpicks and foam. Quality seems to decay when the tide of novelty recedes. Robo-wikipedia probably costs 1/10000th the price get content quality about 60% as good.

People will try to sell people on burning the modern library of Alexandria yet again. Good thing we can backup offline copies! I've been in the woods for the last few months and offline simple english wikipedia has been awesome. Some of the articles on more serious subjects are comedy gold mines in simple english.

[QuercusMax]

I feel like every phone should include an offline copy of wikipedia. That way if you're off the grid for a long time (or the grid goes down) your device isn't totally useless.

Or for that case when you get transported back in time...

[chrisseaton]

‘Wiki’ doesn’t mean person - it means quick. An automatic authoring system would be even more ‘wiki’ than before.

[svachalek]

What is the future where there is no need for human writers, but that still has human readers? A world where we all happily accept The Truth from machines is hard to envision, and not going to happen while this generation still lives.

[pastor_elm]

i think you meant to say facebookpedia or googlepedia