[kleiba]

I disagree, lots of volunteers have provided tons of high quality information since the inception of the web. Wikipedia is written entirely by people that didn't get any compensation for it. People answer questions on forums for free.

Likewise, a lot of content produced with commercial interest in mind is total garbage (this is e.g. where the term "click-bait" originates from).

There's always quality stuff and crap, no matter whether it's been produced for free or not.

[_Algernon_]

Wikipedia continued existence is not dependent on ads or clicks.

[api]

No it’s dependent on donations, either monetary or content. It’s not really free. It has an economic model. You can get away with one that minimal for Wikipedia because serving mostly static content is incredibly cheap.

Wikipedia can also only work because the upstream scientific and academic work to produce what gets posted there is largely subsidized. Wikipedia posters and maintainers do not have to pay the true cost of the content they are posting and very little of it is original.

This model won’t work for, say, journalism, which is very expensive. It won’t work for difficult polished software products. It won’t work for truly original artistic or literary work which takes tremendous amounts of time to produce. If, for example, authors can’t charge for a novel, then only people with trust funds or who are independently wealthy can afford to invest the time it takes to write a book.

The people pointing out how bad ad supported content is are proving my point, which was that there must be some kind of economic model. If there is no working one, content producers default to ads which leads to enshittification.

[quectophoton]

You just made me imagine if Wikipedia had titles like "Is the Heliocentric model wrong?" or "The third planet of the Solar System has a generic name! Learn everything about it", and half of it behind a paywall.

Or worse, if its content were distributed in short videos: "What to know what's that giant fire ball on the sky? Watch until the end!", with a like-and-subscribe animation covering the bottom 20% of the video every 5 seconds.

[kleiba]

10 shocking secrets about the solar system!

[balder1991]

“the last one will turn your brain upside down”