And I guess that's surfacing something important about both cases -- and a chance to overextend my metaphor. Pulling out of a death spiral in a video game requires a lot of knowledge of the game, and a certain willingness to take risks. You have to sometimes send an expeditionary force through the mountains to find a uranium mining site. Or you put all your barley resources into building a war blimp. If you don't know these long-shot options are possible, you won't try them, and you'll fail.
@evan agree on both. People vote with their hearts, but what's happening is the techno-orcs have sucked the oxygen out of all the heroic old-time projects. Not an insider but I wouldn't be surprised if Wikipedia is dropping because it too is no longer needed as fig leaf. They took some risky bets (I know of abstract Wikipedia, wikibase) but they didn't flourish. Actually I can't think of any growing open project today that touches *mass* audiences. Signal with their 70 mln users comes closest.
@evan We'll still be migrating off jQuery UI at that point, so at least we'll be occupied as the walls fall.
I don't know, honestly.
My harsh assessment is that Mozilla has developed a culture of quitters -- they kill products long before they've had a chance to thrive.
Wikimedia, on the other hand, is an intrinsically conservative ecosystem. I don't know if it has the culture to try new things. They may try cutting their way to success, too, like with the shutdown of Wikinews.
https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_closes_Wikinews_after_21_years
So, here's the hard part of the poll question: *inevitable* decline. Have these two major projects reached a point where their optionality has run out, and they're going to just keep shrinking, failing to support other projects in the ecosystem, living with less and less? Losing the manganese mine, losing the barley fields, trying to stretch the last of the soup next to a cold fire as the orcs beat down the last walls of the university?
@evan No, I don't know about it. Did it make you get hopeful thoughts?
I'm not sure either of those policies is going to matter in the long run.
A lot of the commenters on this poll have noted the different approaches to LLMs by both Mozilla and Wikimedia. Mozilla has started https://mozilla.ai/ and is actively working on AI features in Firefox. Wikimedia has been less enthusiastic, and English Wikipedia banned wholesale rewrites of WP articles with AI. https://www.theverge.com/tech/901461/wikipedia-ai-generated-article-ban
Since that time, Wikimedia Foundation has made a lot of deals with big companies who reuse Wikipedia and other Wikimedia data. (As a staff member, I was part of the initial product discovery for those deals.) I don't think any of those deals has taken into account the need for editing affordances in re-use products.
I wrote about this in 2017.