经济学人：人类再也不会创造出像喂鸡百科这样的项目了

klwo2

这文章写得一般，转载的主要原因是告诉大伙，现在主流英语媒体也在说喂鸡百科质量下滑啦。赶紧下几个旧版本的喂鸡百科本地存着吧，以前推荐过了。

6 k" J& t, T0 n8 K) ]双语译文是DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017生成的，我大概看了一下，译文毛病怎么这么多啊？我把碍眼的大毛病用红字标出来了（小毛病更多就不管了），请大家以英语原文为准。
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4 {5 v2 s4 q5 V0 j. i' jhttps://www.economist.com/cultur ... uite-like-wikipedia
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Humans will never again create a project quite like Wikipedia
! f! F, K7 w4 L人类再也不会创造出像喂鸡百科这样的项目了

* n2 S: a/ U, \1 S3 o! xAs it turns 25, one of the internet’s unlikeliest successes faces grave new threats
$ y5 Z5 D- W% L$ |2 [' J( n在迎来 25 周年之际，互联网上最出人意料的成功之一正面临严重的新威胁

( @( L4 ?& D* q% }Written on nearly 23,000 rolls of manuscript, the Yongle encyclopedia, commissioned by a Ming emperor in the 15th century, was the largest reference work in history. It held that title for around 600 years—until Wikipedia, a startup run out of a chaotic office in Florida, overtook it after just six years in business. Today the collaborative online encyclopedia runs to 30bn words in more than 300 languages. Its Latin edition alone has more articles than the “Encyclopedia Britannica”.
2 F+ B( ?! [: p) B+ m这部写在近 2.3 万卷手稿上的《永乐大典》，由一位明朝皇帝在 15 世纪下令编纂，是历史上最大的参考著作。它保持了这一头衔约 600 年——直到喂鸡百科，一家在佛罗里达州一间乱糟糟的办公室里运营的初创公司，仅运营六年后就超过了它。如今，这部协作式在线百科全书的篇幅已达 300 亿词，涵盖 300 多种语言。仅其拉丁语版本的文章数量就超过《大英百科全书》。
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! Z4 E; q+ e3 T4 e1 Q' `3 Q+ L3 ^As Wikipedia celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, it faces big problems. It is shedding both readers and volunteer editors. It is at the centre of an escalating culture war. And AI poses an existential threat. As Richard Cooke, an Australian journalist, observes in a thought-provoking new book, Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia ever written by humans—and it is likely to hold that title for ever. (Any future rival is sure to be made with the help of AI.)
今年，喂鸡百科在庆祝其 25 周年之际，也面临着重大问题。它正在流失读者和志愿编辑。它处于一场不断升级的文化战争的中心。而 AI 构成了生存威胁。正如澳大利亚记者 Richard Cooke 在一本发人深省的新书中所观察到的，喂鸡百科是人类有史以来编写的最大的百科全书——而且它很可能永远保持这一头衔。（未来任何竞争对手都肯定会在 AI 的帮助下打造。）
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As the world’s go-to crowd-written reference source, Wikipedia serves as both an oracle and a mirror. Its story can be traced back to a childhood purchase. When Jimmy Wales was three years old his mother bought a copy of the “World Book Encyclopedia”, which the family updated each year using stickers sent by post. Decades later, Mr Wales was casting around for business ideas. An online encyclopedia never need go out of date, he reasoned. So with a colleague, Larry Sanger, he founded Nupedia in 2000. Its seven-step process of editing and fact-checking meant that after five months it had approved a single article (on “atonality” in music). So to speed things up, they changed tack, launching a crowd-sourced encyclopedia in 2001.
& k) Z: V# c" D作为全世界首选的众包参考来源，喂鸡百科既是一尊神谕，也是一面镜子。它的故事可以追溯到一次童年购物。吉米·威尔士三岁时，母亲买了一本《世界图书百科全书》，此后家里每年都用邮寄来的贴纸把它更新。几十年后，威尔士先生四处寻找创业点子。他推断，在线百科全书永远不必担心过时。于是，他与同事拉里·桑格在 2000 年创办了 Nupedia。其七步编辑和事实核查流程意味着，五个月后它只通过了一篇文章（关于音乐中的“无调性”）。因此，为了加快速度，他们改变策略，在 2001 年推出了一部众包百科全书。

Wikipedia was dreadful—and this was the secret of its rapid early growth. “The average person seeing the young Wikipedia for the first time thought they could do better,” Mr Cooke writes. Later that year the site came into its own, as more than 100 articles about the September 11th terrorist attacks were added in less than a month.
$ |  ?  A. L  m喂鸡百科起初糟糕透顶——而这正是它早期迅速增长的秘密。“普通人第一次看到刚起步的喂鸡百科时，会觉得自己能做得更好，”库克先生写道。那年晚些时候，随着不到一个月内新增了 100 多篇关于 9·11 恐怖袭击的文章，这个网站真正崭露头角。
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Seeing its commercial potential, its bosses considered selling ads. Yet after defections from volunteer editors who didn’t want to work for “WikiPAIDia”, they backed down and ran it as a non-profit. Mr Wales has called it “either the smartest or the dumbest thing that I ever did”: he has not made much money out of the phenomenon he co-founded.
看到它的商业潜力，其老板们考虑过卖广告。然而，在那些不愿为“WikiPAIDia”工作的志愿编辑纷纷离开之后，他们退让了，将其作为非营利机构运营。威尔士先生称这是“我做过的最聪明或最愚蠢的事”：他并没有从自己共同创立的这一现象中赚到多少钱。
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Mr Cooke’s book is an enjoyable rabbit hole of information, rather like its subject. It paints an affectionate portrait of the many oddballs and misfits who have made the site what it is. The second-largest language on Wikipedia is Cebuano, a minority tongue of the Philippines, which has 6m articles—mostly about insects—that have been uploaded by a bot made by a Swede who married a Filipina. A user called Giraffedata cannot bear the phrase “comprised of”, and has spent 15 years removing tens of thousands of occurrences. No one will be surprised to learn that most Wikipedia editors are men.
" B( C8 _! J  @$ Z$ s' e库克先生的书就像它的主题一样，是个让人乐在其中的信息兔子洞。它充满感情地描绘了众多让这个网站成为今天模样的怪咖和不合群者。喂鸡百科上条目数量第二大的语言是宿务语，这是菲律宾的一种少数族群语言，共有 600 万篇条目——大多关于昆虫——由一个娶了菲律宾妻子的瑞典人制作的机器人上传。一位名叫 Giraffedata 的用户受不了“comprised of”这个说法，花了 15 年删掉数万处。得知大多数喂鸡百科编辑都是男性，没人会感到意外。

9 ]1 O# p: V0 ~2 k9 z: |- JThe make-up of Wikipedia editors is reflected in the site’s content. Its article about Scrappy Doo, a cartoon character, was at one stage 2,000 words longer than the one for Poland. And although editors wear their national dress on the first day of the annual Wikimania conference, in a multinational display of diversity, they are not an especially diverse bunch. For Wikipedia’s first ten years, half of all edits came from five countries; there were more editors in the Netherlands than in Africa.
喂鸡百科编辑的构成也反映在网站内容上。它关于卡通角色 Scrappy Doo 的条目，一度比关于波兰的条目长了 2000 词。尽管在一年一度 Wikimania 会议的第一天，编辑们会穿上各自的民族服装，以跨国展示多样性，但他们并不是特别多元的一群人。在喂鸡百科的头十年里，所有编辑中有一半来自五个国家；荷兰的编辑人数比非洲还多。

. E2 j& A0 \# Y* G7 YBut now Wikipedia faces even bigger challenges. One is the febrile political climate. Certain topics have always provoked “edit wars”: the most contested pages include Israel, Jesus and Donald Trump. There have long been problem contributors (the Church of Scientology was the first organisation to be banned from editing Wikipedia, in 2009). But recent arguments about misinformation and censorship have been harder to deal with. Mr Sanger, whose relationship with Mr Wales soured, has denounced Wikipedia’s “globalist, academic, secular and progressive” bias. Last year Elon Musk, a former fan of the site, announced Grokipedia, an alternative to what he called “Wokepedia”.
但如今喂鸡百科面临更大的挑战。其一是躁动的政治气候。某些话题一直会引发“编辑战”：争议最大的页面包括以色列、耶稣和唐纳德·特朗普。长期以来也一直存在有问题的贡献者（2009 年，山达基教会成为第一个被禁止编辑喂鸡百科的组织）。但近来围绕虚假信息和审查的争论更难处理。桑格先生与威尔士先生的关系已经恶化，他谴责喂鸡百科带有“全球主义、学术、世俗和进步主义”偏见。去年，曾是该网站粉丝的埃隆·马斯克宣布推出 Grokipedia，作为他所谓的“Wokepedia”（觉醒百科）的替代品。

The charged political atmosphere has exacerbated a second problem: a lack of editors. Early Wikipedia welcomed newbie contributors. But after some sticky cases of defamation, it tightened up its rules, particularly regarding articles about living people. Since 2017 new editors have been banned from creating fresh entries. Trigger-happy editors even deleted an entry by Mr Wales—on Mzoli’s Meat, a South African barbecue restaurant—for failing the notability test. As Mr Cooke puts it, anyone can edit Wikipedia in the same way that anyone can, in theory, represent themselves in court. For amateurs it can be a complex, hostile experience. The number of active editors in English has fallen by a third since its peak in 2007.
紧张的政治氛围加剧了第二个问题：编辑短缺。早期的喂鸡百科欢迎新手贡献者。但在发生了几起棘手的诽谤案例后，它收紧了规则，尤其是关于在世人物条目的规则。自 2017 年以来，新编辑被禁止创建新条目。动不动就下手的编辑甚至删除了威尔士先生写的一篇条目——关于南非烧烤餐厅 Mzoli’s Meat——理由是未通过关注度测试。正如库克先生所说，任何人都可以编辑喂鸡百科，就像理论上任何人都可以在法庭上为自己辩护一样。对业余者来说，这可能是一种复杂且充满敌意的体验。英语喂鸡百科的活跃编辑人数自 2007 年达到峰值以来已下降三分之一。
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/ _( b9 G) R/ D0 RThe third, most ominous threat is AI. Wikipedia played a crucial role in training large language models (LLMs) with its vast, free, multilingual dataset. It is probably “the single most important training corpus in the history of artificial intelligence”, writes Mr Cooke. This has had the side-effect of immortalising the site’s many errors and hoaxes. Ask ChatGPT who invented the electric toaster, and it may still tell you it was Alan MacMasters, a Scottish prankster who once credited himself as its inventor on Wikipedia as a joke.
; [% J) k) U6 v) g6 C( B9 `第三个、也是最不祥的威胁是 AI。喂鸡百科凭借其庞大、免费、多语言的数据集，在训练大型语言模型（LLMs）方面发挥了关键作用。库克先生写道，它可能是“人工智能历史上最重要的单一训练语料库”。这带来一个副作用：该网站上的许多错误和恶作剧被永久保留了下来。问 ChatGPT 是谁发明了电烤面包机，它可能仍会告诉你是艾伦·麦克马斯特斯——一个苏格兰恶作剧者，他曾开玩笑地在喂鸡百科上把自己列为发明者。
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AI’s absorption of Wikipedia means that more people than ever are reading its content. Yet it also means that fewer people are visiting the site itself. When a Wikipedia link is suggested by a search engine, nearly a tenth of users click through. When Wikipedia is cited by an LLM, the clickthrough rate is only 0.33% (and not all credit their sources). Since 2022 Wikipedia has lost almost a quarter of its readership—and with it, opportunities to solicit donations and recruit new editors. Wikipedians are “a smaller club working harder to maintain something fewer people see”, laments one longtime contributor.
  a% j* A3 }1 |/ |' jAI 对喂鸡百科的吸收意味着，比以往任何时候都有更多的人在阅读其内容。然而，这也意味着访问该网站本身的人更少了。当搜索引擎推荐一个喂鸡百科链接时，近十分之一的用户会点击进入。当喂鸡百科被 LLM 引用时，点击率只有 0.33%（而且并非所有 LLM 都会注明来源）。自 2022 年以来，喂鸡百科失去了近四分之一的读者——随之失去的还有募集捐款和招募新编辑的机会。一位长期贡献者感叹道，喂鸡百科人是“一个更小的俱乐部，正更努力地维护着更少人看到的东西”。

Wikipedia’s billions of words, written, edited and categorised by millions of human volunteers, helped create the conditions for AI. Now AI’s use of that material threatens to suffocate the very source that helped bring it to life.
喂鸡百科的数十亿字词语由数百万人类志愿者撰写、编辑和分类，帮助创造了 AI 的条件。如今，AI 对这些材料的使用，有可能扼杀那个曾帮助它诞生的源头本身。