Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 193 posts

Re: Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English

#21

Post by lakkal »

majos wrote: post #13

I’m a big fan of Wikipedia. It’s not perfect, and plenty of pages are outright bad, but repeatedly clicking “random page” [1] is a great source of entertainment to me. There’s so much info out there, yet I reliably get something surprising, interesting, or funny within maybe 10 random pages. And because it’s random, I learn things way outside my normal interests. Try it if you find yourself mindlessly scrolling! It’s…

I used to do that sometimes myself (and have also donated)!.

One thing that always seemed strange was how often the random page would be for a soccer/football team or player, or for a random town in Poland.

Re: Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English

#22

Post by c3534l »

preommr wrote: post #19

Wikipedia is the most incredible creation in modern times. Because it's not about some law of the universe that people have learned enough about to use to their advantage like electricity or nuclear physics. It's something inherent to us as a species that we came together to create a resource for everyone to access and that it has such a high level of quality. The culture around Wikipedia - the culmination of knowled…

I, like almost every person at the time, heard about wikipedia and scoffed at it. And, in the early days,the quality was atrocious and the scope seemingly insurmountable. But wikipedia almost ever gets better, not worse, and the limitation that the books have to sit on a shelf makes wikipedia far more than an encyclopedia. It has evolved, through time, to be something few people ever imagined it could be.

Re: Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English

#24

Post by jessriedel »

mactrey wrote: post #11
jessriedel wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks stable?

It's impressive that it's stable considering there's probably a lot less to do on Wikipedia today than there was in 2007.

In what sense is there a certain "amount of work to do" defined independently of the number of volunteers and their interests?

The only thing I can think of is that as the wiki grows in size, the amount of work that needs to be done to maintain fixed quality (combating vandalism, counteracting normal decay, fixing link rot) goes up roughly proportional to the number and length of articles.

I guess you mean something like "Wikipedia ought to have an article on X, and didn't in 2007 but does in 2020". That certainly tracks the fact that there was more low-hanging fruit in 2007, but I don't think writing that article means there's any less work for a fixed number of editors to do. The amount of work left to do -- between here and a complete encyclopedia of all human knowledge -- is damn near infinite, and is limited mostly by editor interest.

Re: Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English

#25

Post by commoner »

jacobajit wrote: post #10
IIAOPSW wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not skip the middleman and go directly to wikipedia or reddit?

Reddit/Wikipedia search are an order of magnitude worse than Google

Wikipedia search works well for me. The site search is exhaustive, returning every single page matching the query. For topics in the news recently, all changes are propagated to Wikipedia's search index immediately, while Google takes longer to recognize changes.

Re: Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English

#26

Post by jolmg »

jacobajit wrote: post #10
IIAOPSW wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not skip the middleman and go directly to wikipedia or reddit?

Reddit/Wikipedia search are an order of magnitude worse than Google

I don't know about Reddit, but for Wikipedia I just write a guess for the title of the article I'm looking for, and if I'm not redirected to the proper title of the article, then I'm normally sent to a disambiguation page. I've never found myself in need of something like Google for Wikipedia.

Re: Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English

#27

Post by ceres »

Analemma_ wrote: post #14
brenden2 wrote: post #3

Wikipedia is an incredible achievement. It's one of the only information sources I find to be consistently useful across a broad range of topics. It's also one of the only remaining sources I feel to be mostly trustworthy. These days I append either "wikipedia" or "reddit" to most of my Google searches in order to get useful information. There's so much SEO'd garbage out there, but Wikipedia remains a breath of fresh…

If you're worried about SEO and manipulation, Wikipedia is decent but Reddit is awful. It's pretty well-established by now that astroturfing and influence campaigns are rampant on Reddit, and in some particularly bad cases like /r/worldnews have taken over subreddits completely.

Yeah but it depends on the subreddit though. For some things I'd rather have multiple opinions than that of one blogger.

Re: Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English

#28

Post by Polylactic_acid »

c3534l wrote: post #22
preommr wrote: post #19

Wikipedia is the most incredible creation in modern times. Because it's not about some law of the universe that people have learned enough about to use to their advantage like electricity or nuclear physics. It's something inherent to us as a species that we came together to create a resource for everyone to access and that it has such a high level of quality. The culture around Wikipedia - the culmination of knowled…

I, like almost every person at the time, heard about wikipedia and scoffed at it. And, in the early days,the quality was atrocious and the scope seemingly insurmountable. But wikipedia almost ever gets better, not worse, and the limitation that the books have to sit on a shelf makes wikipedia far more than an encyclopedia. It has evolved, through time, to be something few people ever imagined it could be.

People tend to be super critical of wikipedia but I think it could have been a whole lot worse. We are incredibly lucky that wikipedia isn't owned by some tech megacorp, it isn't loaded with spyware JS bogging it down, and it doesn't require an account to use.

Re: Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English

#29

Post by harshreality »

brenden2 wrote: post #3

Wikipedia is an incredible achievement. It's one of the only information sources I find to be consistently useful across a broad range of topics. It's also one of the only remaining sources I feel to be mostly trustworthy. These days I append either "wikipedia" or "reddit" to most of my Google searches in order to get useful information. There's so much SEO'd garbage out there, but Wikipedia remains a breath of fresh…

You could switch to duckduckgo and use the ! codes; !r and !w search directly on reddit and wikipedia.

In cases where you aren't searching directly on one of the supported sites, and would prefer google's algorithms instead of ddg's (or reddit's), all you have to do is add !g. It's a lot easier than trying to get google to do direct searches (using site:) or search on ddg (I don't think google has any shortcuts for redirecting to search on another search engine).

Re: Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English

#30

Post by benrbray »

Analemma_ wrote: post #14
brenden2 wrote: post #3

Wikipedia is an incredible achievement. It's one of the only information sources I find to be consistently useful across a broad range of topics. It's also one of the only remaining sources I feel to be mostly trustworthy. These days I append either "wikipedia" or "reddit" to most of my Google searches in order to get useful information. There's so much SEO'd garbage out there, but Wikipedia remains a breath of fresh…

If you're worried about SEO and manipulation, Wikipedia is decent but Reddit is awful. It's pretty well-established by now that astroturfing and influence campaigns are rampant on Reddit, and in some particularly bad cases like /r/worldnews have taken over subreddits completely.

I wouldn't use reddit to find credible info about world events or trending topics.

However, it's an excellent source for finding information about hobbies and niche topics. The culinary subreddits have great recipe advice and I'll often go there to find best practices for food safety or unfamiliar techniques. Appending "reddit" to the end of my search means I don't have to sift through hundreds of SEO'd blog posts with questionable advice! For the time being, people don't SEO their reddit comments.

Now that I think of it, I actually do this quite often--Google really isn't what it used to be.

Post reply on HN