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Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English

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

#31

Post by Polylactic_acid »

segfaultbuserr wrote: post #17
RivieraKid wrote: post #15

It's easy to forget how amazing Wikipedia is because people are so used to it. It's also an anomaly in todays internet landscape - no ads, popups or auto-play videos. I think it's literally the best website in existence. If you suggested 20 years ago that there will soon exist a free online encyclopedia, which has two orders of magnitude more words than Britannica, is updated daily and is mostly unbiased - they would…

> no ads, popups or auto-play videos. Also, there are no 100 JavaScript tracking scripts on Wikipedia, and it's probably one of the fastest sites among the top-100 websites in the world.

Most websites start out like wikipedia and then they feel the constant pressure to expand and now they have a mountain of expenses to cover so they tarnish the website in an effort to squeeze every last $ out of the user. I like how wikipedia has stuck to its original goal and kept a lean budget while delivering one of the most used websites on the internet.

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

#32

Post by benrbray »

jessriedel wrote: post #24
mactrey wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As an English Wikipedia user, one obvious gap I've noticed is the lack of detailed information about the geography and history of countries where English is not natively spoken.

I can only imagine that as time goes on, more of these details will be filled in!

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

#33

Post by wutbrodo »

benrbray wrote: post #30
Analemma_ wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

It's also good anthropologically, for at least some segment of the population. I've found the zeitgeist of Reddit comments on (eg) political topics to pretty consistently predict shifts in broader political culture.

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

#36

Post by Liquix »

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…

Wikipedia is AWESOME and I admire your selflessness & generosity in donating to a cause :)

However, before giving them any more money I would recommend reading through the (Wikipedia-hosted, ironically) article titled "Wikipedia has Cancer". The revenue vs. employee count/operating costs ratio is way off. Like, orders of magnitude off.

It's a tough pill to swallow considering how useful the site is and their respectable "information should be free for all" mission.

Again, your generosity is admired and there are far worse causes to donate towards. Just want to make sure people see both sides of the coin before spending hard earned cash!

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

#37

Post by O1111OOO »

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #28
c3534l wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

There was Google's attempt in 2007 wih knol(0) - which many called an attempt at a Wikipedia killer. Agreed... We dodged a bullet.

Authors could also choose to include ads from Google's AdSense on their pages ... All contributors to the Knol project had to sign in with a Google account ... authors were also able to choose the CC-BY-NC-3.0 license (which prohibits commercial reuse) or traditional copyright protection instead.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knol

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

#38

Post by undershirt »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #7
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…

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

Try using Wikipedia through Mac's Dictionary app. I never touch my browser for that anymore.

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

#39

Post by humble_engineer »

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…

After doing this i can see why they have 6 million articles, here's one:

Michael Leedham (born 22 February 1950) is an Australian former cricketer. He played three first-class matches for Tasmania between 1973 and 1982.

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

#40

Post by fhoffa »

6 million pages! A quick look at their distribution:

3.6M of these pages got less than 10 views during December. 4.3M pages got less than 100 views each. 2.3M got less than 1000 views. That's the long tail. On the other side 680K pages got more than 1,000 views, 111K pages got more than 10k views, only 6k pages got more than 100k views, and 90 pages were able to gather more than 1M views (Star Wars, The Mandalorian, The Witcher...).

In summary: The top 7.2% of Wikipedia pages earn 87% of all the monthly views.

Yesterday I posted a deeper analysis on how these pages get their daily views:

- https://towardsdatascience.com/interactive-the-top-2019-wiki...

Apparently the most popular pages are all related to movies (Avengers, Joker, ...), series (Ted Bundy, Chernobyl, Game of Thrones), and deaths.

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