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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

#41

Post by mactrey »

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…

Wikipedia's rules on notability and article length prevent it from growing infinitely (in theory). So my point is exactly that - all that "low-hanging fruit" is mostly gone, and most of the actual writing work that's left is either writing a new article on a subject that is at the margin of notability, which one would expect the average adult to have less interest in than writing a new article on a truly notable subject, or rewriting a section of an existing more notable article which tends to annoy whichever editor last edited it.

But you make a good point that the maintenance work probably grows linearly with the size of the corpus, so really the flat number of active editors shows that the number of editors actively engaged in the research and writing of entries has probably actually declined significantly since 2007.

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

#42

Post by scarejunba »

Wikipedia is great. Every time I create an article, it ends up being tended to by a bunch of gardener bots who fix up all the markup and make it look nice and put an infobox in, and then other people add a little and so on and it just gets better. Honestly, pretty astounding.

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

#43

Post by Polylactic_acid »

O1111OOO wrote: post #37
Polylactic_acid wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the most fascinating thing is the bit about how people criticized google for placing knol results in more accessible spots on google search and the conflict of interest. This is exactly the same debate we are having over a decade later about AMP.

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

#44

Post by kick »

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…

There are two candidates for "best website in existence," both were made by people born in countries that spawned from the dissolution of the USSR, and one starts with "sci-" while the other starts with "Lib." One ends with "hub" while the other ends with "Gen."

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

#45

Post by antsoul »

Don't forget to thank the WikiGnomes for their work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ser_Amantio_di_Nicolao

"What is your favorite good article that you contributed significantly to, or assisted significantly in it obtaining good status?" Ser Amantio di Nicolao : I have not worked on any good articles.

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

#46

Post by majos »

Liquix wrote: post #36
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 respecta…

I remember this essay, the author’s main argument was: Wikipedia seemed fine 10 years ago with 5% of its current money, so the increased spending (and calls for donations to cover it) seems unjustified.

I side with the author in requesting more transparency about what exactly donations get spent on, but this strict argument in terms of how spending growth just “looks” unreasonable isn’t convincing. Namely, it’s pretty plausible to me that scaling big to very big is more costly than scaling medium to big, so this comparison of increasing costs to cancer makes me skeptical.

I don’t have any proof that Wikipedia uses donations judiciously, but the scale and quality of the service they offer relative to the annual revenue (about 100m) and expenses (about 80m) seems...pretty good.

At any rate, I mostly view this as “paying a little for a good service” rather than “donating efficiently”.

But thanks for the pointer.

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

#47

Post by commoner »

mactrey wrote: post #41
jessriedel wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wikipedia's rules on notability and article length prevent it from growing infinitely (in theory). So my point is exactly that - all that "low-hanging fruit" is mostly gone, and most of the actual writing work that's left is either writing a new article on a subject that is at the margin of notability, which one would expect the average adult to have less interest in than writing a new article on a truly notable subj…

> Wikipedia's rules on notability and article length prevent it from growing infinitely (in theory).

That doesn't appear to be true. New people are born, new events occur, new things are discovered, and new entertainment is released every day, all of which increase the pool of eligible topics on Wikipedia. As long as history continues to be made, new articles will continue to be written.

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

#48

Post by Nition »

harshreality wrote: post #29
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 r…

The ability to search these sites directly is also built in to most browsers. No need to send your query through any search engine.

Firefox setup:

- Go to the page with the search you want, e.g. wikipedia.com

- Right-click the search box

- "Add a Keyword for this search"

- Type your "keyword" e.g. w

Now any time you want to search wikipedia, go to the URL bar and type w plus a space first, then your search term.

Chrome setup:

I haven't used Chrome for a while but it also has this feature. You add "keywords" for your site searches somewhere in the settings instead of via right-clicking the search box, but the usage once it's set up is the same.

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

#49

Post by tito »

Just 6,000,000 topics of interest to cover all of history. That's about 1 per 1,000 people on the planet.

There are 5.6 million small businesses in the United States alone. [1]

Imagine a Wikipedia that had more like 6 trillion articles. I'm enamored with a startup named Golden (https://golden.com) which aims to do just that.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/257521/number-of-small-b...

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

#50

Post by hncensorsnonpc »

Wikipedia also is dominated by a elite class of early contributors, PC censorship people or people working directly for the cooperation or on their behalf. There are many accounts with more edits a day the humanly possible or 356 days of the year or article edits from IPs directly from government agencies whitewashing ... they do not even try or know how to hide it. When it comes to info outside of like nature science then wiki is NOT a re

liable and unbiased source at all.

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