Is this now a positive metric? They could have had 6 million 5 years ago if they didn't delete quite so many.
Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English
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Re: Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English
#82It is a great thing they are not racists, or loaded with fake content. Viva!
Re: Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English
#83Just 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...
I don’t think that startup will succeed to the same degree as Wikipedia. Making an successful online encyclopedia isn’t a tech problem, it’s more of a community problem. And it’s stupidly hard to maintain such a vibrant community, moreso if for-profit entities are involved. I’ve seen so many cases where the contributors leave the website due to clashes with corporate members (see StackExchange for an example) In a for-profit service where content is made by contributors without any pay, there’s an inherent power imbalance between the contributors and the platform owners, and it’s natural that tensions will arise.
Re: Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English
#84Wikipedia 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 remember telling people in 2004 or so how it would take over and people thought I was crazy. There were something like 10,000 articles then. One coworker didn't believe anyone could edit it so he edited a page for the fun of it. A few hours later someone had reverted it, which led him to believe more in it.
As they say, Wikipedia doesn't work in theory, only in practice.
As longtime GNU/Linux user then, I viewed the GPL as the foundation to it. Encyclopedias seemed a niche where a GPL-based project could thrive, like in making an operating system or web server.
Re: Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes I worry about projects about Wikipedia and the Archive. When will they run out of storage space and money? When will it become too big to handle?
That will never happen for Wikipedia. Their content is tiny in disk space and not growing very fast. They are also drowning in money, despite what their donation begging messages claim. The Internet Archive, on the other hand, is drowning in data and pinching pennies. Still, they're doing okay, and the constant decrease in per-gigabyte HDD costs are allowing them to continue for the time being. They absolutely need a…
You're saying they rely on the decreasing prices, rather than low prices? How's that?
Re: Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English
#86Wikipedia 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…
Please don't hate on my comment, all I can do is ask not to be downvoted, at least I tried. Here is my case against Wikipedia. In a capitalistic model it makes little sense why Wikipedia should thrive without enriching someone so massively in the process, therefore, it must be corrected. If we assume that line of thinking is valid (which I'm not saying we should or shouldn't) then it follows that an alternative Wikip…
> In a capitalistic model it makes little sense why Wikipedia should thrive without enriching someone so massively in the process, therefore, it must be corrected
Err what? If a model of reality is incorrect you throw out the model, you dont try to modify reality to fit the model.
This is akin to saying something like: Solar panels* dont work in classical physics therefore coal is better.
* iana physicist. I assume they have something to do with quantum physics but dont really know
Re: Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're glossing over that Wikipedia would not be feasible if you had to pay people to do it, and if it were not free, you'd have to pay people to do it. Your "capitalistic model" likely does not correspond sufficiently to reality to be useful. And why did you write this comment? There is no need for a "case against Wikipedia."
I am saying that it would not be feasible, we're actually in agreement on that point. > And why did you write this comment? I feel like you want comments to always have a political motive. > There is no need for a "case against Wikipedia." It's an intellectual exercise.
I agree with asdfasgasdgasdg, and don't understand your reasoning.
Imho the fact that Wikipedia is not commercially marketized is inherent to its success. Feels like a breath of fresh air to have such a rich source of open access information, to search for e.g. medical info rather than trusting Google with it.
If anything, Wikipedia shows to me that people have a longing for more initiatives like that, and they will then reject commercial alternatives that exist.
Gives me glimmers of hope for the future.
Re: Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please don't hate on my comment, all I can do is ask not to be downvoted, at least I tried. Here is my case against Wikipedia. In a capitalistic model it makes little sense why Wikipedia should thrive without enriching someone so massively in the process, therefore, it must be corrected. If we assume that line of thinking is valid (which I'm not saying we should or shouldn't) then it follows that an alternative Wikip…
> In a capitalistic model it makes little sense why Wikipedia should thrive without enriching someone so massively in the process, therefore, it must be corrected Err what? If a model of reality is incorrect you throw out the model, you dont try to modify reality to fit the model. This is akin to saying something like: Solar panels* dont work in classical physics therefore coal is better. * iana physicist. I assume t…
> you dont try to modify reality to fit the model
Well sometimes you do, McDonald's exists not because the food they provide is perfectly nutritious and what a human body needs to remedy hunger. I already concede that capitalism does distort reality.
Re: Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English
#89There's only 6 million notable places, people, businesses, abstract concepts, historical occurrences, species, theories, etc? Does this mean wiki is actually missing a lot? Or are there less things of note than one would think?
There are competing philosophies on Wikipedia, deletionist vs inclusionist. Overall the inclusionists tend to win more than they loose, but the deletionists are a source of resistance to overcome. Some deletionist decisions have been decried as anti-intellectual, but they also contribute to the density of quality, so it's hard to say they're evil. More like neutrals with an incentive, but from the perspective of the self-ascribed "good" inclusionists, the vector between inclusion and deletion points toward evil, and is thus forever frustrating.
Re: Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English
#906 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,…
Wow that's fascinating, I'd never really thought about page distribution. I have good feeling that the majority of those views are due to Google providing the answer for almost anything that can be found on Wikipedia in an "instant search result" box. It has a wikipedia link beneath it to read more, and I guess many people do.
Also makes me wonder how many pages are not viewed because instant search result was sufficiently informative.