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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

#121

Post by bduerst »

fhoffa wrote: post #40

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,…

That's really not too shabby for a long tail though. What's the % that had zero views in December? Do they account for bots?

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

#122

Post by eru »

skosch wrote: post #111
alanbernstein wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're saying they rely on the decreasing prices, rather than low prices? How's that?

The amount of data is growing superlinearly while their resources (probably) aren't, so a dropping price for storage is currently allowing them to keep up (if just barely so).

As a mathematical curiosity: an exponential decreasing price means that the total expense to store a Gigabyte forever is finite.

Eg a 10% decrease a year, means that storing forever costs approximately ten times the first year's storage cost. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_series#Sum has the math.

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

#123

Post by zozbot234 »

busymom0 wrote: post #117
rat9988 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually wikipedia has too much money. If anything we should stop giving it money for some time.

Yep. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2... > In 2005, Wikipedia co-founder and Wikimedia Foundation founder Jimmy Wales told a TED audience: So, we're doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly. So, it's really gotten to be a huge thing. And everything is managed by the volunteers and the total monthly cost for our bandwidth is about US$5,000, and that's essentially our main cost. We could…

The WMF does quite a few things besides paying for the hosting costs of Wikipedia. As one example, their latest project is Wikidata, a general-purpose, language-independent knowledge base which already gets more edits over time than the English Wikipedia does. Given that developing such a generally-useful knowledge base has been a "holy grail" of AI for literally decades and that Wikidata is freely available at zero cost right now, those donations might already be more than paying for themselves.

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

#124

Post by Razengan »

Balgair wrote: post #80
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…

> 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. Oh man, if only it were true! If anything, wikipedia should be seen as an overcoming of our terrible human nature in making something good in the world, not as a property of humans. It is SO precious and fragile in our mortal hands. The story of the Encyclopédie'…

> of our terrible human nature

The ability to learn and teach is the very core of human nature that sets us apart from other animals.

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

#125

Post by fhoffa »

skosch wrote: post #114
fhoffa wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is drowning in money? Their audited financials: - Cash in hand: $100m, Annual expenses: $91m - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim... Internet archive: - Net assets: $2m, Functional expenses: $18m - https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943...

Yes, but look at how those $91M break down. Almost all "actual" expenses (including hosting) went down from last year, but the salaries continued to grow by several million, as they do every single year. I love Wikipedia, but I've stopped donating for that reason.

How much should an organization spend in salaries?

Snapchat spends 1,649m in operating expenses. Wikimedia 46m in salaries.

Now, are these dollars invested paying off for our society? That's for all of us to decide.

- https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/snap/financial..., https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim...

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

#126

Post by ignoramous »

How's https://golden.com doing? I have come across some really detailed Wikipedia articles (for sports events, for example) and at times some really drab ones which I try to edit to improve. But original research articles sometimes do contain a lot more specific information that doesn't survive editor scrutiny on Wikipedia. And the less we talk about numerous advertisment/PR/fluff articles and socio/geo-political edit wars being played out, the better.

Take tech pages for example, I really think an enormous amount of information in blogs, online magazines, research papers need to be out there in Wikipedia pages too, if not as actual texts but as references.

For instance, here's an article on HAMT [0] and another on Radix Trees [1] but the corresponding Wikipedia pages [2][3] for those aren't as consumable as the other two.

There are also cases where pages are deleted because original research, like Willy Tarreau's EB Trees [4] that powers routing, caching on HAProxy.

I tend to research more on Wikipedia than search engines, to be honest. May be, the search engines can get smart enough to amalgamate a page on the searched topic given the amount of open-web they crawl?

[0] https://blog.mattbierner.com/hash-array-mapped-tries-in-java...

[1] https://vincent.bernat.ch/en/blog/2017-ipv4-route-lookup-lin...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_array_mapped_trie

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radix_tree

[4] https://wtarreau.blogspot.com/2011/12/elastic-binary-trees-e...

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

#127

Post by Udik »

fhoffa wrote: post #40

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,…

> 90 pages were able to gather more than 1M views (Star Wars, The Mandalorian, The Witcher...).

So they could cut their network costs by a lot if they just removed pages about current popular culture, which have the highest view rate and a cultural value of exactly zero.

Edit: I'm being sarcastic and a bit bitter, the comments below all make good points. However I find it sad, though unavoidable, that the highest page views are for highly marketed entertainment franchises that have a slim chance to withstand the test of time.

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

#128

Post by dna_polymerase »

Udik wrote: post #127
fhoffa wrote: post #40

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,…

> 90 pages were able to gather more than 1M views (Star Wars, The Mandalorian, The Witcher...). So they could cut their network costs by a lot if they just removed pages about current popular culture, which have the highest view rate and a cultural value of exactly zero. Edit: I'm being sarcastic and a bit bitter, the comments below all make good points. However I find it sad, though unavoidable, that the highest pag…

Their network cost is negligible. Overall hosting cost them less then $3 million, actually they spend more on travel & conferences [0].

[0]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim...

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

#129

Post by tjoff »

Udik wrote: post #127
fhoffa wrote: post #40

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,…

> 90 pages were able to gather more than 1M views (Star Wars, The Mandalorian, The Witcher...). So they could cut their network costs by a lot if they just removed pages about current popular culture, which have the highest view rate and a cultural value of exactly zero. Edit: I'm being sarcastic and a bit bitter, the comments below all make good points. However I find it sad, though unavoidable, that the highest pag…

You don't think those views result in a stronger brand and more views on pages with a higher cultural value?

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

#130

Post by govg »

Udik wrote: post #127
fhoffa wrote: post #40

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,…

> 90 pages were able to gather more than 1M views (Star Wars, The Mandalorian, The Witcher...). So they could cut their network costs by a lot if they just removed pages about current popular culture, which have the highest view rate and a cultural value of exactly zero. Edit: I'm being sarcastic and a bit bitter, the comments below all make good points. However I find it sad, though unavoidable, that the highest pag…

Why do they have a cultural value of exactly zero?
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