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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

#131
post #127
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…

This is dangerously dismissive. Cultural value is subjective, and in any case these articles provide an in-road to other articles, giving the opportunity to expand people’s knowledge further.

I would, however, support Wikipedia having ads on articles in such pop culture categories – and those alone, of course, to avoid conflict of interest where factual accuracy is more vital. This would have to be carefully managed by the Wikimedia Foundation — marking articles for monetisation should be handled only by a specific role – but if done quite carefully and in a privacy- and user-respecting manner (eg Carbon ads [0]) could potentially subside the academic content without damaging Wikipedia’s brand.

[0] https://www.carbonads.net

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

#132
post #127
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…

> a cultural value of exactly zero

I hope you recognise that this is only your opinion. The beauty about a crowd-sourced encyclopedia is that you don't get to define what other people find interesting or of cultural value. The (utopic) mission of Wikipedia is to encompass the whole human knowledge, and that includes a lot of niche topics which might be interesting only for a small amount of people, but it is not limited to that. I love that Wikipedia has a lot of info on "current" (i.e. popular right now) topics, as I get to know what I want to know avoiding the gazillion ads (even though I blackhole all of them) or click-baity titles from the rest of the internet.

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

#133
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,…

These numbers don’t add up... does the 4.3M pages that got less than 100 include the 3.6M that got less than 10? I should image so, otherwise that’s 7.9M pages. But then you say only 2.3M got less than 1000 views? That obviously can’t include the less than 100 or 10’s, but if you add them then you’re at 6.6M..??

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

#134
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 use a similar strategy in balancing out exploration and exploitation with videos - pull 5-10 random links and pick one of them.

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

#135
post #125
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The problem with Wikimedia salaries is that they often are allocated to some projects / roles that don't have much to do with the principal activity (Wikipedia). Although I recognize that it is important to fund / subsidize stuff that won't otherwise be included, I wish their final goal was more concentrated on the wellbeing of Wikipedia, rather than other minor projects.

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

#136
post #133
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,…

These numbers don’t add up... does the 4.3M pages that got less than 100 include the 3.6M that got less than 10? I should image so, otherwise that’s 7.9M pages. But then you say only 2.3M got less than 1000 views? That obviously can’t include the less than 100 or 10’s, but if you add them then you’re at 6.6M..??

I was wondering the same!

Not every page is an article, and I'm counting page views from their logs.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_is_an_article...

Even then you can see in my query that I have removed most of their "special" pages.

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

#137
post #133
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,…

These numbers don’t add up... does the 4.3M pages that got less than 100 include the 3.6M that got less than 10? I should image so, otherwise that’s 7.9M pages. But then you say only 2.3M got less than 1000 views? That obviously can’t include the less than 100 or 10’s, but if you add them then you’re at 6.6M..??

I think its a typo 5.3M not 2.3M have less than 1000 views. Makes sense with 600k over 1000 vies and 6M total

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

#138
It's only shame that Wikidata doesn't get as much attention. It's a knowledge graph that runs _some_ of Wikipedia's content. I became involved recently and what I'd like to do is to get Wikipedians to use Wikidata more (e.g. automatically loading births and deaths on people's profiles), because once these two services are more interlinked, we're gonna get more knowledge graph info for free since people editing Wikipedia will keep improving this structured dataset.

I'd encourage people to get involved in either of these two projects - there's always a niche you know about and could improve its presence in the Wiki world.

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

#139
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Chro…

The standard argument against this is that it’s not very standardised. “wtde” will give you German Wiktionary no matter what browser you’re on. The cost of adding a code for every use case needed on every browser can get frustrating, whereas many bangs on DDG can be easily inferred, and then immediately used. The only cost then is changing a search engine.

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

#140
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This is dangerously dismissive. Cultural value is subjective, and in any case these articles provide an in-road to other articles, giving the opportunity to expand people’s knowledge further. I would, however, support Wikipedia having ads on articles in such pop culture categories – and those alone, of course, to avoid conflict of interest where factual accuracy is more vital. This would have to be carefully managed…

As soon as you open the barn door for having ads at all, the floodgates will open. Also a pointless concession given Wikipedia has far more money than they need.

If Wikipedia ever puts ads up because of the bureaucratic WMF cancer exceeding donations, that's the day Wikipedia dies.

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