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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

#141
post #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 Wikipe…

Is Wikidata how, for example, when a particular football team wins the Super Bowl, its articles are updated, the articles about the Super Bowl are updated, the article about the list of teams that have won multiple Super Bowls is updated, etc... all very quickly? Or is that just an army of volunteers.

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

#142
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Does it set us apart, though? Crows, apes and dolphins have all been known to teach both their offspring and fellow animals.

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

#143
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,…

Ehm, isn't it super obvious that this, too, follows the Pareto distribution?

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

#145
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,…

Do we have a power-law distribution here? (They are rare)

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

#146
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…

Combining random with this fantastic chrome plugin: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wikitube/aneddidib... has really enhanced my morning.

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

#147
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…

There was a behind-the-scenes talk at 36c3 in Dec 2019 where a few Wikipedia Admins show what the infrastructure looks like and what they actually do: Infrastructure of Wikipedia https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-73-infrastructure-of-wikipedia

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

#148
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Does it set us apart, though? Crows, apes and dolphins have all been known to teach both their offspring and fellow animals.

We do it so much better that the quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference.

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

#149
post #141
post #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 Wikipe…

Is Wikidata how, for example, when a particular football team wins the Super Bowl, its articles are updated, the articles about the Super Bowl are updated, the article about the list of teams that have won multiple Super Bowls is updated, etc... all very quickly? Or is that just an army of volunteers.

There are two aspects of this:

1. If all superbowl-related articles used an extraction mechanism that links wikipedia with wikidata, then only the wikidata entry needs updating and all these articles get updated automatically. 2. That wikidata update I mentioned was manual, but a lot of data in Wikidata is updated automatically (e.g. births and deaths from some databases, city population counts etc.), so some things get updated across the board automatically. That's a source of pushback against this - articles being updated automatically, so bad actors can change a lot of things at once.

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

#150
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,…

This is unremarkable since this is just Zipf's law: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law
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