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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

#151

Post by swebs »

soheil wrote: post #67

To take a contrarian viewpoint: maybe Wikipedia isn't so good after all. 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 Wikipedia riddled with ads would be a superior model, in te…

Man, I should really stop bothering to read comments that start off complaining about capitalism in completely unrelated threads.

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

#152

Post by AdmiralGinge »

yunruse wrote: post #131
Udik wrote: 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…

That's a terrible idea in my opinion, any advertising at all on Wikipedia would be the thin edge of a very unpleasant wedge. Wikipedia is many people's first stop for knowledge, we really don't want people being able to buy eyeball space next to what's supposed to be unbiased content.

Additionally, expanding advertising generally is a bad move when exposure to advertising has been shown to be negatively correlated to quality of life and contentedness. We need to be transitioning away from advertising as a primary driver of the online economy, not fuelling it further. Advertising should only be employed when there's no better option in my opinion, not the first thing you reach for monetising a site. We should see advertising like fossil fuels, a regrettable necessity that we should aim to phase out.

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

#153

Post by sornaensis »

drej wrote: post #149
zweep wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Surely having fewer points of information control makes auditing for suspicious/malicious edits easier than relying on auditing individual articles?

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

#154

Post by AdmiralGinge »

Analemma_ wrote: post #14
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…

If you're worried about SEO and manipulation, Wikipedia is decent but Reddit is awful. It's pretty well-established by now that astroturfing and influence campaigns are rampant on Reddit, and in some particularly bad cases like /r/worldnews have taken over subreddits completely.

I have my suspicions about /r/ukpolitics as well. During the last few UK election campaigns the place has read like there's enough astroturf to supply the next dozen Olympics.

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

#155

Post by DonCopal »

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,…

And here you can see the most visited pages for every week: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Top_25_R...

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

#157

Post by goodside »

eru wrote: post #122
skosch wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A stream of perpetual future payments does not need to be decrease exponentially (or decrease at all) to have finite present value. A contract to receive $1/year forever (which you can resell or leave as inheritance etc.) is worth 1/r, where r is the risk-free rate of return at the time the contract is sold. At 1% interest a $1 perpetuity is worth $100 — the amount of money you’d have to put in a bank today to expect to get $1 in interest per year forever.

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

#158

Post by SJSque »

aeyes wrote: post #61

If you speak other languages Wikipedia certainly gets very interesting. German Wikipedia is pretty good, for some topics it is better than English Wikipedia. But Spanish Wikipedia is quite sad to read, todays articles have the quality I remember from when Wikipedia was 2 or 3 years old even though there are many times more Spanish than German speakers in the world. Then there are the Swedish and Cebuana Wikipedias wh…

What's always struck me is how large the Dutch Wikipedia is (1,992,551 articles), given the relatively low number of people that speak that language. They would appear to be a pretty tech-savvy/well-connected nation.

It's certainly consistent with the number of comments that I see here on HN that start with some variation on "Here in the Netherlands...".

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

#160

Post by lr4444lr »

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,…

I wonder what the correlation is between inbound links from other articles and views, though.
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