161–170 of 193 posts
Wikipedia is great. Every time I create an article, it ends up being tended to by a bunch of gardener bots who fix up all the markup and make it look nice and put an infobox in, and then other people add a little and so on and it just gets better. Honestly, pretty astounding.
Earlier 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?
Actually wikipedia has too much money. If anything we should stop giving it money for some time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are two candidates for "best website in existence," both were made by people born in countries that spawned from the dissolution of the USSR, and one starts with "sci-" while the other starts with "Lib." One ends with "hub" while the other ends with "Gen."
It's okay. You can say Scihub and libgen. Nothing bad will happen.
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…
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)
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…
Wikipedia is AWESOME and I admire your selflessness & generosity in donating to a cause :) However, before giving them any more money I would recommend reading through the (Wikipedia-hosted, ironically) article titled "Wikipedia has Cancer". The revenue vs. employee count/operating costs ratio is way off. Like, orders of magnitude off. It's a tough pill to swallow considering how useful the site is and their respecta…
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,…
Another experience I had was watching a video on YouTube from Japan where a guy was brewing coffee which reminded me that the brand of the coffee equipment used in the video is sometimes sold in coffee shops in Europe. I wanted to know a little bit more about the company so I went to Wikipedia - the English page got deleted because there was little information about the company on the English speaking part of the Internet. This does not say anything about the company (which seems to be hugely popular in Japan and certain social circles in Europe), rather it demonstrates the limit of the model Wikipedia uses for curating the articles.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most websites start out like wikipedia and then they feel the constant pressure to expand and now they have a mountain of expenses to cover so they tarnish the website in an effort to squeeze every last $ out of the user. I like how wikipedia has stuck to its original goal and kept a lean budget while delivering one of the most used websites on the internet.
Agree with everything except the "lean budget" part. My other comment has breakdown of their costs. They spend way too much money imo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22135938
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,…
Whenever seeing the staggering number of Wikipedia articles it reminds me of my own recent experience with creating an article. To centralize some of the knowledge of now niche set of keyboards (manufactured by what used to be one of the FAANGs of its time) I set to create a page. After adding some - what I thought - useful and interesting data, the page got deleted as it was not "notable" enough, i.e. lacking suffic…
All agree they want to keep some standard of quality in Wikipedia, they just disagree on the method and threshold for deletion.
Just be aware Wikipedia is not a single hive-mind :)