Wikipedia now has more than 6M articles in English • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by olooney » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 3:28 PM UTC

govg wrote: post #130

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…

Why do they have a cultural value of exactly zero?

More to the point, what even is "cultural value?" After Googling it, I found that it doesn't even seem to be a well defined phrase, much less a quantifiable concept.

Wikipedia uses notability[1] to decide which articles to include. Notability is defined as significant coverage in 3rd party sources. Popular movies are "notable" because other people write about them.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability

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

#172

Post by aeyes » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 3:54 PM UTC

SJSque wrote: post #158

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...".

This page isn't up to date but it mentions that many Dutch articles were created by bots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Wikipedia

This up to date graph from the German Wikipedia clearly shows the jumps: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9d/Wikipedi...

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

#173

Post by jessriedel » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 4:14 PM UTC

mactrey wrote: post #41

jessriedel wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what sense is there a certain "amount of work to do" defined independently of the number of volunteers and their interests? The only thing I can think of is that as the wiki grows in size, the amount of work that needs to be done to maintain fixed quality (combating vandalism, counteracting normal decay, fixing link rot) goes up roughly proportional to the number and length of articles. I guess you mean something…

Wikipedia's rules on notability and article length prevent it from growing infinitely (in theory). So my point is exactly that - all that "low-hanging fruit" is mostly gone, and most of the actual writing work that's left is either writing a new article on a subject that is at the margin of notability, which one would expect the average adult to have less interest in than writing a new article on a truly notable subj…

> Wikipedia's rules on notability and article length prevent it from growing infinitely (in theory).

I take your point, but I would claim that Wikipedia is no where near the maximimum size set by the notability criterion. You can just look at the incredible depth it has on some niche topics like anime that happen to be of interest to the editor demographic (which do strain the notability criterion) and imagine that level of thoroughness on lots of other stuff like (e.g., "photobiology" is a weak page that came up hitting the random-article button).

> so really the flat number of active editors shows that the number of editors actively engaged in the research and writing of entries has probably actually declined significantly since 2007.

Yea, maybe, although improvements in automated maintenance tools may mean that a fixed or even decreasing number of editors could be maintaining the growing encyclopedia.

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

#174

Post by shawabawa3 » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 4:15 PM UTC

jolmg wrote: post #26

jacobajit wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit/Wikipedia search are an order of magnitude worse than Google

I don't know about Reddit, but for Wikipedia I just write a guess for the title of the article I'm looking for, and if I'm not redirected to the proper title of the article, then I'm normally sent to a disambiguation page. I've never found myself in need of something like Google for Wikipedia.

That works if you know the article you want, but for something more abstract wiki search is terrible

I just came up with this example on the spot, searching wikipedia for "inventor of paracetamol", the first result on wiki search is "Polymorphism", then "Diphenhydramine", then "List of Suicides", then "Menstruation"

Searching google for "inventor of paracetamol wiki" links to the wikipedia Paracetamol page subsection History

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

#175

Post by Miraste » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 4:28 PM UTC

Liquix wrote: post #36

majos wrote: 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…

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…

That article is pretty unfair. The Wikimedia Foundation has started a lot of other projects since 2005, several of which are very useful and contribute to their general mission to bring knowledge to everyone. Wikibooks, Wikidata, and Wiktionary spring to mind, among others. They've also become the point of reference for almost everything for the entire internet-connected population, which legitimately requires more PR people, more lawyers, and much higher administrative costs, just to maintain their original level of quality in the face of adversarial governments, megacorporations, and every troll with a keyboard. The relative lack of scandals, disasters, and press attacks in the current climate is borderline miraculous.

Compare Wikimedia to, say, Mozilla. Another high-tech open-access-focused non-profit (sort of), and with 5x higher revenues ($500 million!). They've also spent most of it on new projects and skyrocketing administrative overhead. Yet their PR is much worse, they suffer falling market share, and nobody uses most of their side projects. Wikimedia is still efficient and effective given the arenas it competes in.

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

#176

Post by friendlybus » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

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…

There is little money in creating a piece of artwork that lasts 300yrs, like a church or an exquisite painting for the producer. Companies can't survive on that, all the money goes to magic pop art and maybe some heroic efforts. After that you're outside the system. To quote a fading movie, you either die a hero or live long enough to become a villain (dead genius).

You probably know it and it feels worth saying anyway. I yearn for the enduring masterpiece that transcends simply 'changing the game' and is instead appreciated for its own being for hundreds of years.

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

#177

Post by Carpetsmoker » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 5:19 PM UTC

the_af wrote: post #170

vladak wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is a struggle between "deletionist" and "inclusionist" factions within Wikipedia. One side tends to find fault (many times real faults, mind you) and err on the side of deletion; the other prefers to err on the side of inclusion in Wikipedia. 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 hiv…

I find all of this really hilarious especially considering that a lot of Wikipedia is about trivial stuff like entertainment (films, sports, anime, whatnot), but whenever someone tries to a document something technical in the wrong way ... NO SOUP FOR YOU!

I find it really really rude and disrespectful to just trample over other volunteers' work like this. I'm all for deleting crap, but outright deletion instead of offering suggestions first and then being super-defensive when asked "hey, what's up?" Yeah nah, that doesn't fly. It's like just closing people's PRs on GitHub without offering suggestions on how to fix the patch first with just a single line of "doesn't fit code standards", "doesn't work on Windows", or just a link to a lengthy page.

Guess everyone is too busy fighting over capitalisation of movies titles or whether or not the Stanley Kubrick article should have an infobox to offer meaningful suggestions to new users shrug.

On Wikipedia, the biggest asshole with the most persistence wins. They've deluded themselves in to thinking this is "meritocracy".

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

#178

Post by friendlybus » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 5:22 PM UTC

olooney wrote: post #171

govg wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do they have a cultural value of exactly zero?

More to the point, what even is "cultural value?" After Googling it, I found that it doesn't even seem to be a well defined phrase, much less a quantifiable concept. Wikipedia uses notability[1] to decide which articles to include. Notability is defined as significant coverage in 3rd party sources. Popular movies are "notable" because other people write about them. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notabil…

There's too much in art that relies on unmeasured effects like the impact on the audience's consciousness and the execution on structure and intention to be bothered with numbers beyond box office or critic reviews. You could measure something related to those concepts and you would be capturing a fourth of available judgement for cultural impact.

Culture is a game we have been playing for thousands of years. Art pieces with an observable influence on other artists, the public audience or any human decision making along with an ability to survive the wear and tear of existing in the world as an artwork is a good place to start summarizing an artwork's cultural value.

A grand cathedral like st peter's stands as an example of high quality baroque architecture, the value of the church as an institution. It remains intact after a large number of years, not having been physically deconstructed. It's influence on other artists is common to this day, recently used as a baroque example of maximalism on HN. The site attracts visitors and has yet to be rivalled in it's unique baroque grandeur.

Those influences are quantifiable, and kind of comparable to a flash in a pan like a Hollywood film that gets most of its attention and influence in the first few months then sits in an institutional back pocket whilst other artists denigrate it so that new films can occupy the spotlight and the cycle continues. These films are sometimes used as reference for making new films and the industry puts out two similar styles of film at the same time reducing uniqueness. Generally otherwise left to sit in DVD/bluray jewel cases or disney vaults as they fall out of favour.

You can rank these impacts and have conversations over which interpretive labels they fit into and conclude some are mor valuable than others.

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

#179

Post by friendlybus » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 5:28 PM UTC

wutbrodo wrote: post #33

benrbray wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't use reddit to find credible info about world events or trending topics. However, it's an excellent source for finding information about hobbies and niche topics. The culinary subreddits have great recipe advice and I'll often go there to find best practices for food safety or unfamiliar techniques. Appending "reddit" to the end of my search means I don't have to sift through hundreds of SEO'd blog posts wi…

It's also good anthropologically, for at least some segment of the population. I've found the zeitgeist of Reddit comments on (eg) political topics to pretty consistently predict shifts in broader political culture.

Most of the internet moves homogenously now. Fortnite streamers, reddit, hn, hollywood and Stephen Colbert all hit the same thematic marks in roughly the same time periods. Slashdot one or two days later.

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

#180

Post by the_af » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 6:02 PM UTC

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #177

the_af wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a struggle between "deletionist" and "inclusionist" factions within Wikipedia. One side tends to find fault (many times real faults, mind you) and err on the side of deletion; the other prefers to err on the side of inclusion in Wikipedia. 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 hiv…

I find all of this really hilarious especially considering that a lot of Wikipedia is about trivial stuff like entertainment (films, sports, anime, whatnot), but whenever someone tries to a document something technical in the wrong way ... NO SOUP FOR YOU! I find it really really rude and disrespectful to just trample over other volunteers' work like this. I'm all for deleting crap, but outright deletion instead of o…

I guess you're an inclusionist then. A lot of people agree with you. (Note some in the deletionist camp want to delete many of the articles about trivial stuff!).

I find Wikipedia articles on technical/science subjects tend to be higher quality (with some exceptions of course), those on history tend to be so-so, those about current political matters tend to be outrageously one-sided, and those on pop culture matters are often hilarious -- an article on a subject related to anime can be a lot longer and more detailed than one about real history!

Back in the olden days I remember there used to be a Wikipedia article about vampires, written from the point of view of someone in the "vampire community" who wrote about them as if "vampirism" was a "lifestyle", and when it got edited/deleted of course these people threw a fit. But this was a clear case of garbage that doesn't belong in a general encyclopedia.

Contributing to Wikipedia, especially in topics where there is controversy, is very frustrating. Like you said, the person with the most time or clout with the online community tends to "win". Having lots of rules of the form WP: in order to overwhelm you and make you give up can feel very tiresome. This is why I don't contribute; I simply don't have the time for it.

Still find Wikipedia immensely useful though. I'm glad it exists.