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Too bad the AI scrapers don't care, and are melting Wikipedia's production servers anyway. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/04/ai-bo...
Tragedy of the commons. And that’s why we can’t have nice things. Because people are people. And will always prioritize egotism over respect for the common good.
Okay, that looked a bit ridiculous in the pre-AI era (who needs to download the whole Wikipedia?), but now I can see the sense in it.
Too bad the AI scrapers don't care, and are melting Wikipedia's production servers anyway. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/04/ai-bo...
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> who needs to download the whole Wikipedia Anyone who wants to have access while off-line, for whatever reason. This can be as simple as saving costs via more complicated as accessing content from regions with spotty and/or expensive connectivity (you're on a ship out of reach of shore-based mobile networks, you do not have access to Starlink or something similar, you're deep in the jungle, deep underground, etc) to…
Is there a "politically neutral" human? And if there was, what could that person reasonably say about politics?
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> who needs to download the whole Wikipedia Anyone who wants to have access while off-line, for whatever reason. This can be as simple as saving costs via more complicated as accessing content from regions with spotty and/or expensive connectivity (you're on a ship out of reach of shore-based mobile networks, you do not have access to Starlink or something similar, you're deep in the jungle, deep underground, etc) to…
You have bad politics. This is bad politics.
This is not kindergarten so let's no go down this path. Asking for a politically neutral (see my explanation elsewhere in this thread if you don't understand what that means) source of information is not 'bad politics' but intended to avoid bad politics. I suspect that you 'identify' as either 'liberal' or 'progressive' so I assume you'd be less than thrilled if Wikipedia had a conservative bias. The same goes for conservatives and (traditional) capital-L Liberals who are less than thrilled to see Wikipedia having a 'left-wing' or 'progressive' bias. It just makes WP end up being lumped together with the legacy media, known to be untrustworthy where it counts and that is a shame for a site which in many ways still is a valuable resource as long as you avoid any and all subjects which have been pulled into the polarised political discourse.
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True. Musk for example is publicly attacking it for spreading "left-wing lies" because in his wiki page there are statements like "He has been criticized for making unscientific and misleading statements, including COVID-19 misinformation and promoting conspiracy theories, and affirming antisemitic, racist, and transphobic comments." which are just pure facts. It would be nice to have something like this more decentr…
I was perusing some recent discussions on sources with interest. It seems that Wikipedia's intelligentsia have managed to "blacklist" (deprecate or declare "generally unreliable") practically every prominent source of news in the US that is not centrist or leftist. I kid you not; through a process of attrition they've attacked the very reliability and reputation of every source, including Fox News and the like, and t…
Just because one side happens to produce more misinformation doesn't mean these facts should be omitted. Consider this analogy: Stalin killed millions and was undeniably a tyrant, and even though the current Russian establishment might push a different narrative, it doesn't erase historical reality. Similarly, accurately documenting Musk's misleading statements isn't bias—it's factual reporting.
You can also get it as a .zim file for easy offline browsing with Kiwix. The whole enchilada: https://download.kiwix.org/zim/wikipedia/wikipedia_en_all_ma... Other versions: https://library.kiwix.org/#lang=eng&category=wikipedia
Will the 2025 zim be available as well?
We are working hard toward upgrading the Wikipedia ZIMs, but it is far from being an easy feat. I'm mostly solo on this, and far from dedicating 100% of my time to this, so it does not move very fast. We are quite close to being able to reach the goal however, probably only a matter of weeks now.
Bonus: the tool will now get pretty good at making a ZIM of any Mediawiki, not only Wikimedia ones, we expect for instance to work on all Fandom wikis somewhere this year since there is significant knowledge over there.
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Someone suggested to me to apply a filter that serves .md or txt to bots/ai scrapers instead of the regular website, seems smart if it works but i hate it when i get captchas and this could end up similarly detecting non-bots as bots maybe a view full website link loaded on js so bots dont see it idk
I would love to see most sites serve me markdown. I'd happily install a browser extension to mask me as a a AI bot scraper if it means I can just get the text without all the noise.
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You have bad politics. This is bad politics.
No, you have bad politics. This is not kindergarten so let's no go down this path. Asking for a politically neutral (see my explanation elsewhere in this thread if you don't understand what that means) source of information is not 'bad politics' but intended to avoid bad politics. I suspect that you 'identify' as either 'liberal' or 'progressive' so I assume you'd be less than thrilled if Wikipedia had a conservative…
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I suspect "politically neutral" is a meaningless phrase. It's just a way for people to tar their political opponents by inference. The problem is: even if you report only facts, there is an editorial function in choosing which facts to report, because it is physically impossible to report all facts. So someone can always point to some sort of bias on choosing which facts to report.
And when editors have big ad spenders, you bet they won't criticize the hand that feeds them, most of the time