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

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

#111

Post by skosch » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 6:31 AM UTC

alanbernstein wrote: post #85

ripdog wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That will never happen for Wikipedia. Their content is tiny in disk space and not growing very fast. They are also drowning in money, despite what their donation begging messages claim. The Internet Archive, on the other hand, is drowning in data and pinching pennies. Still, they're doing okay, and the constant decrease in per-gigabyte HDD costs are allowing them to continue for the time being. They absolutely need a…

You're saying they rely on the decreasing prices, rather than low prices? How's that?

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).

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

#112

Post by a-nikolaev » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 6:36 AM UTC

Balgair wrote: post #80

preommr wrote: post #19

Wikipedia is the most incredible creation in modern times. Because it's not about some law of the universe that people have learned enough about to use to their advantage like electricity or nuclear physics. 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. The culture around Wikipedia - the culmination of knowled…

> 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'…

Recommending to donate is rather misleading.

Most of the work on Wikipedia is done by unpaid editors.

On the other hand, Wikimedia Foundation (the one that collects donations and manages the project) is accumulating donations and increasing spendings at ever-increasing rates, way above its maintenance and development needs. Just google a bit. Something like this: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9qqds7Z3Ykd9Kdeay/... Their history of being wasteful and not transparent about their spending is rather long.

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

#113

Post by busymom0 » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 6:37 AM UTC

Thorentis wrote: post #62

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,…

Wow that's fascinating, I'd never really thought about page distribution. I have good feeling that the majority of those views are due to Google providing the answer for almost anything that can be found on Wikipedia in an "instant search result" box. It has a wikipedia link beneath it to read more, and I guess many people do.

The 80/20 rule applies to many these sort of things. In case of Wiki, it's 90/10

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

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

#114

Post by skosch » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 6:38 AM UTC

fhoffa wrote: post #109

ripdog wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That will never happen for Wikipedia. Their content is tiny in disk space and not growing very fast. They are also drowning in money, despite what their donation begging messages claim. The Internet Archive, on the other hand, is drowning in data and pinching pennies. Still, they're doing okay, and the constant decrease in per-gigabyte HDD costs are allowing them to continue for the time being. They absolutely need a…

Wikipedia is drowning in money? Their audited financials: - Cash in hand: $100m, Annual expenses: $91m - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim... Internet archive: - Net assets: $2m, Functional expenses: $18m - https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943...

Yes, but look at how those $91M break down. Almost all "actual" expenses (including hosting) went down from last year, but the salaries continued to grow by several million, as they do every single year. I love Wikipedia, but I've stopped donating for that reason.

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

#115

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 6:42 AM UTC

fhoffa wrote: post #109

ripdog wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That will never happen for Wikipedia. Their content is tiny in disk space and not growing very fast. They are also drowning in money, despite what their donation begging messages claim. The Internet Archive, on the other hand, is drowning in data and pinching pennies. Still, they're doing okay, and the constant decrease in per-gigabyte HDD costs are allowing them to continue for the time being. They absolutely need a…

Wikipedia is drowning in money? Their audited financials: - Cash in hand: $100m, Annual expenses: $91m - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim... Internet archive: - Net assets: $2m, Functional expenses: $18m - https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943...

[deleted]

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

#116

Post by bawolff » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 6:43 AM UTC

soheil wrote: post #88

bawolff wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Err what? If a model of reality is incorrect you throw out the model, you dont try to modify reality to fit the model. This is akin to saying something like: Solar panels* dont work in classical physics therefore coal is better. * iana physicist. I assume t…

> you dont try to modify reality to fit the model Well sometimes you do, McDonald's exists not because the food they provide is perfectly nutritious and what a human body needs to remedy hunger. I already concede that capitalism does distort reality.

This makes no sense.

I dont even know what you are trying to claim. Is one of your premises that capitalism predicts the highest quality product wins at the marketplace? Because that's not what capitalism is. If it was we would all be eating at 5 star resturants all the time as they have the highest quality product when you ignore price.

Are you trying to claim that part of the reason mcdonald's is succesful is because they have a lot of money to spend on advertising and inertia? If so you are misunderstanding my point (or its just a non sequitor). The fact that gaining a lot of capital allows you an (arguably unfair, especially relative to idealized capitalism) advantage in the market place has nothing to do with my criticism that you are fallaciously finding evidence that contradicts your simplified model and then concluding that reality is wrong instead of your model.

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

#117

Post by busymom0 » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 6:46 AM UTC

rat9988 wrote: post #77

balladeer wrote: post #72

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.

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 actually do without the employee … We actually hired Brion because he was working part-time for two years and full-time at Wikipedia so we actually hired him so he could get a life and go to the movies sometimes.

2005: bandwidth cost of $5000 in with 1.4 billion page views

For 2018:

https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/

https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/2018-annual-report/fin...

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation_salarie...

15 billion page views

$145,850,778 in assets

$10,901,208 in liabilities

$134,949,570 in net assets

$104,505,783 in revenue ($97,748,964 from donations)

$81,442,265 in expenses ($38,597,407 salary, $2,342,130 tech costs, others)

I am not that educated on their operations but it seems a bit crazy to me how only 2.4 million out of all expenses is the server costs. And the 39 million salaries are all to their employees none of which do the actual content contribution

Going from 1.5 billion page views at $5000 to 15 billion page views at 82 million is crazy imo.

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

#118

Post by busymom0 » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 6:47 AM UTC

fhoffa wrote: post #109

ripdog wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That will never happen for Wikipedia. Their content is tiny in disk space and not growing very fast. They are also drowning in money, despite what their donation begging messages claim. The Internet Archive, on the other hand, is drowning in data and pinching pennies. Still, they're doing okay, and the constant decrease in per-gigabyte HDD costs are allowing them to continue for the time being. They absolutely need a…

Wikipedia is drowning in money? Their audited financials: - Cash in hand: $100m, Annual expenses: $91m - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/3/31/Wikim... Internet archive: - Net assets: $2m, Functional expenses: $18m - https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/943...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22135938

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

#119

Post by busymom0 » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 6:50 AM UTC

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #31

segfaultbuserr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no ads, popups or auto-play videos. Also, there are no 100 JavaScript tracking scripts on Wikipedia, and it's probably one of the fastest sites among the top-100 websites in the world.

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

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

#120

Post by busymom0 » Fri, Jan 24, 2020, 6:54 AM UTC

jonbaer wrote: post #35

Wonder what a 6M set would cost these days, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia