Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia Reaches 200,000 Articles
CanadaDave writes "The Wikipedia.org project to create a 'complete and accurate free content encyclopedia' has just surpassed 200,000 articles, an increase from 100,000 just 1 year ago. Join in on the celebrations. Some work has been done on predicting Wikipedia's growth and others are already planning for the 500,000 articles over all languages press release. In related news, the project has recently received $20,000 worth of Linux server equipment (9 machines) in hopes to improve performance of the site, which has been prone to downtime over the past year. The servers are being tested right now and will be up and running soon. The purchase was made possible by the many donations the Wikimedia project received in 2003."
Now, if Wikipedia had even just 2,000 entries that were worth reading, it might be more interesting. Considering the proliferation of useless entries on Wikipedia, this isn't all that important a milestone.
Too many entries are lacking in content, or filled with placeholders and outlines for future material that was never added.
- MaineCoon
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
"Modifiable by anyone" does not mean there are no checks and balances. RTFFAQ
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
With a thousand eyes, all bugs/errors/vandalism/junk is shallow... There's always someone watching out for junk. There's a Recent Changes page which shows all edits made, so one can monitor from there.
They do. All the time. Then, within a couple seconds, a non-troll reverts it. Check the edit history of the Hitler article some time. :-)
It does happen but it's dealt with ably!
They're good people, the Keepers of the Wikipedia.
This is where the serious fun begins.
There are a few things that reduce the trolling.
First, trolling on Wikipedia is no fun since the system allows it. There is no sport, no hacking. It just seems stupid.
Second, many people can see the troll and all of them are allowed to correct it by restoring a former version of the post. So anybody can fight the troll.
Finally, the administrators of wikipedia can lock some pages and forbid edition by trolls (by blocking their IP address).
As you can see, Wikipedia is not defenseless !
The "Fuck" article was once cited in a court document in the US. (Reference)
Encyclopedia Brittanica, once the the most prestigeous name in the business, fired its sales force a few years back and became entirely online subscription. I think Encarta forced it change its business model.
I use PayPal constantly, so I can't very well whine, but I do wish my contribution to Wiki hadn't been diluted by those fees. Almost $29k in US contributions, but almost $1.3k in PayPal fees!
Another problem. Those fees come up to just short of 4.5%. The PayPal fee structure says that at the worst, they should be skimming 2.9% plus 30c per transaction. Does this mean that many/most of Wiki's contributions are in small amounts?
30c is 6% of a $5 donation, but 3% of a $10 donation. I think the lesson is, if you're going to donate, the bigger the better -- unless you like subsidizing my use of PayPal's BillPay!
Should PayPal consider giving registered non-profits a break? Or is this admin overhead unavoidable with charitable causes?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Wiki is great. I mean *GREAT*. But it has limitations. Such as the file size for every entry.
I discovered this when I wanted to put on wiki my list of Earth Observation Remote Sensing Satellites. Such spreadsheets are NOT wiki-friendly. This, hopefully, will change with time.
Animoog.org
Thank you all for slashdotting the encyclopedia, as this is one of the better fact encyclopedias on the net (IMHO) I was doing searches for some information , and next thing I know Wikipedia stops responding. therefore i go to back to my home page (slashdot) and behold first news item, is an article on Wikipedia so thank you again for delaying my research.
Yep... I'd say at any given time there's 5-6 people looking out for vandalism. Also, people who do it regularly tend to get temporarily blocked from editing; this happens dozens of times a day, actually. Unlike slashdot, because anyone can edit anything, the junk seems to get cleaned up quite quickly.
I know that you know this, but I'm just clarifying for the benefit of the slashdot community...
Bah! Everything2 has more than 449,000 articles and all in all, 921,175 nodes. It's not really a wiki but anyone with a (free) account can write anything. It has a voting system implemented to weed out the crappy/too short/too old/superseded/getting-to-know-you articles.
I donated $5.00 to Wikipedia but I donated $25.00 to E2.
All Hail Discordia. Hail Eris. Fnord.
This was already discussed in the "Help, please give us money to buy better servers!" slashdot article about Wikipedia. In short, Wikipedia's traffic is comparable to slashdot's traffic. A bit of spillover from slashdot will probably not hurt them very much.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Check out what Wikipedians think at Why Wikipedia is so great.
Top of the list is usually the Neutral Point of View, that makes encyclopedia articles read like what we think an encyclopedia article should be: comprehensive.
Quantity:
Size of Wikipedia
A more detailed quantity comparison between Wikipedia, Encarta, and Britannica
Quality:
English Wikipedia Quality Survey
Wikipedia Quality Analysis
Projected growth:
Modelling Wikipedia's growth
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Slashdot
Slashdot effect
Slashdot trolling phenomena
Another interesting point of note:
According to Alexa (which is not always reliable), Wikipedia.org is now more popular than Slashdot.org.
If anyone wants to watch the Wikipedia Recent Announcements page automatically, feel free to point your favorite news aggregator to Wikipedia Recent Announcements RSS Feed which I generate from the web page. If you use Bloglines, click here for a preview or to subscribe.
"Luck is the residue of design" -- Branch Rickey
Ummm... No, you didn't. No rats in any of the revisions.
a rd &action=history
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Mall
For information on all three, you can even read h2g2's entry on E2, Wikipedia's entry on E2, Wikipedia's entry on h2g2, E2's entry on h2g2, E2's entry on Wikipedia, and h2g2's entry on Wikipedia.
It's under GNU licensing - to the point that some people download all the content onto their Linux boxes to run more efficient database queries through it. If it went private, one person could buy a membership, download everything, and redistribute it under the GFDL. Also, Wikipedia is run by a not-for-profit organization, and has been for most of a year.
Granted, theoretically one "copy" of wikipedia could start charging for memberships like Mandrake does (which I think would never happen) but, like with Mandrake, it would be quite legal to sell copies.
Well, the whole point of Wikipedia is that it's written from a neutral point of view. Actually, one of the administrators is a follower of Reverend Moon's Unification Church - but he doesn't write articles biased in their favor.
I happen to believe in evolution, and to be pro-choice. I don't let that influence my writing, or if I do, I attribute it ("Some people believe that abortion is acceptable in these circumstances because...").
I think it's considered to be racist if you don't spell out the full word "Pakistani." Just saying "Paki" is considered to be a racist term.
Well whenever a majority view is expressed which is too heavy towards one side, wikipedians argue against it calling it POV. When a POV is claimed, the language is turned to NPOV. The opposing argument is included as "Though blah is accepted by most there are reports ..." Since there allways will be people with opposing views it is unlikely that articles at wikipedia take sides. Read the article on Mother Teresa for example. If on the other hand every one starts to agree about something - humanity is bound to be doomed anyway then.
It seems that Wikipedia is quite large compared to the other commercial offerings. For example, the article says that Encyclopedia Britannica's 2002 edition proudly proclaim they have over 85,000 articles and the Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, as having 51,000 article.
By the looks of it, there's still a lot of room to grow though.
Don't know for sure if this is what you're asking, but the "backend" for Wikipedia is MediaWiki. I doubt that it would be really difficult to use a dynamic page & articleid, but the WikiMedia people might have a reason for not using that method.
Join moola.com, play games to earn money.
Revisions earlier than a certain date are not listed. We changed wiki software at least once over time.
Every page must have a unique title, because we have to be able to link to it easily, in wiki markup. It's generally convenient to be able to refer to a page by title rather than ID. When unrelated titles clash, we perform disambiguation. See for example Mercury.
I'm the Admin that 'his royal pain in the ass' Lord Kenneth is talking about (we are not on Wikipedia now, so Wikipedia's conduct rules don't apply).
_ re solution
1 49 .png
_ fo r_comment/Lord_Kenneth
1) There is a current vacuum of power due to the fact that Jimbo Wales (Wikimedia director) is no longer involved in user conduct disputes. We are in the process of working on procedures to deal with troublesome users like Lord Kenneth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict
2) The link you provided cited UK law, not U.S. law. Since the server, foundation, and I'm in the U.S. this does not apply (the link was also from a photographer's website so its validity is in question). Even if the photographer did retain copyright, then that would be negated by the fact that the image is a very low quality reproduction and is thus well covered by the fair use doctrine in the United States.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_talk:Maveric
You have already admitted that I did not call you a troll on the Request for comments page about you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests
I think administration does need a little more bite when dealing with the problem users who insert bias into topics. Users like "Mr-Natural-Health" should be gagged on certain topics, at the very least.
This I can agree with.
-- mav
Seriously though, which proxy software are you using? I've used quite a few and I'm currently using Squid, and I've never seen the User-Agent dropped from requests. It's not generally a good idea since sites sometimes serve different content for different browsers (which makes a lot of sense concerning mobile devices).