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."
What I have never understood is why some troll doesn't go to it and ruin everything? What prevents that?
I mean, I don't want to look up the War of 1812 and fine, "d00d, j00 b33n 0wnz3r3d". That would kinda suck.
Can anyone answer this?
That is such a good website, gets more informative every day. It's amazing how quickly it has become a useful source of info. I'd like to see them get their search engine fixed, but the google thing that they're using in the meantime works just fine.
When I first came across wikis I thought that they'd be prone to vandalism, but it seems to work well. Anybody know why this is? Does all the good info get backed up? Are there full-time people who patrol it for trolls?
Drill baby drill - on Mars
While I love the spirit of openness for both source and encyclopedia knowledge, there are a couple of things that I've been wondering about here.
1. Will scholarly publications view this as a valid source of accurate information?
2. Once people realize there's a free encyclopedia out there that rivals expensive ones (I don't know Wikipedia well enough to know whether it lags, rivals, or surpasses, but I suspect that if it isn't already, it's only a matter of time until it's a serious contender), will they abandon the paid ones? If so, it'll be interesting to see the effects of abandoning our existing knowledge infrastructure.
I just started using wikipedia after seeing the wikipedia needs help article on slashdot.
It is a very handy resource for grabbing good information on almost anything quickly. I use it in conjunction with everything2 when I try to find quick bits of information on a subject.
So, since Ive never really dorked around with wikipedia, what makes it so great? What are some cool things that everyone should know about it?
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
I contributed some articles to the site, but it was the retentive no-lifes that swarm that site which drove me away.
For example, check out the discussion on the 'Elizabeth Smart' article, when it recovers from the 'dotting. They went on for MONTHS, sometimes angrily debating whether the article should include "(Kidnap Victim)" in the title, so as to disambiguate the article from another Elizabeth Smart article. Somebody thought 'Kidnap Victim' was disrespectful, so he goes and changes the article title to "Elizabeth Smart (Media Sensation)". They argued about THAT for another month or so. Eventually they had to vote on the matter. I have never seen so much effort expended on so trivial an issue in my life... it was fascinating in a morbid sort of way.
The site is swarming with people with serious inabilities to play nice with others. Contribute if you want, but don't say I didn't warn you when the wiki weenies make you want to scream.
Wikipedia is a very good idea, however, recently I've come across some problems.
:)
1) Edit wars: militant people will continue to insert bias and lies in some topics, and it is very hard to stop them. The system moves very slowly. I've had to deal with scientific skepticism, dealing with rather ill-informed people who think skeptics are out to destroy science.
2) The community politics: I questioned an admin's use of a personal photograph in his profile (professional photographs usually are copyrighted under the photographer, not the client), and I was threatened with being banned, accused of trolling (I was earlier warned not to call people a troll by the very same admin!), and personally attacked in chat, when I was following wikipedia policy to a T.
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.
Oh, and a litle more information: The first time wikipedia hit 200,000, I believe, was due to many stub articles suddenly appearing. I wonder why
---
Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
Speaking as somebody who has contributed 100-plus articles and done scads of editing over the past year, I'm still not convinced Wikipedia is ever going to be a legitimate reference work. For all the obvious reasons (vandalism, lack of expertise, point-of-view flame wars) articles are suspect.
... and a lot of fun.
If nothing else, however, it is an interesting group-psychology experiment
It didn't take long for some to trot out the usual arguments about Wikipedia: "How do they keep out the trolls and kiddies?" etc.
Wikipedia has spent a lot of time outlining those very questions on their Replies to Common Objections page. Or, if all of you hose the very delicate servers, here's the Google cache version.
By the way, on the announcements page this morning, it was explicitly said, "Please, do not tell too many people about this, our current server cannot handle the extra load." So, uh, thanks all you Slashdotters... ^^;;;
RadicalBender.com
MediaWiki is also used by non-Wikimedia projects. Among the more interesting ones is Disinfopedia, an encyclopedia of propaganda, and Wikitravel, a travel guide. Star Trek fans will want to take a look at Memory Alpha.
Because of Wikipedia's constant server problems, MediaWiki has been refined to be very scalable. It caches almost everything and uses Livejournal's memcached to keep important data in memory. It also has support for Squid proxy servers. Aside from that MediaWiki comes with a huge set of features, many of which are found in few other wikis:
- section editing - edit not a whole page, but just a small subsection of it (great for large pages)
- automatic image rescaling
- LaTeX support for mathematic formulas
- message transclusion - create messages that can be used
- namespaces to separate article content, user pages, image descriptions and discussions; message notification for user-to-user messages
- plenty of query functions to examine the relationships between articles (articles which have many links to them but don't exist, articles which have no links to them, very long/short articles etc.)
More cool features are in the works, including a larger set of backends for rendering music, chemical formulas, chessboards etc. MediaWiki is always looking for new developers. Give it a try and join the mailing list to help out. There are other great wikis out there -- MoinMoin, Tiki, Zwiki, OddMuse etc. -- but I prefer MediaWiki because I find it the easiest to use, and most other wikis use the ugly CamelCaseSyntaxWhichMakesPagesHardToRead.Can Wikipedia do an IMDB on us? Lots of people put plenty of time on the IMDB, with the understanding that it was an open, shared resource. One day we awoke to the news that the editors in the UK had sold out to Amazon and volunteers be damned...
would be a great topic for ask-slashdot i think.
/.ed their site anyways, or their 20thousan bucks are not live yet.
i am really interested to serve a huge demand portal/forum site, and am wondering how to enhance my infrastructure, and to make it as stable with some thousand bucks like the wikipedia guys are trying to do so.
unfortunately, i think slashdot just
any comments or hints or maybe someone gonna put up my question to ask-slashdot?
thanks.
Cool, I didn't know that "compare" feature. Here's the graph comparing slashdot and wikipedia over 1 year. See how much wikipedia traffic increased?
95.5% profit to the "charity" is phenomenaly high effciency. When charitable organizations hold large fund-raising events, they are often very lucky to get even 50% efficiency for their efforts.
Often, a "charity" or non-profit will pay another organization to do their fundraising for them. They will sign a contract that includes an administrative fee, in either dollar or percentage terms, that is taken off the top.
I've been involved in a few fundraising efforts and have never seen anything more organized or larger-scale than a bake sale with that high an efficiency.
Add it in yourself.
:-p
That's the brilliance of a Wiki.
Changelog for the War of 1812 entry
This was actually a pretty good illustration of why Wikipedia works. It's easy to vandilize, but it's even easier to fix it again. Couple that with the fact that there's absolutely no challenge in trolling it and very few people end up trying to wreck it. There's no fun in it.
It's an awesome feature, I just wish I knew how accurate it was. I think the traffic for Slashdot may be underestimated because it only counts people who are using the Alexa toolbar for IE. A large portion of Slashdot's readership uses browsers other than IE, so they can't have Alexa toolbar installed. Even the ones using IE are unlikely to have Alexa toolbar, because Slashdotters hate spyware/useless junk on their computers, and they know enough to remove it or not install it in the first place.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Slashdot Trolling Phenomena is even in there!
See
Wikipedia.org_is_more_popular_than... for a more complete list and some explanations about the weakness of Alexa's ranking (see the bottom of the page that explains that sites like Slashdot and especially Wikipedia are probably more popular than their Alexa ranking indicates).
According to Alexa about 70% of Wikipedia.org traffic goes to the English Wikipedia. We know that is closer to 50% and therefore Alexa greatly undercounts hits to the non-English versions of Wikipedia (which together have more articles than the English Wikipedia).
--mav
Even funnier, from that link:
Relevance to Wikipedia
Wikipedia has been "slashdotted" on:
July 26, 2001 - Slashdot article: 'Britannica and Free Content'
January 22, 2003 - Slashdot article: 'Wikipedia's 100,000th article' (screenshot)
December 28, 2003 Slashdot article: 'Wikipedia Needs $20K'
February 2, 2004 - Slashdot article: 'Wikipedia Reaches 200,000 Articles'
So it already contains a reference to the current slashdotting. That's the beauty of the dynamic content of Wiki pages.