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."
Trolling is a art,
Comment removed based on user account deletion
which has been prone to downtime over the past year.
So we have:
Servers that are prone to downtime.
New servers not running yet.
Linked to on Slashdot
I don't see this turning out well.
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?
As the digitization of our encyclopedias continues, millions of unemployed encyclopedia salespeople lament their poor career choice.
Considering that a Wiki is modifiable by anyone, I don't see how they can advertise that the Wikipedia is accurate with any degree of confidence.
Is this encyclopedia incomplete? I don't see a picture of cowboy neal under "handsome".
;)
I guess antonyms take up a lot of space.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
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 have to admit I've only browsed Wikipedia a few times but the open nature of it seems like it would be rife with abuse. From what I understand there is moderation in place but how long before something like Wikipedia succombs to the trolls and such.
Aardvark
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Aardvark
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Tubulidentata
Family: Orycteropodidae
Genus: Orycteropus
Species: afer
Binomial name
Orycteropus afer
The aardvark (Orycteropus afer) is a medium-sized mammal native to Africa. The name comes from the Dutch for "earth pig", because early settlers from Europe thought it resembled a pig (although aardvarks are not closely related to pigs).
The aardvark is the only surviving member of the family Orycteropodidae and of the order Tubulidentata. The aardvark was originally placed in the same genus as the South American anteaters because of superficial similarities which, it is now known, are the result of convergent evolution, not common ancestry. (For the same reason, aardvarks bear a striking first-glance resemblance to the marsupial bilbies and bandicoots of Australasia, which are not placental mammals at all.)
yes, it's a joke.
The great thing about Wikipedia is that anyone can add, remove, or modify the content. This coupled with the fact that most people take information as fact without properly double checking can lead to some fun times.
For instance, in a taxonomy class I recently took, each person in the class had to write a report on the mallard duck. Well, just as a little social exercise, I decided to replace the content on the mallard duck Wiki page with that the content on the rat page.
When the reports were through being graded, the instructor gave us a rundown on the class performance. I just barely kept myself from bursting out in laughter as the instructor described his astonishment as he read a report that labeled the mallard as "a rodent commonly found dwelling in sewers and other vile areas."
God, that was funny!
If the section on Biochemistry were as in-depth as its section on Star Trek, that thing would be invaluable indeed. But since it isn't, I'm now forced by curiosity to spend my lunch hours jumping from 7 of 9 to the battle of Kittimur instead of finding the proper axes of a Michaelis-Menton plot..
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.
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.
umm, Wikipedia intends to be "accurate".
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
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
I guess antonyms take up a lot of space.
:-)
Not to mention Cowboy Neal
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.
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
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.
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.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
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.
So, write something useful then. Easy problem to solve, isn't it.
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
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...
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.
Couldn't you guys wait a week before posting this. The hardware isn't properly set up yet. There will be a press release when the 500K mark is reached and hopefully the hardware will be ready by then. Sheesh. At least we'll be getting some testing on the hardware, hope nothing melts.
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.
All your base are belong to us
Crushing by elephant
Extreme ironing
List of people known by one name
List of films by gory death scene
For more, see unusual articles and list of trivia lists.
Is it just me, or does this sound a lot like the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy?
;-)
For those of you that don't recall -
I has many galactic treasures of information such as -
The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your finger down his throat
Here is what to do if you want to get a lift from a Vogon: FORGET IT.
or, perhaps the most relevant entry for us:
Earth: Mostly Harmless.
In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker's Guide has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedestrian work in two important respects.
Perfect.
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 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.
Slashdot Trolling Phenomena is even in there!
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 think it is great that Wikipedia exists, that it is free and will forever be free. It is also great that /anyone/ can contribute. This is, IMO, a revolution in how information is presented, controlled and distributed and is in-line with the true intended nature of the World Wide Web.
/any/ error instantly is as easy as clicking "edit this page" and "Save".
Combining the wiki concept with free content also creates something that is far more radical than even free software; truly anybody can contribute. That idea is astounding - especially given the fact that Wikipedia is such a shocking success.
Wikipedia is absolute proof that, left alone, groups of people tend to work together to build magnificent things instead of tearing them down. Locking things down, on-the-other-hand, leads to stagnation and, if anything, temps people to break-in and make a mess of the place. Since it is trivial to vandalize Wikipedia, there is very little reward for the vandal; especially since repairing damage by vandals is easier than creating the vandalism in the first place.
All this tends to ensure that Wikipedia will, on average, improve over time and self-heal. Wikipedia is Linus' Law on steroids; given enough eyeballs reading Wikipedia, all bugs are shallow since fixing
What a wonderful concept!
-- 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).
Perhaps that is the case for abortion, but other more important discussions are censored. In particular, compare the article on Democracy to the article on Fascism or the article on Monarchism.
Despite many valid criticisms of democracy throughout the ages, most notably Socrates and Plato in his book Republic, any attempt to express those views in Wikipedia are removed. Fascism as it existed in the 20th century was basically the modern manifestation of the ideas put forth in Plato's Republic, as well as those of Sparta. The Athens versus Sparta debate has captured the imagination of leaders and intellectuals for over 2500 years now, yet on Wikipedia it is forbidden. Athens good. Sparta bad.
Further, the criticism of egalitarianism specifically as it involves the destruction of culture is also not allowed, even though Plato himself makes that very prediction. This is particularly outrageous when people are well aware that local culture is disappearing all over the world.
Unfortunately, the issue here is as you say "use politically correct language". This, in a way highlights how twisted the modern man can be, after being indoctrinated his entire life. Who determines what is politically correct? What are those standards? It is what you see on television and read in newspapers. It is not like your peers and fellow citizens came up with that nonsense. The elite promote those views through popular culture because it serves their purposes. Consumerism does not work unless you instill in the masses an extreme desire to be different and unique. The freedom to be an individual must be exalted because ultimately it is a desire that can only be satisfied through the acquisition of material goods. Egalitarianism must be promoted because everyone must feel like they have a real chance to better than everyone else, or to be a leader otherwise their desire to be an individual will be crushed.
The principles Egalitarianism and Democracy make up the foundation of the new religion of the ruling class. Both are required for them to maintain the illusion of freedom and self determination in our society. The moment those false constructions collapse, our entire society will crumble.
In the grand scheme of human history, the abortion debate is practically irrelevent. In fact, it is more a symptom of the egalitarian mindset. Only in a world where people believe all humans are equal and deserving of life can a fetus have any value. It is a debate that MUST be allowed, for to silence it would expose the fraud that is egalitarianim. Yet at the same time, the ruling class is very much aware that there are too many people on this planet and that abortion is the best solution to that problem. So the false dichotomy is allowed. Both goals are achieved. Egalitarianism is maintained amongst the masses, and some measure of population control is put in place.
The only issues which allow a diversity of viewpoints are those which result as a conflict between the unnatural egalitarian vision of existence and the very real pressures of life itself.
Someday, politics will follow. But not today.
When considering which debates allow for a diversity of viewpoints, you should consider what the result of that argument will be. Could it change the world? Will it really be something that is remembered a millenia from now?
I don't read or respond to AC posts