Wikipedia Reaches 200,000 Articles

9 new servers, eh? by grub · 2004-02-02 08:40 · Score: 5, Funny

*** I N V O I C E *** To: Wikipedia.org Qty _ _ Item _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ Price _ SubTotal 9 _ _ _ Linux Server Licenses _ $699.00 _ $6291.00 Payable upon receipt. Thank you for doing business with SCO, we appreciate your continued support.

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Trolling is a art,

More Downtime by DrEldarion · 2004-02-02 08:43 · Score: 4, Funny

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.

Re:More Downtime by HeghmoH · 2004-02-02 09:06 · Score: 3, Informative

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.

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Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Re:More Downtime by Spy+Hunter · 2004-02-02 09:13 · Score: 4, Informative

Actually, Wikipedia normally gets as much traffic as Slashdot, or more. A Slashdot link would probably give a noticeable but reasonably small spike in their traffic, not a disastrous deluge of hits.

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main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Re:More Downtime by millette · 2004-02-02 09:37 · Score: 4, Interesting

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?

Hmm.. by JoeLinux · 2004-02-02 08:46 · Score: 4, Interesting

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?

Re:Hmm.. by dysprosia · 2004-02-02 08:48 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
Re:Hmm.. by General+Wesc · 2004-02-02 08:50 · Score: 5, Informative

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. :-)
Re:Hmm.. by I+confirm+I'm+not+a · 2004-02-02 08:51 · Score: 4, Informative

It does happen but it's dealt with ably!

They're good people, the Keepers of the Wikipedia.

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This is where the serious fun begins.
Re:Hmm.. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-02 08:52 · Score: 3, Funny

What I have never understood is why some troll doesn't go to it and ruin everything? What prevents that?

They can't reach wikipedia, because they are all sticking in the honeypot. Thank you slashdot, for enabling the internet to operate.
Re:Hmm.. by glop · 2004-02-02 08:52 · Score: 5, Informative

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 !
Re:Hmm.. by Pakaran2 · 2004-02-02 09:01 · Score: 5, Informative

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...
Re:Hmm.. by misterpies · 2004-02-02 09:39 · Score: 5, Insightful

The problem with Wikipedia is not trolling. It's people who don't know as much as they think they do correcting other people's arguments. It's the majority view winning out over the correct one.

Don't get me wrong - I love wikipedia,it's fun to read and fun to contribute to. But never, ever confuse it being a reliable source, since by its nature it reflects the majority belief. Open sourcing code is one thing: if it works, it works. Open sourcing knowledge is riskier: it's not hard to imagine a world where most wikipedia users were creationists. Would you trust the evolution article then?

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The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
Re:Hmm.. by Metasquares · 2004-02-02 10:13 · Score: 4, Interesting

Theoretically, that's against the Wikipedia etiquette and isn't done too often. However, as I've just recently seen firsthand, most people avoid arguing with the majority view on Wikipedia in practice, even if the majority is wrong. Generally, when this happens, you end up with an edit war between those who are right and those who think they are right.
Re:Hmm.. by Pakaran2 · 2004-02-02 10:14 · Score: 3, Interesting

Well, first of all, if you made a change like that while logged out, it would be noticed.

Second of all, if I came by 4 months later and saw an obvious error like that, I would fix it, and would probably (if I had a few free minutes) poke through the edit history to figure out who put it there. If you made subtly wrong chanvges to a lot of articles, I might start the process of getting you blocked from editing the site.

Consequences by SummerMan · 2004-02-02 08:46 · Score: 4, Funny

As the digitization of our encyclopedias continues, millions of unemployed encyclopedia salespeople lament their poor career choice.

Re:Encyclopedia incomplete? by daeley · 2004-02-02 08:46 · Score: 3, Funny

Is this encyclopedia incomplete? I don't see a picture of cowboy neal under "handsome".

I guess antonyms take up a lot of space. ;)

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I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.

Great news by fiannaFailMan · 2004-02-02 08:46 · Score: 4, Interesting

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?

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Drill baby drill - on Mars

Re:Great news by Tuzanor · 2004-02-02 08:54 · Score: 3, Interesting

It's essentially a CVS (or some diff implementation) so changes can be reverted easily. So far the biggest problem hasn't been trolling, but keeping the content (especially political stuff) as neutral as possible.
Overall it's been very good, though!
Re:Great news by Jon+Chatow · 2004-02-02 08:55 · Score: 3, Interesting

Yeah, we try to keep an eye on what changes are made; of course, there are several thousand edits a day (and getting slashdotted doesn't help ;-)), so we don't catch /every/ one immediately, but it's rare to find an uncaught troll posting.

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James F.
Re:Great news by MachDelta · 2004-02-02 08:56 · Score: 5, Interesting

Yeah, everything is backed up. If a troll goes in and screws up a page, all it takes is one person to click "revert", and its fixed again. The effort it takes to ruin a page is actually greater than that it takes to restore it. Not to mention that trolls are outnumbered like a million to one. Its really just not worth someones time to bother mucking with Wikipedia. One person, or even a group of people, simply can't weild the same power as the collective whole does. So its not very appealing to trolls. Their "work" will be erased within minutes and viewed by almost no one. No point for them, especially when there are much easier places to peddle their smut.

Reference validity and competition by gid13 · 2004-02-02 08:46 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

Re:Reference validity and competition by General+Wesc · 2004-02-02 08:53 · Score: 5, Informative

The "Fuck" article was once cited in a court document in the US. (Reference)
Re:Reference validity and competition by k98sven · 2004-02-02 09:06 · Score: 4, Insightful

Will scholarly publications view this as a valid source of accurate information?

I think that's a bit irrelevant, actually.

Academic publications are all about source-criticism, nothing is (supposed to be) accepted offhand just because it comes from a 'reliable' source. It's what is said that is to be taken into account, not who said it.

Apart from that, encyclopedias and Wikipedia are really about 'general knowledge'. And 'general knowledge' is by definition stuff which isn't in dispute.

And if the information isn't in dispute, there is no reason to question the source, whatever it may be. (and the academic practice is not to give sources for such information, either)
Re:Reference validity and competition by Mike+Hicks · 2004-02-02 09:09 · Score: 4, Insightful

I don't think Wikipedia can really be a top-tier scholarly resource. It's a bit more like a quick reference, with many facts that would have to be re-verified if anyone wanted to use them. Most articles are highly accurate (if a bit thin on the details), and there are discussions on the article "Talk" pages whenever disputes arise.

My only real concern is that people will forget that some bits of Wikipedia can be inaccurate, leading to feedback loops of information. Something might get posted in a Wikipedia article and then get used by a historian or researcher who should know better, and then that validation could lead people to believe the information to be entirely true. We'll have to see how that plays out.

I've heard that Wikipedia is already getting more hits than many online references, and the site has many more articles than most other places. Of course, many of the articles are one-liners, or mere demographic information for tiny towns in the middle of Kansas. I recently saw someone mention that Encyclopdia Britannica has 750,000 items in its index (they have less than 100,000 articles), so Wikipedia getting that many articles would be a good next step.
Re:Reference validity and competition by kfg · 2004-02-02 09:17 · Score: 4, Insightful

I'm less concerned about the abandoning of infrastructure as I am about the abandoning of the knowledge itself.

The fate of the mp3.com archive serves as an interesting cautionary tale for the 21st century.

What happens if Britannica ceases publication but subsequently goes under and deletes the archives? Even if the essential knowledge remains elsewhere I might point out that the Britannica represents an amazing work of literature as well.

Anything on the web that isn't mirrored to hell and gone with full legal rights to distribute has to be considered volatile. Extrememly volatile.

KFG

Re:open and accurate? by daeley · 2004-02-02 08:48 · Score: 4, Informative

"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.

Toast by pizza_milkshake · 2004-02-02 08:50 · Score: 3, Funny

wikipedia is toast atm. as a service to other readers, here is the first of many posts reproducing the currently unavailable content:

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.

Wikipedia is great! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-02 08:51 · Score: 3, Funny

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!

Re:Wikipedia is great! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-02 09:20 · Score: 5, Informative

Ummm... No, you didn't. No rats in any of the revisions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Malla rd &action=history

Depth disparity by F.+Mephit · 2004-02-02 08:53 · Score: 3, Insightful

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..

Ah, wikipedia. by LordK3nn3th · 2004-02-02 08:56 · Score: 5, Interesting

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 :)

--

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Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.

worthwhile project? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-02 08:57 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.

If nothing else, however, it is an interesting group-psychology experiment ... and a lot of fun.

Re:Encyclopedia incomplete? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-02 08:59 · Score: 3, Funny

I guess antonyms take up a lot of space.

Not to mention Cowboy Neal :-)

thanks slashdot by sHu_pAc · 2004-02-02 08:59 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

Common Wikipedia Objections by RadicalBender · 2004-02-02 09:01 · Score: 4, Interesting

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... ^^;;;

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RadicalBender.com

Re:Common Wikipedia Objections by American+AC+in+Paris · 2004-02-02 09:33 · Score: 4, Insightful

Wikipedia has spent a lot of time outlining those very questions on their Replies to Common Objections page.
...yes, but their answers generally amount to relying on The Wiki Way to save the day. While it's a wonderul sentiment, it's profoundly naive to rely primarily on the integrity of the community to cope with growing pains.
The larger a community grows, the less diciplined and dedicated that community will be to the "core values". If Wikipedia becomes the Next Big Thing, the Wiki folks will have an absolute shitstorm of asinine, counter-productive, uninformed, and outright malicious activity to deal with, and they'll tire of it very quickly.
Consider this hypothetical meatspace analogy:
"Mr. Mayor, how do you plan to deal with crime when LittleTown, USA, becomes the thriving metropolitan center you want it to be?"
"Well, we've been doing pretty well so far with crime, as most of the folks here in LittleTown are peaceful types, and Bill is a really great sheriff. We figure things should remain pretty much the same as we grow..."

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Obliteracy: Words with explosions

MediaWiki and other wikis by Eloquence · 2004-02-02 09:08 · Score: 5, Interesting

Also take a look at MediaWiki, the open source wiki that runs Wikipedia. It was especially developed for that purpose, but is now also used by our spin-off projects Wiktionary, Wikiquote and Wikibooks (the latter is an attempt to create free textbooks for use in education, and has already made some good progress). All of these projects are organized under the Wikimedia non-profit foundations. More projects such as a wiki news site are on the horizon.

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.

Re:open and accurate? by frodo+from+middle+ea · 2004-02-02 09:11 · Score: 5, Insightful

Yes but who watches the watchers ?
e.g. Geography (Social and political views.. )

An arab's/Jew's writting on gazza strip
An Indians/Paki's article on kashmir
A tamil's/sinhali's views on Jaffna Jungles in Shri lanka
A catholic's/protestant's view on Ireland
- Socio Political historical events
  No brainer here , History is always written by victors, so any other version would be deemed inaccurate and propoganda.
  How about a non-christian writing about christ , bible ? or a non muslim writing about koran ? Can they be un-biased ? Or for that matter a christian writing about christ and a muslim wring about koran ?Can they be unbiased.
  Let's face it, as long as there is a human element involved, there will be difference of opinion , no matter what the topic is about. And editing out parts which you don't necessaryly agree to is censorship.

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for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".

Interesting pages on quantity, quality, & grow by pantropy · 2004-02-02 09:12 · Score: 3, Informative

Here are some comparisons between wikipedia and other encyclopedias:

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

There's more than one out there by mblase · 2004-02-02 09:15 · Score: 4, Informative

Wikipedia, Everything2 and h2g2 all have different approaches to the same goal -- a web-based user-updated encyclopedia. As near as I can tell (not being a participant in all three), here are the main differences:

Wiki is very strongly fact-based, aiming to imitate a paper encyclopedia as much as possible. E2 and h2g2 are more open and have at last as much pop-culture content as they do factual stuff.
Wiki and h2g2 only allow one article per title, while E2 allows multiple writeups per title (but only one writeup per title per person). h2g2 doesn't have the update/revert structure in place that Wiki does. By allowing multiple writeups, there's no way for a troll to replace good content with bad even for a short time.
h2g2 and E2 both rely on editors with special powers, albeit in somewhat different ways. Wiki basically allows anyone to be an editor, while h2g2 requires editor approval to post an article and E2 requires editor approval to keep it posted.
E2 and h2g2 both have strong communities, with E2 mainly depending on real-time chat and h2g2 on message forums.
E2 allows and even encourages original creative content -- stories, poems, and opinionated reviews -- as much as it does factual content of any sort. h2g2 culture practically requires a creative (read: Douglas Adams-like) personal touch on submitted articles.

Slashdot and Wikipedia by minesweeper · 2004-02-02 09:16 · Score: 4, Informative

Slashdot readers may find the following Wikipedia articles about Slashdot informative and interesting:

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.

Announcements by dze · 2004-02-02 09:19 · Score: 4, Informative

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

IMDB? by Alomex · 2004-02-02 09:21 · Score: 3, Interesting

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...

Re:IMDB? by Pakaran2 · 2004-02-02 09:40 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

links x links by mblase · 2004-02-02 09:21 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

Unusual articles by minesweeper · 2004-02-02 09:34 · Score: 4, Insightful

One of the great things about Wikipedia is that it can include articles that you wouldn't find in a typical encyclopedia or almanac. Generally, anything that is fairly famous and verifiable is a candidate for a Wikipedia article. Examples include:

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.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - First Printing? by 4ginandtonics · 2004-02-02 09:44 · Score: 4, Funny

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. ;-)

Re:Encyclopedia incomplete? by ceejayoz · 2004-02-02 10:00 · Score: 3, Interesting

Add it in yourself.

That's the brilliance of a Wiki. :-p

Re:Article count comapared to commercial offerings by BlzOfGlry · 2004-02-02 10:57 · Score: 3, Informative

You can find the details of size comparasions here.

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.

Slashdot Mirror

Wikipedia Reaches 200,000 Articles

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